by Alec Saracen
Corny or not, the line got the cheer it craved. Chang's smile widened a fraction.
“My friends, my fellow Torians, this is a great day for us all. For decades, Tor has been the slave of a cruel master, the so-called Free Planetary Alliance, from whose oppressive regime I have struggled to liberate us!”
That one's not going to fly, Grey Hawk thought. You were that regime, remember? No? The people will.
Chang's supporters lapped it up, though, and some of them even started a brief 'Chang! Chang! Chang!' chant. Grey Hawk rolled her eyes and scanned through her feeds, looking for anything out of place. She kept a camera on Zhai's face to track his reactions to Chang's speech, though he remained impressively expressionless as the chanting died away.
She could see hints of his mother in his face, though not in his expression. Yuwaga Zhai had come up frequently in the four-week specialist module on Xanang Grey Hawk had taken a year ago, mostly in the retroactive historical shadow of her protégée Dachau Noo. Grey Hawk recalled that the elder Zhai's face had never been still, always coursing with the same angry energy that infused her work. Noo and Zhai had been icons of the civil rights movement on Xanang, both born into low castes, both considered less than human by Xanang's archaic laws, and though Zhai had been executed fifty years ago, much of Xanang's underground reform movement was directly descended from the Zhai-Noo organisation.
When Grey Hawk looked at Gumeigo Zhai and his professional history, she wondered how disappointed his mother would have been in her only child.
“And now,” Chang was saying, raising a fist as if curling an invisible dumbbell, “today, the dream of a world is made reality. Today, Tor throws off the yoke! Today, Tor sheds its chains! Today, Tor declares in one ringing voice, from Macard to Landing, that we will not be slaves again! Today, we are independent!”
He really does think he's in a movie, she thought.
She remembered watching Lappha, a laughable piece of Alliance propaganda poorly dressed up as cinema, in her Media Manipulation module. She had a feeling Chang had seen it too. Maybe he was thinking of Chang, the future film that would put Torian cinema on the map. Perhaps he imagined himself as a respected elder statesman attending the première, modestly brushing away the adulation as he settled down to watch his own hagiography. He wasn’t writing speeches, he was writing his own screenplay.
Grey Hawk almost groaned aloud as an enormous Torian flag, a field of green marked with a mesa rising before an orange sun, slowly rose from the stage behind Chang, lifted by two miniature drones. The applause reached fever pitch, shrill and almost hysterical. She switched back to Roshi Comet for a moment.
“There you have it, folks. Our Coward in Chief, heroically trying to save his own skin.”
TruthTeller's commentary was slightly behind, and more considered. “Chang's declaration is a sharp break from Tor's historical affiliation with the Alliance, which must now be considered a defunct state–”
Chang, meanwhile, was barrelling onwards, his face flushed. “This is not the end of our journey,” he was saying. “This is just the beginning. Dawn has broken over Tor!”
He'd stolen that line from Trenoit's famous speech proclaiming the Third Volmais Republic, Grey Hawk noted, but her attention was elsewhere. On one of her feeds, something had caught her eye.
Movement where nothing should have moved.
She magnified the screen, zoomed in, scanned. Nothing. She cycled through fifteen filters and spectra, turning up nothing each time. But she had seen it. She rewound her recorded footage and watched for it again.
There. What was that? It looked like a faint, shimmering patch of heat haze in the air, darting from one spot to another. The movement was too deliberate for it to be an atmospheric phenomenon. With rising apprehension, Grey Hawk ran the haze through every refinement she could think of. One of the experimental ones she didn't understand gave her the answer.
A shape swam into view, still rendered indistinct by whatever technology was cloaking it, but unmistakably a drone. A long, dark protuberance jutted out from one side. Grey Hawk's hurried calculations told her it was aimed at the stage.
There was every chance it was another piece of the government security apparatus. But if it was, why was it so heavily stealthed?
Grey Hawk was rising from her seat to investigate when everything went to hell.
