by Ari Bach
Eighty-nine more wave hoppers erupted from the ground immediately before Violet’s position. Skunkworks wasn’t going to let the master work go, and they’d committed their entire drone fleet to stopping it. The hoppers burst upward from their salt hangars and flew ahead of the Blackwing, accelerating toward its future position. They were far enough ahead that they could cut her off and cut her up. A turn away from them would only reduce her speed on the bank and let them catch up elsewhere. There was no way around it; she was about to be covered in them.
She had only one chance. Hoppers were piloted by programs. Good programs, programs that know how humans fly. All Violet would have to do was fly in so inhuman a fashion that the drones would lose her or crash. Crash appealed to her more than loss. The first drones were about to land on the canopy. She had only seconds.
Empty skyscrapers began to flash by her sides just as the last drones came into view. They followed her motion for motion as she dodged the towers and decayed factories. She wasted no time and made several hectic course changes that defied the laws of structural integrity and common sense. They continued to follow the craft as closely as possible without crashing, making meticulous course adjustments based not only on speed and direction, but on the programmed assumptions that the craft they followed would try to escape them while also trying not to crash. The latter assumption was incorrect and would prove their undoing as Violet flew directly through the side of an old office building, ripping it from its foundations and spinning it in the air 140 degrees. Most of the hoppers crashed right behind her, and the few that had made it to the Blackwing were sheared off as it passed through concrete.
The force cracked the makeshift canopy further and chips fell away. Chunks of wave hopper and office building poured in through the inertia field and cluttered the cockpit. The Blackwing wouldn’t be able to take another hit until they found its proper canopy, but the mission seemed over for the time being.
With Skunkworks’ external tracking gone, she quickly hacked into the Blackwing’s tracking nodes and silenced them, then finally headed north.
As soon as Veikko linked in from the shuttle to tell her she was in the clear, the adrenaline died and she felt a stabbing pain in her foot. That reminded her she had been stabbed in the foot. The broken leg began to complain right after. She took some platelet packs and a quicksplint from the back of her suit and applied them to her foot and leg. She shot an analgesic syrette into her thigh, and it cleared the pain but not the uncomfortable position she had to sit in with her leg splinted.
Violet looked around at the debris collected from the hoppers and office building, all that fell into the cockpit gently after being struck at Mach whatever. Robotic parts, bricks, dust, two pencils from the office building, and half a wall poster of a cat hanging from a tree. She shoveled out the bits and pieces that shook most noisily in the insistent breeze. The half canopy took whatever air passed the triple field and focused it right on Violet’s cheek. The little nuisances always seemed amplified after the bulk of a mission was over. She couldn’t hit the fastest thrusters and be home in seconds, or she’d be spotted again. She had to wait for the slug-slow Mach 20 ramjets to get her up north.
It took half an hour to arrive in the seas north of Kalaallit Nunaat, where she splashed down and roughly slammed the Blackwing into some underwater rock. That concealed half of it and shattered the last of the makeshift canopy. She left the cockpit outside of the rock face so that she could make her exit. Water was pouring in through the fields and making them crackle badly. She hacked into the shutdown procedures and checked for any coded traps, all the typical thievery, before turning the primary power source off. That cut off the fields and the water flooded in instantly. Damn cold water.
She surfaced to see the old P-Zero shuttle hovering over her. It set down ungently on the water, and she climbed onto its flat chrome wing. A door opened on the slanted side and let her into the same smelly cargo hold she had leaped from hours before. Veikko rolled a scan jamming cylinder down the wing and into the water, then stepped out to toss several Ice-10 crystals in after. They quickly froze a few meters of the sea into a hangar around the exposed parts of the Blackwing.
So ended Project Bentley at 1640 hours on January 3, 2232. Calling it “Bentley” still felt strange. Even after Project Abruptum, Violet couldn’t get used to having made a full spin around the alphabet. She might have been more sensitive to meaningless sentimentality on that day at that time because her parents had died exactly two years prior. She took no notice of the goings-on in her subconscious. She buckled into the cargo hold walls with Veikko for the ride north.
