Andrea pushed her chair back, as if creating distance between herself and her mother. “You’re stalling for time. All you’ve done since I came in here is to try to talk circles around me and get under my skin, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with me, does it?”
“Maybe you’re not as naive as I thought,” replied Katerina.
Andrea sent us all a message.
Someone’s coming for her. Thomas, check the perimeter. Everyone else, arm up.
“This interview was a waste of time for me.” She looked over at Katerina like she was seeing her for the first time. “But for you, it was just another fight. Another chance for you to use those strategies and techniques you put so much effort into developing. When I come back, I’ll return the favor.”
“What makes you think that will ever happen?” asked Katerina. “I gave you an opportunity to learn just as I did. A chance to understand why I’ve done what I’ve done. My ulterior motives don’t matter. I’m always doing more than one thing at a time. It’s a skill you’ll need to develop if you want to survive.”
The door to the interrogation room opened and Thomas walked in. “I couldn’t reply to your message. Communications are under attack as we speak. We need to initiate lockdown.”
Raven called out to him. “What’s going on?”
He looked up in our direction. “A coordinated attack on our network. Messaging has gone down for the moment, but I’ll have that resolved shortly. It coincides with the arrival of four unregistered vehicles in the secure car park.”
Andrea stood up immediately.
“So they’re coming for her?” Veraldi asked.
Thomas shook his head. “I doubt it. My guess is that her masters want to retrieve the Warwick node. The technology is beyond priceless.”
“Hello, Thomas.” Katerina’s voice was as smooth as ever. “It’s been a long time.”
He ignored her and turned to Andrea. “We must not lose that node.”
“Agreed,” replied Andrea. “But we can’t let them take her either. If we break her, we can break the case. Get the building locked down and all defense systems active,” Andrea ordered.
Thomas left the room, followed almost immediately by Vincenzo Veraldi. With one hand on the door, Andrea stopped and turned back to Katerina. “The source from which things derive their being is also that to which they return for their destruction.”
“That’s apropos,” her mother replied, “but I’ve always found Anaximander a bit sophistic.” There was no stopping Katerina Capanelli from getting the last word.
17
The armory was a tight space with all five of us packed in and rushing to gear up. Andrea made her intent clear as she sealed her thermoptic camouflage. “They’re not leaving here with anything—not the Warwick node, not the prisoner, not their lives. This doesn’t end until we kill everyone.”
“How many attackers can there really be?” asked Raven. “With four vehicles, I’m thinking sixteen to twenty at most.”
“That seems likely,” Veraldi answered, “but we don’t know who or what they are yet. They could be Augmen, or androids.”
“We have our own androids as well,” Andrew said as he slipped a fifth magazine into the webbing of his tactical vest. He clearly expected a long fight.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Andrea. “Thomas mentioned an attack on our network. He wouldn’t have brought it up if it was something trivial.”
I didn’t like the implication. “Could someone have hacked our androids?”
Andrea nodded. “Assume every proxy is hostile until proven otherwise. Is everyone ready? Move out.”
She opened the door to a stream of gunfire. As suspected, there were in fact proxies waiting in ambush. Andrea pressed against the wall as she sidestepped back into the armory. I took a knee and aimed into the corridor, waiting for an android to walk into the frame of the doorway. The androids were likely thinking the same about us. We were trapped in a standoff before we’d even begun.
Veraldi messaged Thomas. Our androids are compromised.
Thomas replied immediately. Only some. Are you under attack?
Yes, replied Andrea. They’re in front of the armory.
I’ll send relief, stand by.
“Did you see how many were out there?” I asked Andrea.
“I’d say three or four, but they have the door covered.”
“We don’t have the time to wait for backup,” Veraldi pointed out. “The attackers will breach our external defenses and overrun the building if we don’t get to the perimeter soon.”
“I’ve got it.” Raven sidled up to the door, fired two shots, and then ducked back in as the androids responded with gunfire. “Two down, two remaining.”