On her stage camera, a sudden flash of movement. A dark shape vaulted onto the stage from behind and charged across it, throwing itself into a full-bodied tackle that caught Ambassador Zhai in the side. His eyes bulging, Zhai's heavy bulk came crashing down in a heap – at the same instant the piercing crack of a gunshot rang out.
Grey Hawk didn't need any calculations to tell her that the shot would have hit Zhai if not for the bodyguard's miraculous intervention.
The instant of shocked silence that followed was less than a fifth of a second, she discovered when she reviewed her logs later. It felt far longer.
As Grey Hawk rose, she could see every detail on her camera feeds as if in freeze-frame. Chang's face as he flinched, his eyes yanked wide open by terror. Police snipers belatedly swinging their guns. A crowd captured in the collective act of cowering. Zhai on the floor, disoriented and gasping. Roshi Comet, stunned into silence. The world stood still–
–and moved.
Grey Hawk leapt through the window, and before the shattered pane had touched the ground she was aiming at the drone. It was visible to the naked eye now, stealth systems disrupted by its shot, and recoil had jerked it a few metres back. Grey Hawk only had a sidearm on her, clipped onto her back beneath her smartsuit, which she brought to bear in mid-air, simultaneously selecting the long-range tracker ammunition option on her HUD. By the time her feet hit the ground, the pistol had switched modes.
She fired eight times in a second. The tracker mode coated every bullet with a nanonic layer as it left the barrel. Most of it was shed in the air – but some survived for the impact. Two of her shots were true, and though they glanced harmlessly away, they transferred enough of their coating to the drone for her to track it.
Chaos descended on the plaza. The crowd was stampeding away from the stage, which was bristling with security. The VIPs had disappeared behind the mass of bodies. Chang's podium was empty. The ricocheting bullet had torn a fist-sized hole in the Torian flag. The audience were running into a wall of police around the perimeter of the square and being forced back, but in several places the line had already broken and people were surging out into the streets.
The drone was fleeing. Grey Hawk wiped her HUD clear of her camera feeds and replaced them with maps and tracking data. The hunt was on. Zhai had been saved by forces beyond her control, but she could at least bring down the drone and find out who had taken the shot.
She needed height. She had been planning for this. Macard's uniform architecture meant most of its buildings were of similar heights. If she could get on top of one, the next building would probably be just about close enough for her to jump between them.
Probably.
Skyscrapers loomed overhead. She picked one at random, switched her pistol to climbing mode, and fired. The harpoon lodged in the building two metres short of the top, trailing ultra-strong fibre. When she retracted it, it winched her effortlessly up, the wind stinging her face and the gun reeling in the fibre so fast that when she was almost to the roof, she could remotely detach the harpoon and let her momentum carry her over the lip of the building.
She hit the ground hard and rolled to her feet. A sniper crouched on the opposite side of the flat roof jerked and swivelled to face her, but Grey Hawk was already running. The drone wasn't fast, but its stealth systems were reasserting themselves. It had almost disappeared from view again. Following her tracking data, Grey Hawk sprinted to the edge of the building and leapt, cycling every scrap of non-essential power into her legs. The street flashed dizzyingly far below, and an errant sniper shot snapped past in mid-air, well wide. She hit the next roof running with a metre to spare, c
overed it in seconds, and leapt again.
She was closing in on the drone, but she had company.
A VTOL howled overhead, hot exhaust buffeting her as it passed, followed by two more. Grey Hawk leapt again, but this time the next building was too high. She slammed into the side of it, thrusting armoured fingers into the toughened windows for handholds, and spidered up the last few metres, cursing under her breath. It cost her precious distance on the drone, and by the time she was up and running again its operator was pushing it up and away from the rooftops. Before long it would be out of range.
Still sprinting, Grey Hawk delved into her pistol's smart features and switched to aim-assist bullets, which would use the planet's electromagnetic field to steer themselves mid-flight. She linked them to her trackers and fired six shots as she ran, slowing down a fraction to give herself a better chance.
Five missed. One hit home.
The drone dipped and started to sink, trailing a wisp of black smoke. Its cloaking systems were faltering.
