One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  We weren't working silent, but we were keeping transmissions between us to a minimum, refreshing each other's displays on a random cycle ranging around every twenty seconds; no point in giving Xychek security a reason to skip the Saw inspection. Gustafson had said it would start it right after sunset, so the staff and vehicles that were attending it should be leaving soon. Our plan counted on minimum security at the house, so if Xychek security didn't send most of the estate team to the inspection, we'd have to abort and try another approach later.

  On the principles that you can't be too prepared and you might as well make good use of the time available, I ran another complete weapons check. All sensors flashed green; I was good to go. I cranked up the resolution on the faceplate and focused it on the road in front of me. All ten of the urban disturbance mines I'd scattered on a twenty-meter stretch of highway clung to the road right where I'd put them, each the dull gray color of the pavement and a little thicker than a pair of pants, so inert without a detonation code that you could walk on them or even drive a wheeled vehicle over them without a problem. Transmit that code, though, and boom! Each would blow with enough power to tear a hole in a vehicle without an armored bottom. Every surface of Chung's vehicles would, of course, be reinforced, but the mines should pop with enough power to change their course, maybe flip them. Lim had set a similar group on the highway outside the exit on the other side of the estate.

  I had the suit's audio pickups ratcheted almost as high as they could go, with external sensors in the blanket feeding them. The breezes sang a slow background harmony as the insects and rustling leaves and branches belted out a discordant lead vocal whose direction my mind kept trying unsuccessfully to predict. When the gate to the estate opened a few minutes later, the slight creaking of the moving metal played clearly in my ears. I took the faceplate's resolution back to normal, lowered the audio, and focused on the road in front of me. A few seconds later, the convoy of security vehicles slid past my position. When the last one had passed me, I forced a display update to Lobo so he'd have the count. He compared it to his earlier monitoring and almost immediately the number two appeared in my clone of his display. Perfect. They'd kept back the minimum, enough to give Chung two exit options.

  At the appearance of the number, I set my time mark for ninety minutes. I sipped water from the tube built into the suit. I wanted the Xychek security detail heading toward the inspection to be far enough away that when the estate team yelled for help I could be sure none would arrive before we'd finished and escaped. Xychek's air support was, according to Gustafson, both minimal and the first thing on the inspection list, so unless something went wrong we should be able to count on at least one clear hour from the mission's start. That should be more than enough. I hoped.

  I settled in yet again and tried not to look too much at the light-green countdown on my display.

  Eighty-nine more minutes.

  The timer wound to zero, turned red, and reversed direction, now displaying the elapsed mission time.

  We were on.

  My faceplate's copy of Lobo's forward video feed turned into a blur as he accelerated first downward and then at full speed as he skimmed the treetops toward the estate. The sensors would pick him up, but his low flight path would buy a second or two, and that was all we needed. After five seconds of approach, Lobo fired three small missiles at the gate on his side of the estate, then abruptly changed course and headed up, back, and away from the target, reacting as if he'd been unwilling to face the defense systems.

  Each of Lobo's missiles mirved a second and a half after launch, changing from three fat tubes into a dozen slender rockets. The estate's automated defense systems did the best they could, but the hole our recon had suggested might exist in them proved to be real. The air-defense portion was designed for targets above two hundred meters, and Lobo had never been that high while in range of those weapons. The ground and low-altitude automated systems were solid enough for civilian or typical corporate attack-squad weaponry, but Lobo's milspec rockets overpowered them easily. By the time the defense system launched its three interceptors, it was facing twelve oncoming missiles.

  Ten hit their targets. Via the relay of Lobo's long-distance video sensors I watched as two missiles turned the entire gate area into a cloud of smoke and the remaining eight hit the dirt along a hundred-meter-wide section of ground with the gate at its center. A split second after impact, those eight blew. A mountain of dirt and rock and small vegetation soared into the air and buried the gate and a long stretch of the wall on either side of it. The roar of the explosions shook the air. The helmet's audio system compensated quickly, lowering the volume then readjusting as the sounds died. No one in the estate would be coming out of that gate anytime soon.

  I pushed the magnification on the Lobo relay as far as it could go, but even with the best interpolation the faceplate's processors could manage I couldn't see if any people were moving around; Lobo was too far away for his original feed to carry that level of detail. I'd insisted on an approach that gave the gate guards a chance at living, because I wanted this to be as nonlethal an attack as possible. My lack of information was the price of that insistence.

  No time to worry about that now, though. I fought to control the adrenaline surge that begged me to regard the people in the estate as just so many more bodies, moving but already dead and not knowing it, existing only for us to finish them.

