“Listen to him, baby, or we gonna chop you here in broad daylight.”
Chop: to kill without reason.
Ayumi stiffened slightly, causing the man at her back to shuffle his feet. The blond came forward toward her free hands. She quickly determined the position to be advantageous.
The young blond man never had a chance. With her left hand, she swept down across his nose and broke it before driving upward with her right hand and pushing the fragments up and into his brain cavity. He fell to the ground with a wet thud. Combatives training, something both Kieran and Amy had seen plenty of, gave her the course of action she wanted in milliseconds. Ayumi spun in the grip of the bigger man, found his right wrist, and secured it with both hands. His useless knife pointed away from them both as Ayumi pulled him toward herself and grasped his wrists with both of her hands. Twisting upward, she drove the small knife into his abdomen and upward until it rested against his sternum.
Both men lay gravely wounded, but it wasn’t enough for Ayumi. The small knife glittered in the dreary morning light like a sign of finality. She reached for it and stopped as Amy’s voice filled her mind.
<
Making sure they won’t follow us.
<
You want them following us? Ayumi collected the knife, twisted it in her hands, and determined the appropriate killing stroke for each man.
<
Ayumi watched the blade tremble in her hands. The reference came up from her studies of Kieran. An eye for an eye.
<
Ayumi heard the swiveling of a closed-circuit television camera a hundred meters away. She looked up and found the camera staring right at her. Variables of lens diameter, lighting, and distance pointed toward the camera, having taken a good clear shot of her. A search of the building’s address aligned it with a Terran Council financial center. They would have her face identified in a matter of minutes.
Shit!
Ayumi slit both men’s throats with barely another thought. Their gurgling gasps for a last breath played like a symphony to her ears. One after the other, she threw trash bags over their dying forms. On the wet, cold pavement the pistol clamored for her touch. She collected it at a fast walk and proceeded down the block to her original destination. Tucked into the waistband of her new jeans, it felt like security. It felt damned good.
<
“Shut up,” Ayumi said aloud. Head down and legs moving quickly, she accelerated down the street. Once out of the camera’s view, and surrounded by a crowd of people listening to a quartet of street musicians, she ditched her coat and slipped away with troubled thoughts.
If you wanted to stop me, you could have done more.
<
I’ll do what I have to do, Amy. The girl was still with her, somehow, and it was better to acknowledge it and move forward while she could. As much as she controlled the physical body, there was more to being human. The conscience, if that was the lingering voice’s role, would provide that.
Her careful order was ready for pickup. Backpack, hexhab shelter, and additional clothing sat prepared for her on the customer service platform. Gear in hand, she eschewed filing the official registration for her firearm and headed to the air terminal. A person, especially one with a pretty face, could feign ignorance, and there was a registration grace period running in her favor. She practiced her lines a dozen times as she waited for an autobus.
At one hour and forty minutes until her departure, Ayumi fidgeted and tried to contain her anxiety by walking. Everywhere she looked were cameras and information terminals. As their blank lenses panned over her time and again, getting off the street became a priority. She accessed and took over a passing off-duty autocar and directed it to the LaGuardia terminal. The vehicle asked for her reservation information, and she handed it over without a thought and created files enabling her to have a type of diplomatic privilege. The vehicle would scan Ayumi and her ticket and reconcile the two, enabling her to walk from the car to the plane without stopping at security. The pistol would make the trip uneventfully in the waistband of her jeans. The small transport was no larger than the regional jets from Kieran’s time—only forty seats, of which two-thirds were empty. The start of winter was not a good time to travel, apparently. That was fine with her.
She settled back into the seat and closed her eyes. Content and prepared, Ayumi allowed herself to fall asleep for the ninety-minute flight into the Franklin Preserve.
Below the cavernous hallways of the L’École de Médecine in Paris, Sophie rushed through the Terran Council’s equally sprawling, nearly vacant clinic, wondering how she ended up there, before checking her neurals again. She only had a single patient, and the emergency summons implied that her patient’s condition had finally changed after more than a year of nothing.
The young blond woman, pale and barely breathing, lay on a transportation gurney. Her vital signs were erratic. A resting pulse rate of less than forty combined with respiration rate of more than twenty breaths per minute defied explanation. The on-call physician, Dr. Wendell, was eventually successful in getting the woman’s body to respond by medically inducing a comatose state. Encephalographic specialists came and went, trying to determine if the woman was brain-dead or simply catatonic. Sophie believed the pretty girl was trapped in her own brain, but she said nothing, even in the treatment room. Taking orders and following them without question or opinion was the best way to earn the notice of her supervisors. Maybe after another year of spotless, clandestine care for this young woman, they would take her off this strange rotation of watching one girl whose condition never changed.
