Strykers

by K. M. Ruiz

  “We won’t fight you.” Ciari smiled slightly, the expression eerie and wrong on her face. “And we won’t beg anymore.”

  “We own you,” Anchali snapped out, wrinkled face ashen from shock.

  Ciari pressed her fingers against a small, circular bruise that stood out on the side of her throat, the only evidence of Lucas’s deceit, even if the humans didn’t know it. “We own ourselves now.”

  “Ciari,” Erik said. He thought of the eleven years he’d ordered her to live by his rules and all the rest before that when she’d fought in the hardscrabble streets of the world on orders from the government. Loyalty wasn’t found in slavery.

  “Stay on Earth, Erik,” Ciari said. “If you stay, we can show you a different way.”

  “Go to hell.”

  The quads opened fire, but it was too late. Ciari was gone, teleported out to who knew where by some other newly freed Stryker, taking with her Erik’s faith in the way the world worked.

  [THIRTY-THREE]

  SEPTEMBER 2379

  THE SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA

  Keiko teleported herself, Jason, and Quinton into a safe house buried in the Slums of the Angels. The broken mess of buildings and roads that surrounded the city towers of Los Angeles were where most of the population resided. She stumbled when her feet connected with the ground, and only Quinton’s firm grip stopped her from checking out the floor of the arrival area with her face.

  “You all right?” Quinton asked.

  Keiko straightened up. She swiped at her nose and the faint hint of blood that leaked from it. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “I could have pulled this round,” Jason said.

  “You teleported the last time, and you spent more time in Japan shielding than I did. It was my turn anyway.”

  They’d been teleporting across continents and oceans during the last sixteen hours without rest. That many teleports, across increasingly longer distances, mixed with the arguments and fights that inevitably broke out with every group of Strykers they met, had exhausted them. Quinton looked marginally better. After the first twelve times, he’d been the one to submit to telepathic verification by other Strykers to confirm the truth of their orders, sparing Keiko and Jason from having someone else mucking around in their minds.

  Keiko took a moment to stretch her arms over her head, trying to ease the knotted tension in her body. “At least we’ve reached North America again. We’re almost finished.”

  They knew they were working under a time limit and had hit the ground running back in Toronto before moving on to Buffalo. They kept going east, teleporting across the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in London and begin the hard task of giving Strykers the virus beneath the heavy presence of the government’s security grid.

  It had taken long hours to work their way through the Stryker ranks in Europe under the pretense of Keiko checking on their status as the world rioted. They couldn’t reach their people in The Hague. Africa had been easier, with less than a dozen surviving cities across the entire continent. They bypassed the Middle East, which, like most of Russia and nearly all of Asia, was full of deadzones. They’d skipped from Africa to Asia’s ravaged coastlines along the tip of India and the southeastern swatch of land appropriated by China. Australia was nothing but desert and firestorms, and they’d just come from Japan.

  They still had two continents to work their way through, with at least 250 Strykers left that they needed to reach.

  “Here’s hoping this group doesn’t argue like the last one,” Quinton said tiredly as he touched the bruise on his face.

  Jason snorted. “I can’t believe you let her get past your defenses.”

  “I wasn’t going to burn a fellow Stryker. I figured she’d accept Keiko’s authority as chief operating officer after picking through my memories. How was I supposed to know she’d have an emotional breakdown?” Quinton shrugged uncomfortably. “She still believed us and didn’t question Ciari’s orders.”

  “Telepaths tend to believe more quickly than anyone else,” Keiko said as she stepped off the arrival dais in the corner of the large garage. “So let’s find one.”

  They didn’t even reach the door before a short, young man was palming it open. Telekinesis slid against their own shields, a heavy weight that made Keiko’s headache worse. “Daeng,” she said. “We’re here on the OIC’s order.”

  Daeng pointed at Keiko’s companions. “Sir, you know we’ve got kill orders for those two.”

