I felt a weight pressed on the back of my neck. My arm was wrenched back, and I realized that someone was trying to get control of my gun. They were applying pressure and torque in all the right ways, but a prosthetic doesn’t have pressure points or nerve bundles to exploit. I kept a grip on my weapon and steadied my arm against their efforts. I flexed my wrist and fired three shots toward what I guessed would be their head.
The weight on my neck fell away and my arm came free. I scrambled to my feet and watched Katerina Capanelli roll into a fighting stance. I raised my weapon and in the moment of pause before it all went to hell, I sent Andrea a message.
Katerina free
To tell the truth, I’m not really sure that’s how the message read on Andrea’s end. Dataspike messaging depends on subvocalization, not the most reliable or efficient way to send a message. I’d been getting better and better at it, but with the near-concussion I’d just experienced, there was every possibility that the message Andrea received was nothing but gibberish.
I could almost see the calculation in Katerina’s eyes. She had a choice: fight or flight. She could run through the open door, maybe find support from the Jovians, and escape the building, or she could attack me, take my weapon, and finish what she’d started over Europa. Would she be fast enough to do either with my gun in play? Her eyes darted to the door, then back to me.
She smiled and said, “who’s your friend, Tycho?” Then she ducked and took the first step toward the door.
I realized what she was thinking. Katerina knew her value to Section 9. She was going to use Samara as a hostage, and was counting on my hesitation to use lethal force. I thought about how arrogant that was as I fired. I didn’t immediately understand what happened next.
I’d shot twice, leading her movement and expecting to hit somewhere in her chest. Instead, my shots were wide to the left and she had closed half the distance to me on the right. I adjusted and fired twice more, this time aiming for her head, but the shots went over high as she slipped low and clipped my knee with a sweep of her legs.
The attack would have left me crumpled in pain had she hit flesh and bone. As it was, the force staggered me and I stumble-stepped back to regain my footing. It may not have been the result Katerina had expected, but it was enough. She sprang up, grabbed my right arm with one hand, and stepped in with a barrage of uppercuts to my armpit.
Electric pain surged down the length of my arm. My hand went slack, and the gun fell from my grip. She kicked the weapon away, pulled me down with her into a wide, deep stance, and used her hips to flip me over her shoulder onto the floor.
She didn’t release her grip, instead wrapping one leg around my arm and locking it in place with the other. She pulled my wrist into her chest and arched her back to hyperextend my elbow. Compared to the feeling of those punches against my prosthetic interface, this was just a dull ache like winter on old bones.
“You survived the crash,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
I planted my feet on the floor and braced myself. I’d managed to lift 700 kilograms with my augments. A 60-kilo woman should be no problem regardless of the disadvantage in leverage. I drew a breath, twisted my shoulders, and curled my arm.
Katerina came off of the floor as my arm swung around. I’d tried to drive her head-first into the metal, but she anticipated and countered by releasing her grip. She was flung toward the door instead and landed on her shoulder. She gracefully rolled onto the balls of her feet, and I followed her eyes as she took notice of my sidearm, less than eight feet away.
I realized my error just as Katerina seized on it.
She moved for the gun and I reacted, pushing off into a sprint as hard and as fast as I could. I knew I couldn’t get to it before she would, but I thought that if I could bowl into her, I could buy a chance to get it away from her. Katerina was only flesh and blood after all; I could do with my augments what Andrea had done.
She was impossibly fast. I’d never seen anyone like her before or since. Katerina had my pistol in hand before my third step. I ducked my head and crossed my arms, tensing for the impact and entertaining the faint hope that the hit would knock her unconscious. I threw my weight forward, then nothing. The hit never came.
I felt myself pulled from side to side as the room spun around me in a blur of shapes and color. Lights streaked across my vision until the view suddenly locked into place. I was sailing through the air, further into holding, as I watched a receding snapshot of Katerina, the open door, and Dr. Markov.