Sophie dutifully checked the girl six times a day, six days a week. She bathed the girl and kept her from getting bedsores. Three times a week, Sophie moved the girl’s extremities to keep her joints active. Often, she spent time reading to the girl, and other times, she played music. There were days, though they were not as frequent as in the past, when the girl’s color appeared almost pink and healthy. Mostly, she was pale and jaundiced. Whatever hope Sophie carried that the girl would wake, and maybe become an actual friend to speak with, faded over the months. When the call had come to move the patient back to Paris a few days before, Sophie wondered if they were going to euthanize the girl. In the secured clinic, anything was possible.
Even the armed guards, of which she’d only seen two, never spoke to her or anyone else. They stood by the door in the quiet carpeted hallway, moving only to check identification cards and to rotate between themselves for breaks. Sophie, though, had never seen one on any kind of a break, not even eating in the cafeteria upstairs. They were simply there. Like the girl.
Sophie pushed through the gate at the nurse’s station with a tray of the usual medications. While the cocktail of drugs kept the girl comatose and functioning, the minimal brain-wave fluctuations, a sign of waking, had faded. The doctors argued about the validity of every piece of equipment and sensor watching her. There had been no appreciable change in more than seven months.
At the door, she nodded at the burly, mustachioed guard. “Bonjour.”
The guard’s eyes moved from her face to the badge clipped to her simple white scrub uniform then back to her face.
“Merci.” She smiled, but the impassive man glanced away and stared at the bland taupe wall, as always.
Her right hand found the palm pad, and she placed her feet completely inside marked boxes on
the floor to allow for the body scan. After fifteen seconds, the pad beeped, and she punched in her four-digit code and the star button. A loud click came from the top of the door as the magnetic lock disengaged. Sophie pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The girl lay in the same position that Sophie left her in six hours before. Her quiet, pretty face turned toward the single window, the girl seemed almost happy. Sophie set her tray of medicines down and stared up at the girl’s real-time medical data streaming across a wall screen tacked above the bed.
The girl had a fever of 99.1 degrees. As Sophie watched, it ticked to 99.3 and then 99.5.
“Room controls, lower bed temperature five degrees.”
The system beeped. The temperature hovered at 99.7 and remained constant. A sudden rise was unusual, if not shocking, given the girl’s near-vegetative state.
Sophie tapped her badge with a finger the way they did in old holo shows. The intent was the same. “Pharmacy, patient twelve has a low-grade fever. Please adjust and counter.”
The peripherally inserted catheter in the girl’s left arm was controlled from the pharmacy two floors above. Through the molecular-transport system, they could wire a prescription into a control unit behind the wall and make almost any medication for immediate delivery into the body. Limitations included the blood-brain-barrier-crossing drugs and a host of opioids that were too expensive and dangerous to administer. Aside from the sudden fever, the girl’s vital signs were right in the center of the appropriate zone.
Sophie turned to her medications and set about preparing the first syringe for application. She uncapped the syringe, tapped a light-pink fingernail against it, turned back to the bed, and jumped.
The girl’s eyes were open but rolled back in her head. Beeps came from the wall screen in a staccato beat until a warning tone kicked in. Her temperature spiked to over 101 degrees, and the girl’s heartbeat swung wildly toward tachycardia. Her spine bowed backward in a fierce spasm, and she moaned for several seconds until Sophie had the presence of mind to engage the bed’s auto-restraints. What the girl said made no sense.
“Maaally… maaalllyy… mmmaaalllyyy.”
With the restraints engaged, Sophie stepped forward and put her hands on the girl’s face.
“Calm down,” Sophie said in accented English. “You are in hospital. We are trying to help you.”
The girl’s eyes rolled down and, after a moment, focused. Blazing blue irises stared into Sophie. “Eeet… eeet… her… mmmaaalllyyyy.”
“I can’t understand you, miss.”
“Eeet… herrr… maalllyyy… keerrrun…”
Sophie shook her head and tapped her badge again. “Require immediate assistance. Patient Twelve is awake.”
The girl looked up at the wall screen. A few seconds later, it beeped and showed a neural connection had been engaged. How in the world—
The screen showed picture of a young Asian girl with short hair, smiling. There was a counter in front of her as if she was shopping. Text began to appear under the picture. “It’s her. Mally. The one that did this to me. She took Kieran from me.”
Sophie turned back to the girl. Her eyes were blue and blazed with an intense anger. That expression, paired with a slackened face from the neural-inhibitor medication, made her look monstrous.
“I’ll try to help you, miss. Please. You have to give me something more.”
The girl’s moans were long and loud and grew into an incoherent scream. Sophie tried to calm her. As the door opened, she turned. The burly security guard stepped inside and studied the girl and then the neural connection. He tapped his badge twice and let the door close behind him.
In that moment, Sophie realized his other hand rested on the grip of his pistol.
“Please, you have to help me get her under control.”