We heard another burst of shots, then received a message from Thomas.
The hallway is clear. The proxies you see are fully functioning.
Andrea cloaked. When she reappeared, she was standing outside of the armory, gesturing for the rest of us to join her. When I stepped out in the hallway, I saw three of our proxies standing silently next to four dead androids.
Andrea sent out another message. I need an update, Thomas.
A fraction of our security proxies were compromised by the electronic attack. I’ve forced all proxies into network isolation to stop it.
So we can’t control them?
They’ll respond to commands delivered in person. That’s part of their core programming. But no, we can’t exercise any remote operational control over them.
Our proxies were staring at us. Raven eyed one cautiously. “I don’t know, Chief. This could get very confusing, very quickly.”
Andrea started walking. “Shake it off. We need the tactical support. We can’t assume anything, so approach any proxy as potentially hostile until you have evidence that it isn’t.”
“This is going to make response coordination difficult,” Veraldi commented.
“You’re absolutely right,” Andrea replied. “We have no way of knowing in advance if an android is friend or foe, and we can’t communicate with them beyond line of sight. We’ll have to consider the whole facility as the battleground.”
That was such a sobering thought that no one even replied. The loyal proxies fanned out around us like trained guards, but I don’t think any of us felt entirely comfortable to have them. Disconnected from the network, they were no longer vulnerable to malicious logic injection, but it was still difficult to ignore that only a few bytes of programming separated them from the proxies that had ambushed us.
Not for the first time, it occurred to me that our reliance on android proxies was a weakness—not just for Section 9, but our whole society. A facility staffed with human beings would have been much easier to defend, and would have required a much larger force to successfully assault. With proxies, we were already overrun before the enemy even breached the facility.
We passed the elevators, but Andrea didn’t break stride. “It’s not worth the risk,” she said, answering the unspoken question. “They could be hacked or boobytrapped. We’ll circle around to the stairs.”
I fully expected the stairs to be held by enemy-controlled proxies, but there was nothing and no one. If the roles were reversed and I was the one attacking, the first thing I’d do was deploy proxies to stop movement between levels. Thomas’s response to cut the androids from the network was likely why such an obvious choke point was left open. It cost us the ability to coordinate our response, but it denied the enemy the same advantage.
Andrea messaged Thomas. Any hostiles on level 4 near the south staircase?
No, but there is a small group at the elevators. Be advised, attacking forces have now penetrated the facility at both entrances.
Understood.
Raven and I took position by the door and waited for Andrea to cloak. Andrew and Vincenzo each kept their attention on the stairs leading further up and down. Andrea faded out of sight, and moments later the door swung open onto a quiet h
allway. I stepped through and went left, while Raven went right, both of us ready to fire at the first sign of trouble. Seconds passed, and there was no movement other than our own shadows, no sound beyond the low rumble of the environment control. The corridor was clear for the moment, just as Thomas had said.
Andrea decloaked. “Vincenzo, Raven, I want you to secure the east side. Tycho and I will take the west. Andrew, rendezvous with Thomas and secure the lab. Your priority is defense. Everyone else is on offense. If it isn’t Section 9, destroy it.”
Andrea turned to the loyal proxies. “Force protection condition gamma.”
The androids obeyed, moving out to defend our facility with thoughtless obedience. Vincenzo, Andrew, and Raven formed up and headed off toward the east wing, and I followed Andrea as we headed west.
She didn’t say anything at first, not that I expected her to. We were fighting for our lives, after all. When we reached the vault door demarcating the west wing tunnels, she turned and grinned at me. “It looks like you’ve got a handle on your prosthetics.”
“Thanks, chief. It feels like I still have a long way to go, but I almost forget about them sometimes. Like they’re a part of me.”