Varg chimed in via link, “Highly recommend we abort lift off, ditch this old junker and fly the Burp back home instead.”
“Blackwing, Varg. Please don’t call it the Burp,” rang Vibs.
“Our shuttle is obsolete. We have a new space-worthy craft.”
“One we can’t show off. Not yet.”
Veikko interjected, “Practically speaking, the Bur—the Blackwing has only one seat and no cargo.”
“Okay,” reasoned Varg, “you three take the P-Zero shuttle, and I’ll take the Belch.”
“Gaseous regurgitation,” laughed Veikko. “Technically it may be a flatu—”
The sound of a light backhand resounded from the hold.
“Thanks, Vi,” linked Vibeke.
Silence prevailed for twenty seconds before Varg spoke up. “If they didn’t want us to call it a Burp, they shouldn’t have named it B-I-R-P. Besides, it won’t be a ‘black’ wing once we gilt it up.”
“We won’t,” answered Vibs. “The flex-diamond hull is better than gold, TK chrome, even natural diamond. It will stay a Blackwing.”
Veikko strained a full five seconds before trying to get on Violet’s good side. “I vote for purple. The Purple Burple. There’s some technical name for a burp, but I can’t think of it….”
Violet was about to threaten a second backhand when she looked down to the white smart-foam and found it covered in blood. Her wound was leaking again.
“I have several fractures in my leg and an impalement through my foot,” she declared flatly. Veikko looked down at her foot. Varg and Vibeke peered in from the flight deck.
Veikko replied, “Yes, yes you do.”
All knew the shuttle was completely lacking in any first aid equipment, and Violet had already applied the best any of their armor had to offer. There was little to be done for the battered appendage. Violet stared at her foot uselessly and exhaled. Soon they would arrive at the ravine, and Dr. Niide would fix the wound. Vibs sent a quiet link back home so he could ready his surgical robots.
The knowledge that she would soon be perfectly repaired struck Violet the opposite way it should have. She felt a subtle wave of apathy. It was an odd thing to feel at the end of a successful mission, and Valkyries were taught to mention any psychological oddities they might experience. So Violet might have told her team that she felt like shit had Veikko not interrupted with a far more dire revelation.
“Eructation! A ‘Ructus.’ That’s the term,” he said, looking proudly toward Violet, “for a burp. Cetaceans call it röyhtäily.” Veikko nodded. Pain seeped into Violet’s foot, and the slow flight home in the P0S felt all the slower.
SIRAJ/TEPES S.C.S. owned fourteen prisons, jails, and detention centers in Bharat. The Hugli River Detention Center was by far the most infamous of them. Built to house 6,000 inmates, it actually housed well over 25,000 the last time anyone counted, which was over ten years before Mishka was imprisoned there. The “Ergosphere of Kolkata” gave up on prisoner census after 2219 because none of the guards could accurately estimate how many prisoners thick were the piles on which the visible prisoners stood. Since then, matters had only grown worse as every disease from the bubonic plague to swine flu to the hemorrhagic strain of emu fever invaded and mutated amid the human petri dish into unnamable flesh eating pestilences. The culture that grew with equal virulence among the inmat
es was one of murder, cannibalism, and torture, so Mishka fit right in.
In fact, it was exactly where she wanted to be. Not that she wanted to be in prison, but she didn’t have much of a choice. As long as she lived, Vibeke was going to chase her. From the events in Bangla, that much was clear. After a year on the run, Vibs had come within seconds of dragging her back to Valhalla in chains, and if capture by the Bharatiya Sthalsena was the only way out, it would have to do. She knew she’d be able to escape, so the only real loss was her new eye. They confiscated it as soon as she was processed. She’d grown very attached to her eye in the last year. She wasn’t happy about needing a new eye in the first place, but once implanted it grew on her. The poor thing transmitted from the possessions office until a cauliflower-eared guard smashed it under foot.