  Keiko managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. “Orders have changed. We’re here to save your life and that of every other Stryker in the Slums.”

  He hesitated, not quite believing her, but they didn’t have time to deal with wasted moments.

  “You got a telepath on-site?” Jason said.

  “Yes,” Daeng said. “Tanya is our senior telepath right now. She’s upstairs.”

  “Call her down here so she can verify our actions and that we’re not trying to kill any of you.”

  Daeng looked at Keiko for confirmation; she gave it. His eyes lost focus for a second or two as he tapped into the psi link he shared with his team. “Tanya’s coming.”

  A minute later, a thin Mexican stepped into the arrival room, wariness in her gaze. “Sir?”

  “Link with Quinton,” Keiko said. “Ciari’s orders.”

  Strykers knew better than to disobey their Syndicate’s officers, especially the OIC. Tanya pulled Quinton into a psi link, taking the memories that he shoved into the forefront of his mind and reviewing them.

  “You’re kidding,” Tanya said, staring at them in disbelief. “That should kill us.”

  “Hasn’t killed anyone we’ve dosed so far,” Quinton said.

  “Ciari wants her Strykers to live,” Keiko said, her voice cracking from exhaustion. “You will accept her orders and recall in shifts every Stryker in the Slums. We don’t have time to waste on petty arguing.”

  “No,” Tanya said after a moment. “I suppose we don’t.”

  “Tanya?” Daeng said warily.

  She gave the younger Stryker a lopsided smile, eyes bright. “It’s fine, Daeng. We’re going to follow their orders.”

  It took ten minutes for Tanya to telepathically contact all the Strykers assigned to the Slums and coordinate teleportation for everyone. Keiko, Jason, and Quinton left her to deal with the transfer while they went to set everything up.

  The Slums were filled with rioters, the buffer zone around the city towers a veritable bloodbath between the military and assigned Strykers holding back the deluge of people hoping to reach a transfer shuttle. The safe house had been ignored only due to psionic interference. The World Court had tasked those Strykers in the Slums to keep everyone down on the ground and out of the city towers. Not that it mattered any longer, with most of the registered humans leaving, but the Strykers still had a job to do and they were going to do it to the bitter end.

  That maybe the end wouldn’t be so bitter was why no one really fought this procedure. The virus could save them, and no one living with a kill switch in his or her head was going to say no.

  Jason rubbed a hand over his burning eyes as he gestured at the first few Strykers who had arrived. “Find a place to sit or lie down. It can’t be administered standing up.”

  Daeng was the first to pick a spot, sliding to the floor with his back against the wall. “What exactly does it do?”

  “Turns off the kill switch so the government can’t fry your brain. The virus reprograms it around the internal security system. We can’t turn off the tracking signal yet. If Strykers started going missing on the security grid in large numbers, the World Court would just fry everyone before we got to them,” Jason said as he prepped the dosage. “Took the doctor who wrote the code months to get it right.”

  “What happened to the doctor?”

  “He’s still alive.” Jason knelt down and pressed the tip of the hypospray against Daeng’s throat. “Hold still. This is going to hurt.”

  “The gove
rnment won’t know?”

  That was the fear and the choke hold that all Strykers lived with, the knowledge that if the neurotracker processed even a glitch in its programming, they would die. Jason tapped the hypospray gently against skin.

  “It’s bioware the code is targeting and nanites are machines.” Jason smiled, but it was more teeth than anything else. “We’re nothing more than biological machines, when you get right down to it. The virus is going to create a backdoor through our wetware. It’ll take a few minutes to complete.”

  Jason stabbed his thumb against the hypospray button. The soft shushing sound the thin cylinder made as it pressed a dozen tiny needles into skin was echoed by air sucked through Daeng’s teeth. Jason moved back and switched the hypospray to his other hand, lifting his free hand to scrape his teeth over the small bruise on his thumb.

  He’d pressed that button hundreds of times since leaving Toronto. Those that received the shot came away with a perfect circular bruise on their throat, right over their carotid artery. The rest of the procedure was just as painful, as if the kill switch itself had been flipped.