  Lobo had already fired a second burst, this time a barrage of ten small missiles carrying transmission-clogging comm webs, thousands of grain-size modules that detected all active transmissions in their range and broadcast garbage across every in-use frequency. We'd set the cloggers to skip the hobbyist niche we were using and focus on the standard military and commercial bands. We risked our transmissions being recorded and decrypted if a civilian with a snooping hobby happened to be targeting the estate, but we'd kept the chatter down and our encryption was strong, so the risk was minimal. Six of the missiles made it through the defense systems and sprayed their sensors across the estate before hurtling into the ground just outside it.

  "Team one, first group heading your way," said Lobo in my left ear. "One vehicle, five humans. No way to tell if target is among them."

  "Got it," Lim—"team one" in case anyone did record and decrypt our comm—said in my right ear.

  "Trank 'em, don't kill 'em," I said.

  "Already understood," she said, "but the roads are murder." She'd taken great joy in pointing out that if Xychek didn't armor its vehicles very well, our plan would kill everyone in them. I had no answer for her other than my belief that the vehicles would be strong, a belief born of the respect I'd developed for Xychek's security squad during the time Lobo and I had monitored them.

  "Team two, second group heading your way," Lobo said. "Also one vehicle, five humans, and no way to tell if target is among them."

  "Moving to position," I said.

  I threw off the blanket and sprinted to my second mark, a level spot behind a tree where I would have a good view of anyone trying to get away from the vehicle. I pulled a second camo blanket off the two guns I'd previously placed there and aimed at the gate, and settled into sniper position in front of the bigger one.

  "Second group has reversed course and headed for rear exit," Lobo said.

  We'd hoped the teams would split and take advantage of the multiple exit points, so our plan focused on that option. If the second team stayed with the first after what was about to happen, we'd know the first team had Chung, and Lim would have to hold them both until Lobo could get there. I maintained my position; Lim had the best data on the action at her end, so it was up to her to make the call whether I should join her.

  The first Xychek team reached the rear of the estate. My relay of Lim's display showed the escort vehicle jetting out of the barely open gate. Lim blew half her mines a second after the vehicle cleared the gate. The display image turned fuzzy with smoke. As the processors filtered the visual noise of the
dust, the feed in my faceplate cleared enough to show the black vehicle flipping end over end in the air several times before it crashed to the road. Enough of the vehicle's internal systems were intact that it extruded disaster supports and righted itself, but two of the doors were hanging loose, their rear supports trashed by either the mines or the landing.

  "Second group returning to original course," Lobo said. "Team two, assume the target is in your group. Team one, verify assumption."

  First the front and then the rear of the crashed vehicle exploded as Lim placed armor-piercing rounds in both areas that might house the main drive engines. Armor shielding around the cabin was standard executive protection, so the occupants should survive the small explosions. Sure enough, all five people spilled out of the back of the vehicle, using its rear doors and the heavy dust in the air for cover. One peeked around the door and for that action earned a combo electrical disruptor and trank round in the meat of the shoulder; he dropped fast, twitching. Lim was as accurate as ever.

  The sound of my gate opening yanked me away from Lim's display relay. The escape group hit the exit point fast, and I blew half my mines. I'd planted them farther down the road than Lim, not trusting my accuracy as much as she did hers. The vehicle had been edging to the far right of the road, so the mines sent it spinning side over side into the air. It landed on its flank on the ground on the shoulder of the road opposite me, then righted itself. Both doors on my side sprang open, as did the rear door on the opposite side. The driver and the passenger nearest me spilled out and hid behind the vehicle as I shot an armor-piercing round into its front. These guys were fast: they fanned out to either side of the highway a moment after the front of the vehicle exploded. I switched guns, settled my breathing, and put a disruptor/trank round into the shoulder of the guy on my side of the road because he was the nearer threat. He dropped hard, body twitching on the way down. I swiveled the sights to my left and found the second guy. He was running fast and erratically, making it hard. I squeezed off three shots in rapid succession. The third hit him and dropped him.

  I turned the sights on the open driver's door, but no one was inside. I scanned farther away from the car on the other side of the road and caught a glimpse of three figures running in a cluster, the front and rear each staying close to the center. The center had to be Chung.

  They disappeared behind some trees.

  "All five down," Lim said, her voice jagged, pumped. "Checking now."

  "Three on the move," I said, my own voice as raw as Lim's, my breathing coming hard. "Opposite side of the road from me. Track if possible."

  I abandoned the sniper rifles—they were no good on the move—and sprinted across the highway, staying low, drawing a pistol loaded with disruptor rounds as I ran. I reached the vehicle's rear and used it for cover. I snaked up a video feed and panned it quickly across the area in front of me. All clear. I dashed to the tree nearest where the three runners had entered the woods, backed against it, and panned the video feed again. They had maybe ten seconds of lead on me, but the woods weren't dense and the ground was flat, so I found the men as they were angling out and away from the estate. I flicked the Acquire button on the video sensor, and my heads-up display gained a red tracking arrow. I took off on roughly the same course as the Xychek trio, following the arrow, running for all I was worth.

