Jia expanded her shield and bashed an approaching monster, then blew its head apart before lifting her rifle and taking out another mid-hop.
Erik kept up his own shots, thinning the monsters. The corpses knocked some of the jiangshi to the ground, but they righted themselves, although slowly. The duo backed toward the door as the horde advanced, continuing fire.
“Let’s see how grenades do,” Erik announced. “You go for it. I’ll save mine for the sorcerer.”
Jia barked a laugh. “Now, there’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear from you.”
“This night is full of surprises,” he answered.
“Grenades out!” Jia shouted.
She swept from left to right, launching grenades in rapid succession. She had just enough to cover the entirety of the forward line. Her targets made no attempt to dodge as they continued their bizarre, inexorable advance.
The slight delay in launch resulted in explosions traveling like a wave through the horde, scattering the jiangshi.
Most of the monsters near the center of the plasma grenade attacks remained on the ground as charred corpses, though some toward the edge of the explosions rose, their damaged limbs and sides regenerating.
Erik couldn’t bring himself to complain about the rules of a purely fictional encounter.
He’d never thought he’d appreciate that humans were easy to kill, but this scenario reminded him of the advantages of facing foes with familiar and weak anatomy.
While the grenade barrage hadn’t finished off the horde, the now-immobile bodies and disruption to the formation slowed the grasshopper-like advance of the enemy.
Jia and Erik took advantage of the chaos to follow up with bursts on the closest standing enemies. More of the jiangshi fell behind the smoking and charred remains of their brethren, the mighty horde now thinned but not destroyed.
“Back out.” Erik pointed his rifle at the roof. “I’m guessing crushing them will work, too.”
Jia fired her jump thrusters, propelling herself toward the door. She stepped out of the building.
Erik jogged toward the door firing his grenades into the roof. Such an attack wouldn’t bring down a modern building, but as the explosions ripped into the roof and the building shook, his confidence grew. Burning chunks of wood fell from the ceiling, raining down on the jiangshi. He made it out of the building, with Jia covering his retreat.
They continued backing away, covering their firing arcs and sending surviving jiangshi to virtual hell. Smoke filled the building, and larger chunks of the roof collapsed, crushing the creatures under their weight. Flames spread along the walls.
“Damn.” Erik laughed. “We should be fighting smarter, not harder. We could have just burned the entire building down to begin with.”
“That level of destruction is usually not available,” Jia replied. “Let alone if we’re in space. Blowing up the prison would have stopped the nanozombies, but it would also have killed everybody else aboard.”
“Sure, be boring and criticize the burn-down-and-blow-up-everything plan.”
A group of jiangshi bounded through the doorway, and Jia and Erik took them down. The small number of survivors fell victim to a collapsing wall. The roaring fire consuming the building licked at the night sky, and smoke continued to pour from the newly birthed funeral pyre. A burning jiangshi pushed up through wreckage, only for Jia to blow its head off.
“Next time my friends ask me what I do on dates,” Jia began, “I’ll tell them the truth. I spend them doing things like killing Leems and jiangshi. So sexy!”
“It is.” Erik smiled. “Now we just need the sorcerer.”
“That will have to wait,” Emma announced. “There is a message for you from Agent Koval. She wants to meet you both tomorrow and not at the hangar.”
Erik wiggled his fingers inside the exo’s arms. “And here I thought we’d get a little more vacation after the crap with Jared.”
Chapter Seventeen
April 22, Neo Southern California Metroplex, Invisible Tower
Jia looked down and shook her head, surprised that her stomach and heart were calm.
The visible guide rails marking the swirling path didn’t do much to convince her brain that she wasn’t about to topple to her death. Transparent metal and clever holographic feeds gave the impression she was standing on thin layers of clouds and would soon fall to the dark parking platform far below her.
She’d never had a fear of heights, and as she stood on the world’s most bizarre tourist attraction, she hoped it wouldn’t birth a new one.
Would that affect her flying?
Curiosity pushed out any fear that dared creep inside. She lived in one of the huge towers of Neo SoCal. If she brought someone from even a couple of centuries forward, her residential tower would be a mighty castle in the sky, a modern, defiant Tower of Babel stretching into heaven.
Just one among many.
The invisible tower was a brilliant deconstruction. Minor commercial and municipal storage levels filled the bulk of the tower, if only because no decent Uptowner would dare travel in the Shadow Zone to see a landmark.
The main attraction, the top, didn’t look like much from afar. Its potential terror and grandness required a person to be there.
It said more about an individual human than anything.
For the moment, Jia wasn’t there to challenge the divine or herself, but to meet with their employer. She wasn’t surprised that Alina didn’t want to meet at the hangar. It made sense. If they always met there, it increased the risk of enemy detection, despite the efforts they’d put into taking different routes there and taking full advantage of Emma’s capabilities.
On her more cynical days, Jia might admit that she suspected Alina was also using the meetings as an excuse to see interesting tourists’ sites around the metroplex.
Interesting, but not always popular. The current location was likely selected for the sparse foot traffic. When the Invisible Tower was first built decades prior, it’d been swarmed with people impressed by the novelty, but that had worn off. Now it was most often a destination for school trips rather than a place people went out of their way to visit.