  The nanites, already activated within the hyposprays, followed their programmed orders. Even as Keiko, Jason, and Quinton urged the other Strykers to relax, the nanites were already moving through the internal carotid to where it joined with the arterial circle of Willis. From there, the nanites disseminated through the smaller capillaries and reached the areas where bioware filaments connected to the nerves and brain.

  The neurotrackers, when the bioware died, felt as if they took their bodies with them, the way the Strykers thrashed against the agony, nervous systems out of whack and bodies suffering through an unwanted machine’s death throes. When it was over, the Strykers remained unconscious for a minute or two as their bodies and brains adjusted to the absence of something they had lived with for most of their lives.

  “Breathe,” Keiko was saying to another Stryker. The recipient shoved herself up straight in her chair, face pale and bleeding from the nose. “Take a deep breath, it’s going to hurt for about an hour.”

  The Stryker ran her fingers over the back of her head, where the neurotracker sat beneath skin and bone. “Hurt doesn’t really cover it.” She opened her mouth wide, trying to ease some of the pressure in her skull. “Fuck, that burns.”

  “You sure it’s off? That it can’t kill us?” Daeng said from where he sat. His breath was coming quick and fast through his mouth.

  “We’re sure. Ciari would never risk her people on something that wouldn’t work,” Keiko said. “The signal is still going strong. Take a minute to catch your breath, then get back to your posts.”

  Keiko, Jason, and Quinton managed to get through five more shifts of Strykers before the clock ran out. Their luck couldn’t last, but that didn’t stop Keiko from reaching desperately for the Stryker beneath her hands, who suddenly reared backward, clutching at his head. He started screaming and wasn’t the only one. Other Strykers they had yet to dose keeled over screaming, clutching at the back of their necks and heads.

  Keiko yelled wordless protests as bodies convulsed around her. She’d seen too many Strykers die like this over the years to not know what was happening. The mass termination was quick, but it was brutally painful to watch, made worse because they could do nothing. They had no way to save the Strykers writhing on the floor as their entire central nervous systems were fried from the inside out.

  Keiko didn’t know she was crying until she couldn’t even see through the tears in her eyes.

  “Fuck,” Jason yelled, slamming his fist against the wall. “Fuck.”

  “We weren’t finished,” Keiko said, voice breaking as she stared at the bodies strewn around her. Reflexively, she clenched her hand around the hypospray she carried.

  It wasn’t just the Slums. They still had cities to pass through, Strykers to dose in the Latin Corridor and South America where they were embedded in cartel territories or the few actual cities that had survived below the equator. Only it didn’t matter anymore, because they were too late, and all the remaining doses of the virus-carrying nanites were worthless.

  Quinton carefully pried the hypospray out of her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers. “Keiko,” he said, voice raw. “Take us back to Toronto.”

  He was asking her to focus when all she wanted to do was fall apart. Keiko swallowed thickly. “Such a fucking waste.”

  “I know. But our job isn’t finished.”

  Keiko ran the back of her hand across her nose and took in a deep breath. “Tanya, deal with the bodies. We need to keep a presence in this city and that order comes directly from Ciari.”

  “We don’t have to stay,” Tanya said.

  “Where will you go?” Keiko asked in a brutally hard voice. “That’s what we asked everyone else we’ve dosed. Where will you be safe in a world that would rather see you dead if not leashed? That’s a mentality we need to change, and it won’t happen if we go running off to save our own asses or for revenge. It will get us nowhere.”

  Tanya ducked her head a bit, expression twisting as she stared down at the bodies of her fellow Strykers. “Do you care about the registered humans?”

  “Not as much as the people on the street,” Jason said, rubbing at his face. “We psions need them to survive, and anyone in the city towers who’s not in a shuttle right now is shit out of luck. The World Court has to see the tracking signals are going strong, which means they’ve got to know most of us aren’t dead. They’ll push the launch even harder now.”