That was the least of her immediate problems. She was thrown into a holding room that rivaled the worst days of the old På-Täppan pile. She managed to stay atop the heap of people, which was so thick and unstable that she couldn’t stand upright. All she could do was crawl cautiously over the mess of sweaty limbs, bleeding sticky prisoners, and shreds of prison clothing. Her own was in tatters within seconds; both sleeves and a pant leg were torn off by hands reaching for anything they could grip to pull themselves out of the mess. When they caught her flesh she twisted them off or bit them off. She had to lessen the number of oncoming attacks. One corner of the room had people piled so high they nearly reached the ceiling. She headed for it.
The instant she secured her penthouse, she began to plot escape. The ventilation shafts were unsuitable, as there were none. The heat was so intense and the air was so foul that she estimated less than an hour before she would succumb to the conditions and would be rendered unconscious or insane, as seemed the symptoms. Her first priority was defense. She elected to make a shiv. After fending off several attacks from her inmates, she took the time to break one of their legs more thoroughly than usual. She snapped his femur with force in the right direction to leave a sharp, jagged edge. The terrible sound kept attackers at bay for a time. She estimated the direction of the internal blade and sawed it free to create an opening, then reached into the wound and began cutting through the connective tissue of the hip with her fingernails.
No sooner did she have the bone knife in her hand and ready to go than the crowd crouched still, staring at just about the most disturbing thing most of the pickpockets and petty thieves had ever seen. Mishka had to smile with the knowledge that the creation of her weapon was a deterrent so strong she might never need to use it. Now her mind was free to contemplate an exit. The only one she could see was the way she came in. She worked her way across the man-pile to the trap door through which prisoners were dropped. It was within reach but flush sealed to the ceiling. So she waited. In only seven minutes, it opened to expel a bruised, beaten mess of a woman. Mishka used her as a step to the door, leaving her to presumably worse uses by others.
Microwave fire began the instant Mishka caught hold of the floor above. She took two stun rays to the wrist, losing her femur shiv as the door closed. She expected the crowd to attack her as she fell, but found them all keeping their distance, well aware that she might want to make another blade. Just then a valve on the south wall opened and a heap of humanity poured out into the adjacent ventricle. Mishka leaped and made sure that she was among them. The new room was bigger and smellier, though it had a floor instead of a pile. A sorting area where newcomers were forced by guards into whatever ring of hell came next. It contained men who hadn’t seen her weapon-forging techniques, so as soon as she spotted a guard, she ran for him. In seconds she had cracked his armor like a crab shell. In seconds more she had his doleo and used it to send waves of pain through the other inmates who grabbed for it.
Having quickly mastered the new room, she hunted for an exit. This room had the same rotten walls as the last but no people-heap. The bases of some walls had serious decay. She was looking for something to widen the cracks when a three-meter-tall humanoid stomped up to her. She had fought enlarged gang members back with Valhalla, men who had every bone lengthened and every muscle bloated to provide a fearful visage to their enemies. It had worked so far for this man; he was still alive. But Mishka had seen the schematics. A solid surgery could strengthen a person if it added a decimeter to his height, but this oncoming thing must have added a meter and change. His bones were longer, but they were weaker. He bared his sharp black teeth as he prepared to grab her with a hand that could fit fully around her waist. She didn’t even think of using the doleo as a simple baton to cause pain. She had to get to the wall over lines of cowering prisoners and oncoming guards. She extended the doleo to its full length and ran for Gargantua, forcing the doleo into his mouth to the back of his throat, putting him down to serve as her pole vault box. She flew over him into the wall with enough force to put a deep dent between two of the worst rotting breaches.
She felt cool air from the outdoors. So did others. Mishka elected to stand back as they started beating down the wall, savagely attacking their only hope of escape. Every guard left in the room was on her, and in numbers their armor would be harder to crack. She broke the doleo in half, knowing the inside of a doleo contains a powerful burst-discharge battery. Keeping the other guards at bay with a barrage of strikes, she tore the coating off the battery and threw it to the floor, then flipped one of the guards down and crushed the battery. The discharge nearly vaporized him within his metal armor. Bolts struck the other guards and knocked them unconscious.