Humanity’s greatest wonders grew stale with the advancing decades and technology.
“Maybe we should have taken the elevator,” Erik commented from beside her, a smile gracing his face.
The look made her slightly uneasy because of his use of a holographic disguise. It was close to but distinct from his normal appearance. Something about her brain wanted to reject the false image. She presumed he felt the same way about her holographic disguise.
“I always wanted to visit here,” Jia replied. “But my father wouldn’t go anywhere near it, and my school never did. After that, it slipped my mind. There’s so much to do and see in Neo SoCal.”
“Yeah. Now that I’ve been here a while, I can see why a lot of people never leave.” Erik shrugged. “Not that I think it’s that great, and I’ve always liked wandering more than a lot of people, but it wouldn’t be a terrible place to live.”
“It hasn’t been, even with the corruption.” Jia ran her hand along a guard rail, which shimmered different colors at her touch. “It’ll be anticlimactic if we end up falling and dying.” She held up a hand to stop his expected comment. “I know, I know, safety systems.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you worried?”
“Not that worried.” She bit her lip. “But it’s hard to look down and not be a little concerned.”
Erik grinned. “I’d rather die that way than a lot of other ways.”
Jia’s brow wrinkled, and she eyed her partner. “You would?”
Erik nodded. “At least on Earth, if you fall, it’ll be over sooner rather than later. In space, if you get stuck out there, you’re going to have a long time to think about it. That wouldn’t be fun.”
“I’ll keep that in mind if some capricious god lets me choose the way I’m going to die.” Jia looked around befo
re nodding at a floating holographic display marking their current floor. “This is the right floor, isn’t it? Alina has her faults, but she’s never been one to play games with time.”
The air shimmered for a moment, and a short woman in a long dark coat appeared with a smile.
“What’s past is prologue,” the woman declared.
Alina had sent another message an hour prior, noting she would be quoting Shakespeare as a passphrase and requested a Xunzi quote as the appropriate response.
Sometimes Jia wondered what went into the agent’s decisions about how to verify identities, but after thirty years of working in the shadows, the agent had earned her right to eccentricities.
“Not hearing is not as good as hearing,” Jia replied. “Hearing is not as good as seeing. Seeing is not as good as knowing. Knowing is not as good as acting. True learning continues until it is put into action.”
Jia waited, her hand near her jacket. There was always the chance it wasn’t Alina. A woman might not be able to choose when she died, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t put fifteen bullets into those trying to kill her.
“This area is now secure, even against Emma,” the other woman continued, this time in Alina’s voice. “Though I’ve sent her a message to note I’ve established contact and hopefully stop her from doing anything dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Erik asked.
“You have a gun. That makes her a lot more dangerous.”
Erik chuckled. Jia lowered her arm. There wasn’t going to be a shootout. That was a little disappointing.
“Sorry to call you back into action so soon,” Alina continued, “especially since you stumbled upon some anyway. You’ve earned months off if we’re going by your success-to-risk ratio.”
Erik shrugged, a nonchalant look on his face. “We’re working for you because we want to take down the conspiracy. I wouldn’t give a crap if that meant we were working twenty-four/seven, as long as it ended with them gone. I want that to be clear. I came back to Earth for revenge.”
“I’ll add, the sooner the conspiracy is taken out, the safer everyone in the UTC will be,” Jia continued. “And I’m hoping that knowing Sophia Vand was involved has given you some leads. I don’t think anyone will complain if the conspiracy goes down as soon as possible.”
Alina nodded. “We’ll get to Vand in a minute, but I wanted to talk housekeeping.”
“Housekeeping?” Erik raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, housekeeping.” Alina gave him an uncharacteristically happy smile. “I’ll cut to the chase. The Defense Directorate is almost ready to turn the jumpship over to you.”
“I can hardly believe it.” Jia shook her head, as impressed by what she was being told as she had been when she’d learned the truth about Emma. “It’s amazing enough that they’re letting us keep a unique AI, but now they’re providing us an experimental drive. If I wasn’t living through this, I don’t think I’d believe it.”
“The jumpship is nothing but a hunk of useless metal without Emma.” Erik smirked. “And they know she’s on our side, now more than ever. They almost lost the drive to the Ascended Brotherhood, but we took them out.”
“True,” Alina replied, “but it’s more than that. Much more, and I think it’s important that you realize that.” She gestured toward the sky behind her. “Though you’re right that it’s heavily related to the Ascended Brotherhood. The Venus mission and your success there have helped to solidify your usefulness in the minds of certain high-ranking people in both the DD and the ID, who until then had harbored some skepticism. And the simple, blunt truth is, we’ve had more success against the conspiracy since you two got involved than we’ve had in years, and a lot of that happened even before you were working for me. You’re considered a good investment, and they’re convinced they can get faster, more effective results with less overall resource use if they concentrate on making the best use of you two.”
Erik scratched his cheek. “I like faster results when it comes to taking out those bastards. If the government wants to throw more fancy equipment at me, I’m not going to complain.”