Come on, you son of a bitch, Grey Hawk thought. Go down.
But the drone wasn't done yet. Its pilot reversed course and flung it into a steep dive, dropping below the rooftops and foxing the pursuing VTOLs. Grey Hawk swore and followed it, staying above as the stricken drone wound its way around corners and over intersections. Whether intentionally or not, it was headed for the river.
A plan started to congeal in Grey Hawk's mind, but was interrupted by the staccato buzz of machine-gun fire. The rooftop behind her exploded into a cloud of chunks and splinters as one of the VTOLs strafed her, apparently having decided she was a threat, and Grey Hawk dived left to avoid the raking fire, rolling and springing up again as the VTOL banked hard overheard to keep up with her change in direction.
Not good.
But the river was directly ahead now. She had run out of buildings after her last jump. The plan became the only option.
Well, she thought, here goes nothing.
The drone was sixty metres below her but barely ahead. As it flew out over the river, Grey Hawk reached the edge of the building, and jumped.
For an instant she thought she'd miscalculated, but it was just a wobble in the drone's flight path. She streaked down like her namesake, eyes fixed on her prey, and their trajectories intersected. Fragile components buckled and broke beneath her with the force of the impact, but the drone might still have kept flying if she hadn't caught hold of the ridged barrel of its mounted gun, dragging it down with her. Grey Hawk frantically activated every shock-dampening system she had as she and the drone plunged into the river.
If she'd fallen head first, she might not have survived it, neural dispersal or no. As it was, she managed to contort herself at the last second, catlike, to spear into the water feet first, slamming into the river bed a moment later with a tremendous shock. Stone cracked beneath her feet, and urgent warning messages panicked shrilly about damaged systems. She didn't have time to worry about that. Instead, she went to work, ripping apart the mutilated drone at the bottom of the river, tearing wires and circuit boards out as she hunted for – gotcha.
The drone's computer core was a fist-sized, armoured chunk of metal, heavy even underwater. If the operator had any sense, they'd have remotely wiped it already, but it was a rare system that could be scuttled without trace. There were always clues, and Grey Hawk would find them.
Eventually. Right now, she had more pressing problems.
Machine-gun fire churned the water into a storm of bubbles feet away from her, and Grey Hawk kicked off, torpedoing upstream with the computer core clutched tightly in one hand. There was a bridge a hundred metres away, and she swam for it, trailed by gunfire. The river was shallow, but deep enough that the bullets smashing through the water were harmless by the time they reached her – which gave her pause for thought. Bullets couldn't reach her. Could sensors?
At the bridge, she waited until the shadow of the VTOL shot past overhead, then let herself sink to the river bed. She recalibrated her power output, pumping everything into stealth, and lay perfectly still. Her smartsuit hood wrapped itself around her head, and her emissions on every spectrum shrank to a fraction of normal. She could only maintain it for about ten minutes before cooling became a serious issue, but that might just be enough.
With care, and extremely slowly, she started to kick just fast enough to stay off the bottom, moving slowly downstream on her back, looking up at the eerie rippling of the world above. VTOL shadows buzzed overhead like insects, flitting back and forth across the river. They were still firing occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, but the distribution told Grey Hawk they had no idea where she was. Or maybe they thought they'd got her already.
She passed the wreckage of the drone, a mess of splintered fragments already being scattered downriver by the current. The gun, severed from the main body, lay motionless on the river bed. Still the VTOLs hovered, and still they showed no sign of knowing where she was.
After ten minutes, Grey Hawk had travelled a kilometre downstream. She had to dial down the stealth systems to sustainable levels, but nobody suddenly spotted her as a result. After another half-hour of drifting, she was satisfied that she'd lost her pursuers.
When she reached a pedestrian footbridge, she kicked up to the surface, clambered up a support, and deployed a camera over the edge. As soon as the bridge was deserted, she quickly swung up, still dripping, and strode off towards the suburbs, reprogramming her smartsuit into an inconspicuous outfit. At the first opportunity she cut into a park and started shedding the heat she'd built up while stealthed, which had the useful side effect of drying her out. The park was dotted with picnickers, workers on their lunch breaks, and sunbathers, though there was a current of anxiety in the air. People were muttering in clusters, their watches streaming the aftermath of the debacle at the plaza, and the occasional overhead VTOL brought on a fresh round of nervous chatter.