I hit the floor hard on my back. I rode the momentum and slid onto my feet, ready to engage, but what I saw made me stop in my tracks. Katerina had Samara at gunpoint.
“It’s over, boy,” Katerina said quietly. “You did well.”
“This won’t end the way you think.”
“I know your kind, Tycho Barrett. I’m sure this will go exactly how I imagine.” I watched in horror as Katerina pressed the gun into the nape of Samara’s neck and fired. Samara went limp, and Katerina threw her toward me.
I rushed forward and caught her as Katerina disappeared into the corridor. Samara’s neck was scorched around the entry wound and bleeding freely. She was coughing frothing blood. I spotted the exit wound as I laid her on the floor on her side, blood soaking her clothes just beneath her ribcage. I ran through the checklist as I unclipped the first aid pack from my vest.
Stop the bleeding with pressure and dressing. Keep the victim still in the recovery position. Apply nanite lattice and administer clotting agent if possible.
I took a packet of lattice from the first aid kit and ripped it to size. I pressed it to her neck and wrapped gauze to keep it in place. I pulled my hands away to get the dermal injector to give her the clotting agent, but as soon as I did blood seeped out from beneath the dressing. I quickly pressed my hand against the wound.
It was awkward and difficult to treat. The gauze wasn’t applying enough pressure alone.
Think, Tycho.
I pulled away and reached into the kit again, this time for the scissors. I cut into Samara’s shirt down the length of her sleeve to make a pair of long cloth strips. I looped the cloth around her neck and under her arm and then tied the ends together across her chest. It seemed to hold, so I loaded the dermal injector with the clotting agent. I pressed the injector to her shoulder and pushed the button with my thumb, and the nanites were delivered with an audible hiss.
I took up the scissors again, this time cutting Samara’s shirt down her chest. I pulled the flaps of cloth away and searched for the exit wound. There was so much blood I couldn’t actually see it. I ran my fingers across her side and eventually found it. Her body tensed when I touched it, and she made a sound and spat bloody drool.
“You’re okay, Samara,” I lied. “You’ll be okay.”
The exit wound was small, barely the size of a fingernail. That meant the round had fractured inside of her and only a single piece had left her body. There was likely serious internal damage I couldn’t do anything about. She needed immediate help, or she was going to die.
I messaged Andrea.
19
Katerina escaped from holding, currently armed, whereabouts unknown. She shot Dr. Markov. I’ve done what I can, but she has internal bleeding and bullet fragmentation. I need medical assistance here ASAP.
I paused for a few seconds, then sent another message.
I’m sorry, Andrea.
How had Katerina escaped the interrogation room? Could she have hacked it somehow without Thomas knowing? Or was Thomas too busy trying to stay alive to have even noticed? How was that even possible when she had no dataspike and there was no access terminal?
There was every possibility she had already succeeded in getting out of the building. If that was the case, the special forces soldiers attacking our building had already achieved one of their probable objectives.
I wanted to do something. I sat cradling Samara’s head, clearing her mouth when the blood choked her. She’d fal
len unconscious, her breathing no longer panicked and ragged, but slow and, worryingly, shallow. I’d heard nothing from Raven or Vincenzo, and I thought of them lying on their backs in a growing pool of blood, staring up with vacant eyes at the ghostly off-worlders that killed them.
At last, a message came in. Understood, Tycho. Pursue Katerina. Capture or kill.
So there it was, I had my orders. Despite how little sense it made, my task was now to hunt down Katerina. I gently lowered Samara’s head, propping up the first aid kit as a kind of pillow for her. I stood and walked through the door into the corridor, entrusting Dr. Markov to whatever help Andrea might be able to arrange for her.
The Jovian soldiers had entered the complex from two directions, the east and west elevators. If Katerina wanted to rendezvous with them, she’d pick one of those two entrances. Then again, doing so would mean she’d run into Section 9 or our android proxies long before her own allies. If she wanted to avoid that, was there any other way to get out of the building? The south elevator and stairwell didn’t have ground level access, but the north elevator—
“Of course.”