Jia looked Alina up and down, considering what the other woman had just said, a cloud of suspicion darkening her mind.
If everyone was willing to help them because they’d been getting results, what would happen if they suffered a reversal? A botched mission could result in the military coming for the jumpship and Emma, even if Erik and Jia survived. They couldn’t take on both the conspiracy and the government.
Jia’s breath caught. A couple of years ago, the idea of taking on the government would disgust her as insurrectionist talk, but now she worried about what would happen to Erik and Emma.
She took a deep, calming breath.
There was no point in worrying about the future. They needed to use whatever resources were available for as long as they were. The Vand takedown had proven they could make progress even against the most powerful people in the UTC. All they needed to do was continue what they had already been doing.
“When are we going to get the ship?” Jia asked, keeping her voice casual.
“I don’t have a concrete timeline, but the short answer is soon,” Alina replied. “I’d predict within the next month, if not faster. It’s still unclear if the DD is going to insist on other personnel besides Raphael being aboard. They keep going back and forth on that, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do. For now, though, I’ve got something else I need. Something local that won’t require an experimental jump drive.”
“Local?” Erik nodded at a tower in the distance. “You mean a Neo SoCal job? That’s convenient. I’d thought we’d already scared all the conspiracy advocates away from here.”
“Neo SoCal would be convenient, but that’s not it.” Alina let out a quiet chuckle. “I meant local as in on Earth. I’ve sent you to the moon, Mars, and Venus. This time you just have to go to the other side of the planet.”
“Easy trip.” Erik cracked his knuckles. “And I’ve been looking forward to taking down more of the conspiracy. If they’re still dumb enough to stick around, it’s like they’re serving themselves up for us.”
Jia rubbed her chin, eyeing the agent. “You found something following up on Sophia Vand, didn’t you?”
“It helps when you know where to shine your light in the dark.” Alina nodded. “She covered her tracks well, but knowing she was involved has opened a lot of different paths. Our initial investigations suggest that the bulk of the Vand family isn’t involved in the conspiracy. That Vand never married nor had any children might be related to her involvement in the conspiracy. It’s not like there aren’t millions of eligible partners for her out there.”
“So, this isn’t just about the Vands.” Jia frowned. “That’s unfortunate. It would have been easier.”
“It doesn’t mean investigating Sophia Vand’s tentacles won’t lead us to interesting places. In this case, my people stumbled upon something that might be minor, but I wanted to deploy scalable assets during the investigation in case things turn out to be more serious. You two can punch above your weight without raising as many flags.”
Jia snorted. “In other words, you don’t want to expose the entire ID to the conspiracy, but you do want Erik and me to burn down a palace if necessary.”
“Burn down a palace?” Alina’s brows rose. “Huh?”
“Forget it.” Jia waved a hand. “Explaining it would take too long.”
“I don’t care if you think we’re scalable or expendable assets,” Erik interjected. “You keep giving us the tools we need to take on the conspiracy, and we’ll work together to keep going after them until every last one of them is dead or in prison.”
“Good to hear. Some corporate officers linked to a company previously controlled by Sophia Vand are having a small retreat. The company’s activities and resources outflows can be indirectly linked to activity by the Ascended Brotherhood and other potential conspiracy operations in recent months.” Alina frowned. “
And there has been other unusual activity related to that company, including money transfers to different organizations, including the Vand Foundation. We can’t see anything obviously illegal about it based on our initial investigations, but at a minimum, those people are worth looking into because their operational tempo has been increasing since Vand’s death. Ignoring an obvious coincidence is a good way to let the conspiracy get away with something.”
“Where are they meeting?” Erik asked. “You said this was an Earth-based assignment.”
“The Mizuchi Undersea Resort,” Alina answered.
Erik’s face scrunched. “Great.”
Jia raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong? I’ve read about it. It’s a nice luxury resort.” She looked at Alina. “Or does the Vand Foundation own it?”
Alina shook her head. “We checked into that. It’s not controlled by them, at least not directly. That might even be why they’re meeting there. It was hard to collect the intel we have.”
“I’m not worried about an ambush.” Erik frowned. “I just don’t like undersea places much. Boats are fine, even subs, but entire resorts?” He shook his head in disgust. “Arrogance.”
“Huh?” Jia stared at Erik, not bothering to hide the shock on her face. “You didn’t seem bothered about being in a dome on the moon or the station we went to. How is Mizuchi different?”
Erik gestured vaguely toward the sky. “In a vacuum, there’s nothing outside the dome. I’d rather have nothing than a whole entire ocean waiting to come in and crush me.” He shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it. I think it’s more arrogant to build an undersea facility than a dome or a space station, and that’s probably why we have a lot more people living in domes and space stations than in undersea colonies. We all have that feeling on some level.”
“It’s not like it’s that easy to breach a dome, undersea or otherwise. Even the conspiracy smuggled an experimental bomb to the moon when they were trying there.” Jia pointed down, grimacing she saw the faux emptiness beneath her. “Nothing tactical is going to breach one of those, and I doubt a couple of corporate suits showing at a resort to plot ends with a grav bomb or a nuke.”
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