She slid her finger across the door’s lockpad—circle, triangle, square, circle. “They are a part of you,” she said. “The hardest challenge of living with augments isn’t the meds or the regular surgical maintenance, it’s understanding that the technology and your body are one and the same. They’re just a container for your mind, the real you.”
The vault door’s locks disengaged. “I think I understand,” I said.
Andrea nodded then cloaked, and I pulled the door open. She decloaked a few paces beyond the door and signaled me to follow, her attention and weapon trained on the corridor ahead the whole time. I stepped through the doorway and tapped on her shoulder. She then walked forward at a measured pace and I followed, turning to walk backward every few seconds to check for movement behind us.
Ten meters down the hallway, we encountered a lone proxy. It’s back was to us and it seemed to be standing idle, but it was doing so over a body—a technician, judging from the uniform. Andrea gestured for me to hold my position. I took aim, expecting her to engage from where she stood, ready to provide overlapping fire. Instead, she cloaked.
The android’s chest burst open moments later and its feet dangled as it was lifted from the ground. Andrea shimmered into view with her arm plunged through the proxy’s body to the elbow. Her hand was wrapped around its graphene spine, detached synthetic muscle dangling from the broken vertebrae. She placed her free hand on the android’s shoulder and wretched her arm back. Its head twisted free as the body fell to the floor, dangling from the broken spine in Andrea’s hand.
I approached the technician’s body. “Looks like they were ordered to kill everyone they could.”
“I wouldn’t expect any of Section 9’s enemies to have discretion. Would you?”
I caught the oblique reference to Tower 7. “Do you think we rely on these things too much?” I asked her.
“They’re just tools,” she replied. She raised the android’s head and looked into its lightless eyes. “A human is what caused this. Once this is over, she’ll answer for it.”
We soon came upon another group of three proxies close to the west elevators. I looked to Andrea for how we’d handle them. Her silent approach was all well and good for a single android, but I couldn’t see leaving guns out of play when outnumbered.
The androids perked up and moved as a group around a blind corner. We heard a burst of gunshots a moment later. Andrea leveled her weapon and pressed against the adjacent wall. She gestured for me to take a position on the opposite side.
I settled against the right wall and cautiously moved up toward the corner. Something moved up ahead, and I crouched instinctively. Gunfire scored the black metal above my head, and Andrea returned fire. For brief moments—when stepping too hard or bumping against the wall—I could see our attackers. A faint ripple trailed in the air with their movements as they sought cover behind the corner.
“Active camo!” I called out, falling back the way we’d come.
“We need to—grenade!”
She threw herself back down the corridor as a fist-sized white cube struck the right wall and clung. I was already flattening myself against the floor before the thought had occurred to me to do so. Years of training expressed in a single, lifesaving action.
The Arbiter Academy referred to it as Maximal Life Affirmation—the greatest survivability possible in a shitty situation. At a good distance from the grenade, with a minimized cross-section, we’d have a 99% chance of escaping without injury if we did everything we were trained to do.
Open your mouth to prevent burst eardrums, exhale as much as possible to keep your lungs in place when the pressure wave hits. Keep your eyes shut tight.
The adhesive grenade exploded in a bright green flash, and my world became all heat and light. If I’d had a bit more time to act, I would have turned and flattened out with my feet toward the explosive instead of my head. Still, I was alive, and grenades usually traveled in pairs. I needed to get up and counterattack.
In the moments after the blast, everything in my left eye was a white negative of the hallway, swimming with shadows and fireflies. I tasted sulfur on my tongue, and my lungs burned.
I tried to blink my vision clear as I stood and slotted my weapon. I could see clearly through my right eye, so I closed my left and trusted the augment as I pressed forward. The corner at the end of the hall seemed clear, but that only meant our attackers were either taking cover or weren’t bumping into anything hard enough to disrupt their thermoptic fields. For all I knew, someone could be standing out in the open with a gun to my head.
