by Isaac Hooke
seven
Rade smashed into the concrete floor at the base of the steps and rolled a short ways into the concrete tunnel. He retracted his helmet faceplate—with the breaches, pressure had fallen drastically inside the jumpsuit, making it difficult to breathe. He took a long inhale.
Guess I’m imbibing the city’s air after all.
He scrambled to his feet and dashed into the underground subway platform, where people had taken shelter from the fighting behind pillars and back-to-back benches. He fired at the platform screen doors as he ran, creating holes in the translucent polycarbonate from which cracks spidered outward. He hurled himself at the damaged area, firing his jetpack to increase his momentum.
The weakened platform screen shattered and he fell through. He issued countering thrust from his jetpack to cushion his landing. After touching down, he sprinted into the subway tunnel; he liberally fired his jetpack between steps to give himself a bounding pace.
Pain continued to flare from his wounds. He glanced down and saw blood oozing from a perforation on the right side of his midsection. More blood trickled from a hole near his left clavicle.
He glanced in the digital rear-view mirror—basically the feed from his aft camera piped into the upper central area of his vision—and saw enforcers leaping onto the tracks behind him. Perdix drones followed. Rade quickly rounded the bend before they could get a bead on him.
In two hundred meters he came upon a maintenance door in the side of the tunnel. He broke through and slammed it shut behind him. A ladder led to a grille—it wasn’t locked, and opened onto the sidewalk.
He emerged slowly, wary of tangos. He saw the building that he had marked just ahead. He hadn’t realized it before, but it was a hospital.
Good. Maybe I can get my injuries treated.
It was surrounded by enforcers, which currently had their backs to him. They had taken cover behind various police cars. Perdix drones, humming like angry buzzsaws, were making dive-bombing runs at the windows.
Rade glanced at his overhead map. His team had holed up within the building, rather than on the rooftop as per his previous instructions. Probably a good idea. Their blue dots on the map had low ping times—indicating a strong, good signal.
“We see you, boss,” Lui transmitted.
“I’ll be right there,” Rade sent.
Rade surveyed the parked cars nearby and his AI pointed out one that was hackable. Rade went to it at a crouch and took control.
The Perdix drones had apparently spotted him, because some were swooping down toward his position. Rade floored it.
The tires flattened under the assault, and the hood and windshield became riddled with bore holes, but the engine kept running so he maintained the acceleration.
He broke through the line of enforces, striking a glancing blow to one of the police cars, and jostled up the hospital steps until he crashed through the glass front doors. He struck a thin pillar that separated the next set of glass doors inside, ending the impromptu joyride.
He kicked out the windshield and rolled across the riddled hood, landing in front of the vehicle at a crouch. Glass shards from the inner doors crunched underfoot. The acrid scent of burned electronics assailed his nostrils. He heard footsteps and the buzz of drones, both quickly growing in volume from outside.
Shaw, Surus, and three of the Centurions were waiting on the far side of the open concourse, leaning past the edge of a staircase. They had stolen plasma rifles in hand.
“About time you decided to crash the party,” Shaw said. “Come on!”
Rade hurried across the concourse.
Shaw and Surus opened fire, taking down his pursuers—a glance in the digital rear-view mirror told him that so far two Perdix drones had swooped inside, along with one enforcer. All three crashed into the ground as he watched.
He continued his mad dash.
When he reached his Argonauts, he ducked behind the railing of the staircase they had gathered upon.
Shaw glanced at his wounds. “Good choice of building.”
“You’re being sarcastic?” Rade said.
“Not at all,” Shaw said between rifle bursts. “Okay, maybe a bit. Get to the convalescence ward. We’re making our stand there. I’m marking the location on the map.”
“What about you?” Rade asked.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Shaw said. “Covering your bee-hind.”
Rade took the stairs two steps at a time, though he was feeling fairly winded by that point. He glanced at his overhead map: a swath of mapped areas had been cut through the darkness of the interior, indicating where the other Argonauts had passed. The rest was black and unmapped, as the city data Batindo had given them hadn’t included any building blueprints.