Prisoners had since worked the wall loose and began to pour out. The first twenty men had been microwaved by outdoor guards. Another twenty still fled the heat and decay of the indoors before the crowd began to understand that death waited outside. Once they were finished dying, Mishka made her move. Shaking the powdered guard from his armor, she donned the hot metal and ran for freedom. It began to grow hotter as soon as she was outside, hit by microwave beams. She’d hoped to pass for a guard, but they either didn’t buy it or didn’t care. They were roasting anything that emerged.
The situation was difficult. Ten guards running at her on the ground. Ten more firing at her from walls and towers. Thirty corpses around her. Armor keeping the beams off but heating up badly. It would knock her out in under a minute. She burrowed quickly under the thickest concentration of bodies and forced the armor off herself. Microwaves were still hitting the body pile above her. Some were starting to burn. Luckily the ground guards were almost there. She heard shouting, and the microwaves ceased. Soon after, the corpse atop Mishka began to move. They were pulling it away.
Mishka rolled limply to get a view of the guard that was prodding the bodies. He was careless. She sprang and seized his microwave, then used its stock to knock off his helmet. He turned away but exposed his familiarly deformed, bloated ear. She shot through the front of his temple to blind him, and he dropped. Others were coming. She took cover within the bodies as guards opened fire again. She surveyed the weapon; it only had stun, burn, and dig functions. Dig would have to do. She fired at the fattest corpse in the pile and waited for fire to cease again. It ceased after only thirty seconds. Then she felt the guards prying again. They’d be more cautious this time. Using the guards’ motions as cover, she worked her way into the hollow man. If he stayed facedown she could stay hidden. He stayed facedown.
Minutes later the guards had the situation under control. Mishka prayed they would skimp on proper investigation and cleanup. She waited almost twenty minutes, but nobody touched her makeshift tauntaun. She could just make out a hand grab the microwave she discarded. Her prayers were answered when she heard the bulldozer. She wasn’t able to hold on to her cover for long as the bodies rolled, but she didn’t need to; nobody was watching anymore. They pushed the pile straight into the Hugli River.
Once underwater, more accurately under sewage, she swam fast for the opposite bank, where only a razor-wire fence blocked the bank. Halfway across she emerged from the prison’s link jam and
ads flooded in. Behind the fence was a market. She cautiously surfaced and scanned for guards. None on this side, none watching from the other. All busy sealing the hole or dumping another dozer-load of bodies. She emerged from the river and spat out the foul slime that had seeped into her mouth, then climbed the razor wire. Climbing the stuff was never her forte in training, and her palms paid the price, but injury training was one of her best subjects. She topped the fence and dropped into the market.
She had three priorities: number three, find a new eye; number two, find her tank; but number one was something she could do immediately. She had to. With great urgency she scanned the signs and link labels of the market and found her destination. After her stay in the prison and swim through the sewage, she had little time. She ran, pushing aside anyone in her way, throwing the door open so hard it snapped a hinge. She jumped over the counter and grabbed a clerk by his collar. Customers ran, the clerk cowered in fear. He could see Mishka was desperate, ravenous, and homicidal.
“Please,” he begged. “Anything you want! I’ll give you anything!”
“Hand sanitizer!” she demanded. “Alcohol gel, antiseptic alcohol gel! Now!”
With her wounds clean and stinging, she broke open the store’s first aid kit and regrew all but one cut in her skin. She stuffed the dermal regenerator in the elastic of her waistband. She ran back outside and quickly hid in an alley—the market was swarming with Bharatiya Sthalsena. She ducked into a weak crate and killed the man sleeping inside, then headed online.
She hacked the Bharatiya Sthalsena net in seconds. It showed every soldier on the streets. None were coming for her. Only a few were following search protocols. To the side of the operations files, she found records. Impounds. Impound lots. HRDC lots, HRDC unconventional vehicles. One listing for a four-legged tank. HRDC lot address—only three kilometers away. Back to the street ops pages. Personnel on duty. Bharatiya Sthalsena soldiers by height. Female. 1.87 meters. Hugli River Marketplace. One: Sanchita Patel. Highlighted, two blocks north, one block east.