  "Status," I gasped as I sprinted around trees, avoiding some bits of undergrowth and barreling through others. Lobo was to pick up the first of us to take down the assigned targets, then help the other person. If I didn't catch my runners, we'd be better off with all of us chasing, because we had to assume Xychek security had learned of our attack the moment we started and had teams coming our way. Our window was closing.

  "Checked and confirmed," Lim said. "Target is not here. Repeat: Target is not here."

  "Acquiring team one now," Lobo said.

  I was gaining on the runners. Chung was almost certainly slowing them, the security guys both paid to stay with him no matter what. I pushed my pace, working to control my breathing, soaking in my own sweat, mentally cursing Lim yet again for the suit's inadequate climate control.

  The rear guard slowed, turned his shoulder, and threw something. I skidded into the back of the nearest large tree as a shrapnel grenade exploded in the air, blasting high-velocity shards of razor-sharp metal into the trees all around and in front of me. I lost three seconds to making sure all the shrapnel had found a home, then another couple as I snaked around a video feed to verify I could safely move. Anger coursed through me as I saw the damage the grenade had caused; it could have ripped me to shreds. If I'd permitted myself to bring lethal weapons, at that moment I would have drawn them.

  I needed Chung alive, but I didn't need him happy. I holstered the trank pistol, pulled a screamer launcher from my rear pack, and sprinted after them. I could barely see them in the trees ahead of me, but the glimpse I got was enough. I forced off the suit's audio feeds, then fired the screamer over their heads and ran hard for them. I couldn't see the grenade's flight path, but I could tell when it neared them because they grabbed their ears and stumbled, then fell, as the intense pain shook their eardrums and heads. I crammed the launcher into a side pocket and fumbled with my pistol's holster as I ran; they were already getting up. I drew within ten meters and stopped, aimed, fought the shaking in my arms, and fired four times, twice at each of the two men I could see, the center and rear runners.

  So many things happened in the next second that only later could I reconstruct what I'd seen.

  Lobo dropped from the sky fifty meters behind the runners, a side panel open to reveal the upper half of Lim.

  The rear runner fell.

  The center man, still standing, clutched at the man in front of him.

  That man lifted and aimed a pistol at me.

  The upward motion of the pistol dominated my vision. I dove to the ground, not wanting to have to rely on the suit's armor if I could avoid it, and rolled to my right. I looked up in time to see the front man drop, then Lim wave from Lobo's open hatch.

  I scrambled up and ran to the remaining man. As I drew nearer I verified it was Chung; I'd looked at images of his face too many times not to know it well. He waved his arms and said something I couldn't hear; I realized then that the suit's audio feeds were still off. I grabbed him, pulled an injector from an arm pouch, and jammed it into the side of his neck. He collapsed.

  I turned on the audio feeds in time to hear Lobo land, the sound barely audible over the pounding in my ears and the rasping of my breath. I released the helmet and shook my head, glad to be in the open air.

  Lim darted out of Lobo, her helmet also off, hair tightly bound onto her head, face drenched in sweat, eyes wild, breath coming sharp and hard. She pointed at the man she'd taken down. "You owe me," she said between breaths. She smiled, eyes still shimmering madly.

  I looked down at the men on the ground beside me, then nodded. I glimpsed myself in my helmet's faceplate: My eyes were as crazy as Lim's, and I was smiling, too.

  I'd given in to it again, lost the battle for control, a fight so very easy to lose. Unless you were very lucky or very damaged, violence always consumed at least part of you. It ate through your civilized exterior like acid through cloth, uncovered the animal inside, and left you, if you were lucky enough to emerge alive, shaking and terrified and yet happy, juked from the conflict, your body still in it, part of you not ready for it to be over and another part elated that it was and that you weren't among the dead. This had been no big thing, as safe an action as an armed mission could probably be, the Xychek guys overmatched before it started, and yet the violence had spidered into me again.

  Each time I put myself in this situation, I resolve not to do it again—but I always do. I consoled myself with the thought that I truly had no real alternative this time, that spending every day, days into months into years, running from a corporate bounty was no way to live. I shook my head slowly, fighting for calm, willing the juice of the
moment to crawl back into the dark fetid pools it normally inhabited.

  I grabbed Chung, lifted him on my shoulder, and headed for Lobo.

  "Thanks," I finally said to Lim, nodding back at the man she'd shot. "What do you say we get far away from here fast?"