He reached the second floor, passing Unit C stationed near the edge of the open stairwell.
“Hurry,” the combat robot said.
Rade heard windows breaking and the distant sound of metal feet clanging across the floor; he continued up to the next level. Shaw and the others were close behind him, with Unit C bringing up the rear.
At the third floor he and the others left behind the stairwell and dashed across the hall. Two more Centurions—Units D and E—lurked outside different rooms, their bodies flat against the walls that bordered the doors. As Rade and the others raced past, the robots directed their rifles inside those rooms, providing suppressive fire. Afterwards, the Centurions joined the group, following on drag.
Rade reached the infirmary. TJ and Harlequin were guarding the entrance and waved Rade inside.
“Boss, we’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t we?” Harlequin said.
“You’re sounding more like a human all the time,” Rade said.
“I’ve had good teachers,” Harlequin replied.
Rade dashed into the room. The air smelled sterile within, heavy with the cloying scent of antiseptic. The room contained eight hospital beds, most of which had been upturned, and the mattresses removed. Argonauts and combat robots had assumed positions beside each of the six windows on the far side. There were tiny holes drilled through the external-facing wall where lasers had penetrated. The team had piled much of the room’s furniture, including at least two standalone cabinets, against that wall to provide cover, and propped mattresses over the windows themselves, buttressing them with smaller pieces of furniture such as night tables and visitor chairs. The ex-soldiers aimed their rifles through the cracks between the mattresses and the windows and fired at different targets outside.
The Argonauts with Rade took up positions near the entrance behind him after coming inside. He noticed that the entrance door was shot off its hinges.
Tahoe was lying on one of the intact hospital beds, being tended by a Weaver. Bender lay on another bed with bandages around his bicep, and his leg. Another Weaver was currently examining his toe. Both men were conscious. The legs of their beds had been lowered so that the mattresses sat close to the floor, next to their doffed jumpsuit pieces.
It appeared that his team had taken several doctors and patients hostage: the Kenyan civilians huddled in the middle of the room between the upturned beds. Most likely the hostage-taking had started out as unintentional—the civilians happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rade wasn’t sure how easy it would be to let them go at the moment, given how trigger-happy the tangos in the hallway outside were likely to be.
Batindo cowered in his jumpsuit next to the civilians. He hadn’t picked up a weapon for himself. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have known how to use it.
Rade noticed that not all of the Centurions had been able to acquire rifles either, and these unarmed combat robots idled near the hostages, watching them.
Shaw rushed past Rade and righted one of the beds. She grabbed a spare mattress that was lying nearby and replaced it. “Lie here.”
“I can still fight,” Rade said.
“I’m sure you can,” Shaw agreed. “But for how long? You won’t do any o
f us any good if you topple over from low systolic pressure in ten minutes. Now lie here.”
Rade obeyed, tossing his plasma rifle to one of the unarmed robots beforehand. The Centurion nodded in thanks, and took up a position near one of the windows.
Shaw adjusted the length of the bed “legs,” lowering them so that the mattress sat as close to the floor as possible. Then she rolled a spare Weaver over to him.
“Take off that helmet,” Shaw said.
Rade brought his hands to his helmet, but his fingers hesitated on the open latch.
Shaw raised an eyebrow. “You’re already exposed to the atmosphere...”
“Yes, but my helmet might still be giving me some protection from psi attacks, even with the faceplate open,” Rade said. “Tahoe, you’ve taken off yours. Are you sensing anything?”
“No,” Tahoe said. “But that begs the question, if I was being bombarded by some sort of psi attack, would I even notice?”
“Probably not,” Rade said.
He hesitated a moment longer, then opened the latch and removed his helmet. His head felt cold immediately—he realized his hair was damp with perspiration.