The Swan Rooms, our suite within the hotel itself. She could use the north stairwell to enter the Hotel du Lac through the Swan Rooms and then make her way down to the street from there.
I took off running, ignoring any concerns about hostile proxies or Jovian soldiers. If she was moving cautiously to avoid recapture, I could only catch up by being reckless. If I was lucky, there was even a chance that something could have delayed her along the way, and that she might not have made it into the hotel yet.
As I approached the north elevator, I saw the car was already in operation. I repeatedly punched the call button anyway, knowing it would make no difference. I ran further down the corridor to the stairwell, preparing for the long climb, when an uneasy thought stopped me at the door.
What if Katerina expected me to come this way?
It was a paranoid thought, barely rational, but I was never one to ignore my instincts. Katerina could have set an ambush at any number of points, but she could have easily sent the elevator up knowing I would follow via the stairs. She’d then have a single point of entry to monitor, a guaranteed fatal funnel, and the high ground.
I stepped back from the door and looked around for anything useful. I was entering a narrow space, possibly into a trap, and I was unarmed. I had my augments, sure, but I wasn’t confident I could control my prosthetics with enough precision to avoid lethal force in combat. My orders were capture or kill; the priority was to bring Katerina back alive.
The standing water at my feet gave me the idea to look up. The fire suppression piping ran exposed along the ceiling. Now that the system had discharged, there wouldn’t be any internal pressure. I bent deep and jumped, then I grabbed hold of the piping fifteen feet overhead. It didn’t immediately come free under my weight, so I placed a hand against the ceiling, took a breath, and pushed. The pipe groaned, strained, and finally broke. I landed on my feet in a splash of water, holding a three-foot-long section of metal in my hand.
It would have to be enough.
I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the door and crouched low. If Katerina was waiting on the other side, she could only react to it opening. Moving fast enough, I could get through before she fired, then it would just be a matter of getting close. Speed at the start was critical. I shifted my weight between my feet and planted myself, visualizing the path I’d take just beyond the door. I played through the next five seconds again and again in my mind. When I was sure, I turned the handle.
I tore the door open and sprinted past the threshold. I was as alert as I’d ever been in my life then. My vision was a sequence of hyper-detailed still images flashing, one after another at the center of a dark tunnel. My first step beyond the door was on the second stair directly ahead. I bounded up, three steps at a time, scanning for movement.
I came around the first landing and paused for a split second. It could have cost me my life, but so could blindly running through a tripwire or IR field. The stairwell ahead, as far as I could see, looked clear.
I kept still and listened. The door below swung shut, and the sound echoed up the stairwell. There was the steady drip of water as it lightly cascaded down the steps, and the sound of my own breathing. I was alone. There was no trap, no Jovian fire team waiting in ambush, no proximity mine or rogue agent.
I climbed the next flight of steps. Then the one after, and the one after that. My pace picked up as I rose higher and higher, my caution giving way once again to the pressure I’d felt before. Katerina had a six-minute lead on me, and it was growing by the second. My hesitance entering the stairwell couldn’t be helped—it would have been the perfect killbox had anyone been so inclined—but the time I took to reach the Swan Rooms was entirely within my control.
I raced up those winding steps with all the speed an augmented human possibly could, which is to say it was less than a fifth of the time it should have taken. I never grew winded. The pump where my heart used to be kept an even, quiet flow. My legs pushed off the 800th step as easily as the 8th.
The door to the Swan Rooms was locked with a pattern code. The elevator would have let Katerina out into a living room, but the stairwell entrance was behind a faux closet in an adjacent room. Unless she had taken the time to search for it, it was unlikely Katerina had even noticed. It was an aesthetic choice that was now serving a practical use.
I swiped in the pattern on the lock. Triangle, triangle, circle. The hinges quietly groaned under the weight as the maglock depolarized. I then pushed the two-foot-thick door open and stepped through into the Swan Rooms.