I fired short bursts blindly into the area, deciding that at best I’d kill someone and at worst I’d keep them pinned behind cover. Counting my shots as I sidled backward, I knew I’d need to reload soon. Andrea would have to keep up the suppressing fire soon.
“Andrea,” I called out, afraid to take my eye off the corner. “Are you hurt?”
No answer. The silence stretched into seconds and finally, I turned to where I’d seen her last. She was gone.
I didn’t think she’d leave me to handle this on my own, but for her to cloak when I couldn’t was essentially turning me into bait. I pressed against the left wall and reloaded, hoping Andrea had some plan I couldn’t see.
The fire suppression system activated as I racked my weapon. I wasn’t sure what had triggered it. Water poured down from the ceiling, and in that rain I saw a figure. A negative space where the water wasn’t, in the shape of a man. The shape made a quick movement then retreated behind the corner. A white cube shimmered into view and arced through the air. Another grenade, I realized, thrown directly at me.
Maximal Life Affirmation for a situation like that would be to catch it and throw it back. A good idea for most explosives, but not for those white cubes. The white cubes were adhesive grenades, a weapon peculiar to Jovian military. Trying to catch a grenade like that would only result in an explosive bonded to my hand. I couldn’t cover more than fifteen feet in the time it would take for the fuse to burn out, so running wasn’t any better an option. Both fight and flight, in this case, led to the same ends.
My solution was sacrifice. I swatted the grenade with my weapon, and the grenade clung to it as it was designed to do. I cocked back and tossed the rifle as hard as I could down the corridor, then I turned and flattened out on the floor once more. I felt the blast a second later, an instantaneous, all-over pressure like floating a hundred meters below the ocean. Then I felt the heat, searing and angry across my face. I rolled onto my back in the ensuing lull and, in the first moments after, felt a strange calm as the cool water from the fire suppression system rained on me.
I’d been lucky enough to survive twice and knew there would not be a third time. I took a deep breath, rolled over my shoulders onto my feet, and
sprinted as fast as my augments could take me to the corner at the end of the hall. If any of the attackers survived the explosion, my only prospect for survival was to overwhelm them before they could recover. I drew my sidearm and thumbed off the safety.
I came around the corner and found two bodies on the floor. Both were torn apart from the waist up, but I could tell they had been very slender and tall people. They were wearing powered exoskeletons but didn’t seem to have any identifying patches or markings on their gray uniforms. The bodies were both so mangled that I didn’t notice at first how odd their positions were. I didn’t consider how strange it was that both were seated, nearly upright, on the floor. I didn’t see, until he was ready to fire, the third figure cloaked on the floor behind the bodies, outlined in falling water.
I dropped immediately, throwing my back flat onto the floor. I heard the unmistakable report of a railgun as rounds streaked over my head. I craned my neck and fired between my knees, grouping my shots as best I could around the blue muzzle arc from the weapon. The shooter flashed into view as two shots struck him in the chest. He was another slim, tall person in gray with an exoskeleton. He seemed hurt but certainly wasn’t dead.
He kicked one of the corpses onto me. A slurry of gore and water sloshed across my face. I pushed the body off of me and saw the man frantically trying to replace the rails on his weapon. That was the trouble with railguns; the power and simplicity comes at a hardware cost. The rails break down structurally from prolonged use and have to be swapped in combat. Not a big deal as part of a unit performing a raid, but a liability when everyone else in your fire team is dead.
I raised my pistol to fire and saw the slide was locked back.
I cursed the situation, myself, and God, and ejected the empty magazine. The man in front of me aligned his new rails to the body of his weapon. I pulled a fresh magazine from my pocket and slammed it into the pistol. The man locked his rails into place. I racked my slide.
He leveled his rifle, and I heard gunfire.
Loud and close, the staccato pops of black powder instead of the drawn-out crystalline ring of a railgun. The man shimmered into view as his head split open, a bloody flower blossoming in spring rain. I turned to my left to see a lithe form silently approaching, outlined in falling water.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 86