He removed his pistol and pointed it at Sophie’s chest. She flinched away, toward the window, knocking over a small table. The guard made no move toward her patient.
“Sorry. Orders.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For two days, I spent every other six-hour shift sitting in the squadron ready room, waiting for a chance to fly. Every single time, I was limited to HICAP missions so far away from the battlefield I could barely see anything. High-combat air patrols, in this generation, were near exospheric circular patterns designed to detect incoming vehicles from space. There wasn’t much to defending against them with physics as part of the equation—if something wanted to drop toward the planet, gravity did all the work. We learned to engage them with everything we had and get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak. There were no orbital threats in the exercise. The TDF were getting their assess handed to them by the Styrahi infantry and their sleek, delta-winged fighters based on the edge of Tithonium Chasma.
Not that I’d seen anything other than high clouds for the last couple of days. Commander Bussot, sure enough, would not entertain any discussion from me, to the point of threatening me with insubordination if I questioned her flight rotations one more time.
Logging flight hours was a good thing, but in a combat aircraft, I preferred to be down there in the fight rather than flying in a gigantic circle, which any idiot could do. I tried to talk to the commandant twice but could not. I realized that, just as in my time, I was not cleared to be in the area where his post was located during the exercise. Far be it for the men who needed the best ideas and insights to actually get them. Players, like me, were barely even pawns. As a trainee, I was “assigned” to the squadron that Bussot “commanded.” That meant I had nothing to do and almost no one to talk to.
“Lead, Two. What did the fish say when he hit the concrete?”
<
It’s okay. I keyed the microphone on our private channel. “What does it say, Jenkins?”
“Dam!”
Even bad jokes helped to pass the time. Jenkins was full of them. “Awful, Two. Just awful. Seriously, you can stop now.”
“Not like we’re going anywhere, Lead.”
True. With Lily tied into the aircraft, I could sleep, theoretically, but that was not really a possibility. Situational awareness was one of the keys to being a successful pilot, and it meant being ready for anything at any possible time. There was a lot of empty space in the sky, but there was stuff out there as well. The exercise commanders said that nothing would come in from orbit, but our intel guys knew the Styrahi had staged some aircraft on Phobos. Lily seemed to think they would play, but I wasn’t sure. There were too many other variables to focus on. I wasn’t going to sleep, nor was I going to sit there and let the fight get away from us. All I had to do was wait.
I’d seen to it the night before. The best part of the exercise environment was that there were joint cafeterias and social areas where participants were supposed to get together and bond. Add in alcohol, and those areas could be hazardous, but if handled correctly, people socializing there could make breakthroughs in the tactical fights of a simulated war that could change the strategic picture down the road. That was my intent when I’d walked into the TDF-heavy crowd at the Brass Anchor, but I’d seen the big picture with the Styrahi ground force positions, and it complicated my plan. I’d heard the rumors that the TDF wanted to mount a multipronged assault on the Styrahi stronghold identified as the “Valley of the Damned.” They’d holed up in a box canyon with sheer walls on either side and lined with impressive antiaircraft positions. At the south—the open end—were two divisions of infantry forces in prepared, standoff-capable positions. No one was going in there. They could have planned a hundred prongs on the attack corridor and it wouldn’t have mattered.
<
Thank you, Lily.
The 73rd Tank Battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel Quinn Whelan. I’d met him at the Brass Anchor the night before. He was sitting alone at the bar, nursing a glass of extremely rare twenty-one-year-old Bushmills, when I sat down and struck up a conversation. The crossed sabers of armored forces on his collar, and his almost-slumped body position over his drink, were just what I was looking for.
“Good evening.” I pulled up to the bar. “This seat taken?”
“Not at all,” he said in a lilting Irish brogue. He was near my age, maybe two or three years older with thick black hair and bright-blue eyes. He was sad but angry. His eyes were tired but clear. I could tell he was taking time to hide over a well-earned drink. “I’ve got to head back to the field soon, anyway. My ride leaves in about thirty minutes.”
“Looks rough out there,” I said.
Whelan regarded my rank-less uniform over for a moment and seemed to shrug. Exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. In his eyes, I saw a man who’d seen the elephant, probably as a very young private, maybe a second lieutenant, in the Great War. With any luck, he would be seeing and thinking the exact same things about me. A soldier can always tell a veteran from a newbie. A soldier can also tell when another one is hurting. Watching him, I knew exactly how he felt. He’d tried to do the right things, and someone, most likely one of the commanders who loved their finite control, had put him down.
“They call you in to chew you out?” I asked.
Whelan laughed. “Yeah.” He tossed back the whiskey and grimaced. “Look, I really have to go.”
“There’s a different way.”
Whelan started to stand, but he stopped. “No, there’s really not.”
Vendetta Protocol Page 17