He set the helmet down on the floor beside him. Shaw helped him remove the upper portions of his jumpsuit assembly, then the Weaver set to work on his wounds. One of its telescoping limbs applied a sonic-injector to his shoulder and side regions, and the pain immediately numbed.
Shaw lovingly combed Rade’s damp hair while the robot worked. “You’re going to be all right.”
Rade nodded distractedly. He felt slightly embarrassed by the public attention, though the only ones watching him were the hostages and unarmed combat robots. “Shouldn’t you be fighting?”
“I gave up my rifle to one of the Centurions,” Shaw said. “So there’s nothing else I can do except be at your side, anyway. Which is how it should be.”
He wanted to put his helmet back on and shut them all out, even Shaw, and have some quiet time for himself, but he couldn’t. Not yet. He forced himself to remain present.
He glanced at the hostages. He thought of how the Perdix drones had fired at the crowded bakery.
“I’m not sure those hostages will prevent the enemy from firing rockets or lobbing grenades in here,” he said.
“I’m not so sure either,” Lui said from where he was ducked underneath one of the windows. Leaning against a mattress, he cradled one of the heavy turrets he had ripped from a walker unit. “But apparently, we have a VIP in our midst.”
“A VIP?” Rade said.
“Batindo says one of these men is a cousin of the Kenyan king,” Fret explained. He resided underneath another window, and held a stolen plasma rifle between the crack formed by the shielding mattress and the windowsill above him: he was obviously piping the rifle scope’s viewpoint to his Implant, because he occasionally squeezed the trigger.
“Which one?” Rade asked.
Fret pointed out a small man in a white lab coat. According to the public profile on his embedded ID, he was a general practitioner. His name was Ran Kato.
“Batindo recognized his name,” Fret continued. “He’s convinced the governor won’t bomb us, not while we hold him hostage. We had Kato transmit his hostage status on all available channels, and lo and behold, that caused the robots to let up their main attack. At least for the moment.”
Rade nodded slowly. “If he really is a cousin of the king, Governor Ganye could use him as leverage when the Kenyan warships come.”
“That would be the wisest and most prudent thing to do,” TJ said. “But that assumes the man we’re dealing with is wise and prudent.”
“And not just a prude,” Bender joked.
“Like you?” Manic said. “What did you do, bicep curl a porcupine?” He was positioned underneath the window beside Lui, his rifle shoved into the gap between mattress and sill. His eyes momentarily focused on this reality, rather than that of his rifle scope, and he nodded toward the bandage on Bender’s bicep.
“Actually I didn’t,” Bender said. “And how would that make me a prude if I did, bitch? Bicep curl a porcupine. What kind of a moronic—”
“What did you do then?” Maniac’s eyes defocused once more, and he squeezed the trigger on his plasma rifle. “Scratch another drone.”
“What did I do?” Bender said. “I was beating off while watching you during the firefight, and I flexed my bicep muscle too hard in my excitement, and the muscle exploded.”
“Ah, I can see that,” Manic said. “I have that effect.”
“Yeah,” Bender said, laughing. “When other men witness your manly endeavors, their muscles explode. You make my muscles come, Manic.”
“I’m sure I do,” Manic said. “Though that looks more like blood to me, not come.”
“My muscles had a period because of you,” Bender said.
“I don’t think Bender’s injured too badly,” Harlequin said from his guard position by the door.
“I probably am,” Bender said. “But these Weaver bitches have dosed me up with so many painkillers I feel higher than a monkey hanging from a giraffe’s dick.”
“Hey boss,” Lui said. “Got something strange to report.”
Still lying down, Rade turned slightly toward Lui, but flinched. He felt pain through the numbing in his side, and he wondered just what the hell the robot was doing to him. He didn’t want to look, however. That might make him vomit, something he definitely hoped to avoid, especially in front of his men.
“Go ahead,” Rade said.
“While we were on the run down there, I detected a quantum Slipstream signature emanating from the legislature building. Of the kind Phants use.”