  “All right,” Tanya said. “We’ll hold the line for those on the street and help them fight off the military. We’ll wait for Ciari’s orders.”

  “Try to keep the city towers intact,” Keiko said. “We’re going to need something to live in when this is all over.”

  Keiko teleported the three of them back to where they started, arriving in Ciari’s office back in Toronto. She looked around, realizing that everything in the office but the lights and a single vidscreen showing a map of the world was switched off. The only one to greet them was Jael.

  The Strykers CMO’s eyes were red. “You’re back early.”

  “We didn’t make it in time,” Jason said, choking on the words.

  “I saw.” Jael tilted her head at the vidscreen. “On the monitoring system.”

  Keiko sucked in a deep breath and turned around to face Jael. “Where’s Ciari?”

  “She’s gone. Left with Lucas for The Hague.”

  “Just now?”

  “About an hour ago.” Jael let her attention focus on Jason and Quinton. “Who is Aisling?”

  “Fucking hell,” Jason said. “What did they say?”

  “Only that this is what Aisling wanted. Ciari’s words, not Lucas’s.”

  “Aisling,” Quinton said, “is who Lucas has been taking his orders from, near as we can tell.”

  “Where is she? Can you bring her here?”

  Jason and Quinton shared an uncomfortable look. “We’ve never met her,” Jason said.

  “Are you telling me that Lucas has been following orders from someone that you’ve never seen or spoken to? And you just blindly trusted in Lucas’s word for this?”

  “No, we don’t blindly trust him. But he’s been right every single time, and what he wants—” Quinton broke off to take a deep breath. “What Lucas wants is better for everyone in the long run.”

  “If I didn’t know how many Stryker lives the Serca family has saved for us over the years, I’d be disgusted to know that you believe in their propaganda.”

  “We weren’t scheduled for retrieval.”

  “Not by us,” Jael agreed, a sharp look in her hazel eyes. “I’m thinking Ciari had her own agenda.”

  “You think?” Keiko said. “Aren’t you in her mind?”

  Jael sighed and shook her head. “Ciari ordered me to sever the psi link.”

  “What the hell is wrong with her?” Quinton said.

  “You know Erik fried her brain,�
�� Keiko said. “She almost died. What you don’t know is that the psi surgery went wrong and she lost control of her empathy.”

  “She turned off part of her own mind,” Jael said quietly, looking down at her hands. “I told her to. It was the only way to save her.”

  The silence that followed that remark was uncomfortable and difficult to fill. Keiko chewed on her bottom lip before asking, “Can we kill the signals in the neurotrackers now that we no longer need to hide our freedom? We don’t need the government knowing where we are anymore.”

  “There’s a way,” Jason said. “I need access to the government’s working satellites, though.”

  “I can get you that. We should do it now before they try to cut us off.” Keiko waved a hand at Jason and Quinton, beckoning them to follow her out of the office. “We’ll be on the command level, Jael.”

  The door slid shut behind them, their footsteps fading away. Jael looked around at an office she had wandered in and out of for years. She wondered what the walls remembered of her, if the history embedded in this place would paint her as something other than a desperate woman trying to survive.

  “Computer, activate. Chief medical officer override,” Jael said, digging her fingers into her thighs, nails scratching at her uniform. The terminal behind her switched on.

  “Receiving,” the disembodied voice said. “Voice identification confirmed. Command required.”

  “Pull up the Registry records. Locate the listing for Lucas Serca and backdate.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The Registry had been put into effect to support the Fifth Generation Act. Every family listed in the Registry was required to submit an intact genealogy that stretched back to the Border Wars. It was viewable to the public, an issue of transparency the burgeoning World Court back then had required. Truth, in that instant, couldn’t be locked away. Jael closed her eyes, hoping she was wrong as the computer began to spit out names, dates of births and deaths, the years spinning backward.

  [THIRTY-FOUR]