Happy independence day, Grey Hawk thought.
An icon flashed on her HUD. It was Red Wolf. Grey Hawk sighed and opened the channel.
“You're fucking lucky,” Red Wolf said bluntly.
“I know.”
“What a mess.” Red Wolf was trying to be angry at her, but her heart wasn't in it. “Are you safe?”
“For now.” Grey Hawk consulted her damage reports. Her legs had taken a pounding, but it was nothing her internal repair systems couldn't fix in a day or two. “I should have seen it earlier.”
“You should have, but you didn't,” Red Wolf said. “At least Zhai's alive. I didn't think they'd try to hit him so soon, or so publicly.”
“When Chang was right there for the taking, as well.” Grey Hawk sat down beneath a broad horse chestnut tree and tossed the computer core from hand to hand for a moment. “Someone really wants him dead.”
“You'll need to keep a closer eye on him, then.”
“I will.”
“What that entails is up to you.”
“Yeah,” Grey Hawk said thoughtfully. She booted up her analysis software and waited for the discomforting sensation of thousands of sensor tendrils worming their way out of her fingers and into the computer core. It was the closest thing to pins and needles that she could still feel. “There's good news. And more bad news.”
Red Wolf sighed. “Bad first.”
“They know Liberators are on the ground for sure now.”
A pause. Then: “Can't be helped. They saw us come in, now they have confirmation. It was inevitable. Good news?”
“I've got this,” Grey Hawk said, linking Red Wolf into the preliminary analysis of the computer core. “From the drone that shot at Zhai.”
Another pause. “Good,” Red Wolf said, which was almost a compliment. “Let's see what it has to tell us.”
Grey Hawk sat back against the trunk and watched dapples of sunshine dance on the grass. It was all artificial. The effort and expense of maintaining a public park of Home life on a biologically incompatible world was astronomical. Instead,
all the plants were fakes – good fakes, but hardly indistinguishable from the real thing. Even the smell of the place was mixed up in a lab and piped in. She had seen real forests on bio-compatible Plenty, and even the best imitations paled in comparison. She ran an artificial hand over artificial grass and plucked out a single blade. It was a near-perfect visual replica, duplicating the sharp vertical delineation and the central ridge, but it didn't take a botanist to see it was devoid of life.
After forty seconds of analysis, codebreaking, data recovery, and a host of other automated processes, results from the computer core started coming in. Grey Hawk scrolled through the summary. As she'd expected, all the data had been remotely wiped, and very little of it was retrievable. What was retrievable was largely useless, generic stuff.
“Anything?” Grey Hawk said, without much hope.
“Not yet. Give it time.”
As the data rolled in, Grey Hawk flipped through the media response to the attack. The government programs were spinning it as a foiled attempt to prevent the declaration of independence, with no mention of Zhai whatsoever. The clips they showed had already been doctored to imply Chang was the target. Roshi Comet was going ballistic, bombarding his viewers with endless slow-motion replays of the attempt and peppering his coverage with shaky footage of Grey Hawk's VTOL-shadowed flight across the rooftops. Apparently, she was the would-be assassin, speculated by Roshi to be a secret FPA super-soldier. At least he wasn’t blaming Liberation.
TruthTeller, meanwhile, was focusing more on the significance of independence, pointing out that Chang's government had proven its incompetence in the most public way possible. TruthTeller also knew who Zhai was, and, based on the ambassador's presence, was issuing dire predictions that the unspoken remainder of Chang's ruined speech would have announced that Tor would apply for Coalition membership. Grey Hawk had a feeling TruthTeller was right, but it didn't gel with what they knew of Zhai's political leanings and probable purpose on Tor. They needed a way to shine a light through the murk.
“Oh, hello,” Red Wolf said suddenly. “Look at this.”