At a glance, there was no doubt that she had come this way. Clothes were strewn on the floor, and the sink in the kitchen was wet. The hotel staff were barred from entry and didn’t have keys to the room. No one from Section 9 ever used the suite either, although we sometimes did allow visiting dignitaries to use the room if only so we could record them for possible kompromat.
It looked like Katerina had quickly swapped clothes and washed up. Changing one’s appearance is standard spycraft when trying to evade pursuit, and in retrospect I should have done the same, but at the time all I could think about was her slipping through my fingers because I was too slow. I hurriedly crossed the suite and walked out into the hotel.
There were two different ways to get down to the hotel lobby. Katerina could have gone either right or left, and I had no way of knowing which route she had chosen. Facing two equal options, I arbitrarily decided to head right.
If she was already outside, she would have disappeared into the city by now. As I jogged through the hotel corridor, I passed a couple who stared at me as I went by. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but then I remembered I was covered in Dr. Markov’s blood and carrying a length of pipe.
When I reached the ground floor, I was confronted by a member of the hotel’s staff. He was yelling at me in what I assumed was Flemish. I shook my head and pointed at my ear, which only seemed to confuse him. I pushed past him and continued into the lobby.
I scanned the room, looking for anything that didn’t fit. A group of young men stood in a circle off to one side, talking. An old man reclined in a chair, nursing a coffee and gesturing through something on his dataspike. A tired woman led an obstinate child to the elevators. A well-dressed man sat on his luggage and argued with someone on a call.
Heads turned as I crossed the lobby. My eyes jumped from face to face, searching for Katerina’s features. It was likely she was already out there somewhere in the city, but if she wasn’t, she’d be the one person not reacting to the blood-soaked man with a weapon stalking through the hotel.
A trio of young women by the front entrance caught my eye. Two were staring and had slowed to a stop, but the third hadn’t. She was tall, with narrow shoulders and a lean build. She was wearing water-stained mesh upper shoes.
“YOU!” I shouted. The woman didn’t flinch.
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I took off in a sprint, and the woman did the same. As she did, the shawl hiding her blonde hair fell away and she glanced back. We caught eyes, and Katerina smiled.
She burst out onto the street, slipping around two men trying to enter the hotel. I bowled through them, closing the gap to Katerina with every step of my prosthetics. She was absurdly, inhumanly fast in short bursts of action, but she was in fact still human. Her strength was fading. Her body was tiring. For all her speed, like the dark of an eclipse, I would eventually overtake her.
She veered off the sidewalk and into the road, then she moved with the flow of traffic. The cars did what they were supposed to and tried to avoid her. Vehicles swerved and slid to a stop in organized chaos, the onboard AIs coordinating a best-outcome response between each other. Katerina leapt on top of a coupe then jumped onto a utility van as it skidded to a stop. She continued down the street, hopping from one vehicle to the next as they weaved through and past one another.
I tried to follow her path, but the variables were different for me. By the time I’d reached one, the vehicle had come to a stop or was trapped in a tangle behind others. Katerina was using the traffic as a way to mitigate the advantage of my augments. I leaned on every bit of freerun training I had, but the distance between us only grew as I maneuvered around the jumble of vehicles while she coasted on top of them.
I knew it couldn’t last, and she was likely thinking the same. Eventually, the best-outcome response for every vehicle in the area would be to stop, and she would be back where she started with me right on her tail. I tried to anticipate what her plan would be then, but nothing made sense. She was stalling for time, that much was clear, but to what end? She couldn’t be leading me into a trap. Her path was too haphazard and left too much to chance. Was the plan simply no plan?
That’s when I heard the shouting. StateSec response units and officers on foot closed in on me from all sides. From their perspective, I was an armed man chasing a woman through the streets of Bruges after assaulting an employee of the Hotel du Lac. I dodged between two of the approaching officers and kept running after her, although at that point I wasn’t sure what I could really achieve. Even if I caught her, it wasn’t as if I could detain Katerina right in front of them. I’d have to kill her on the spot.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 88