“What do you think our Phant was doing?” Rade asked.
“I’m not totally sure,” Lui said. “But we’ve seen evidence that the Phants use quantum Slipstreams for communications purposes in the past.”
“Surus?” Rade said.
“We do use them,” Surus said. “Mostly for communications between automated systems in this reality, for example between a remote base and a Mothership. It circumvents the twenty minute requirement my species usually needs when communicating Phant to Phant in the supra-dimension, and the Slipstream nature allows the signals to travel great distances.”
“You think our Phant is communicating with a Mothership?” Rade asked.
“It’s possible,” Surus said. “But as you know, the closest Mothership is six centuries away. More likely, in my opinion, is that it was communicating with some other alien race, closer to this section of the galaxy.”
“How could another race even understand the signal?” Lui said. “And the message it contained?”
“A learning process would be required of course,” Surus said. “To give you an analogy, it would be similar to communicating with a stranger via Morse code, when the stranger didn’t understand the underlying code. It would also require a race with the technology to read the quantum signals in the first place, which would emerge from the Slipstream of the target system. Usually such a race would be late Tech Class III, or early Tech Class IV.”
“So more advanced than us, you’re saying?” Lui asked.
“There’s a good chance, yes,” Surus said. “At least in some technologies.”
“All right, well, the nearest uncharted system is quite a ways distant,” Rade said. “I don’t think we have to worry about aliens crashing the party for the time being.”
“Famous last words,” Bender said.
“I should note that quantum Slipstreams can be detected in the same systems from which they were sent,” Surus said. “They don’t necessarily have to target a destination system via an existing Slipstream. And they can pass through planets, even suns. If a vessel of some kind were hiding nearby, the signal would reach them...”
“Well, we have more immediate concerns in case you hadn’t noticed,” Rade said. “I’m not going to worry about hidden aliens or other speculations at the moment. Keep targeting those tang
os out there, team. Let’s not allow them to get comfortable.”
“Oh, I think we all intend to make life as miserable for them as possible,” Fret said.
The Weaver finished with Rade shortly thereafter. It healed his wounds, leaving pink scars in place. It applied bandages to either section, saying: “Wear these for the next day. It will reduce the scarring.”
Rade shrugged. He had never heard of wearing a bandage to reduce scarring before. He supposed different cultures employed slightly different technologies.
Rade donned his jumpsuit, as did Tahoe and Bender; he replaced his helmet for the head protection it provided, but retracted the faceplate so he was still breathing air from the external environment. He retrieved the suitrep kit from his left cargo pant pocket, and applied patches to the perforations in the fabric of the jumpsuit.
“Might as well open your faceplates,” Rade instructed the team. “And conserve your internal oxygen supplies.”
The Argonauts complied. Except for Bender, who promptly replaced the helmet he had removed for surgery, and shut the faceplate.
“To hell with that,” Bender said. “I’d rather use up all my oxygen than risk exposing myself to a Phant psi attack.”
“There’s no guarantee we’re facing a Black,” Surus said. “In fact, we’re probably not.”
“I don’t care,” Bender said. “When you’ve all lost your minds, and you’re running around naked and chanting mantras and smearing each other with your own feces, I’ll be the one who brings you all back from the brink and tells you I told you so. Even though you wipe your feces on me, I’ll do that for you.”
“Huh? Where do you come up with this stuff?” Lui said.
“Oh yeah?” Manic countered. “Well, when you’ve exhausted your O2 supply, and the team is stranded out in deep space, forced to make a spacewalk from the ramp of our Dragonfly to the hull of the Argonaut, and you suddenly find yourself breathing void, I’ll be the one who tells you I told you so. Besides, what’s the big deal? You already removed your helmet.”
“Yeah well, I put it back on. Maybe I’m just a contrarian, you know what I mean? Never been one to follow the herd. It’s suited me well in the past.” Bender turned toward Surus and flashed his golden grille. “By the way, you interested in dinner tonight, hot stuff?”