by Rick Partlow
Valerie closed her eyes, running her hands over her face tiredly. “Jesus,” she sighed. “If someone had told me ten years ago that I’d be standing here today…”
She paced over to the cement staircase and sat on a mostly-intact step, hands clasped across her knees. “We have to get Shannon out of confinement before she’s no longer useful to Ayrock,” she finally said, confidence returning to her voice, “and we have to make sure that Jason isn’t sacrificed in this mission. But there’s something else we have to do: preserve the Republic.” She pushed herself to her feet, stepping closer to Franks. “I used to think that the Republic was hopelessly corrupt, that it was a relic of a bygone age of jingoism and greed.” She snorted cynically. “And it is, more than I even knew back then.”
She shook her head, looking around at the ruin of the Barclays Center. “But look at this city, Captain, Sergeant. I’ve looked at it quite a bit over these last few years, you know? This is what happens when you have a divided, splintered world. This is what happens when rogue dictators get their hands on nuclear weapons with no one to stand up to them, no one to rein them in. Millions of people died here, tens of millions more across this country, almost three billion worldwide…we can’t let that happen again. As bad as things are right now, they can get so much worse. So no, I don’t want to go public with this until and unless Ayrock does, which would leave us no choice.”
She looked back and forth between the two of them. “Do you have a problem with this?”
“Not me, ma’am,” Manning told her. She hadn’t been comfortable with breaking op-sec anyway.
Franks didn’t look as convinced. “If you want my opinion,” he said, “we’re making a mistake keeping everyone in the dark. Yeah, there’ll be some heartburn, maybe some rioting, but what are we getting now?” He shifted his carbine, resting its butt against his hip as he made a gesture of frustration. “If you keep propping up this house of cards, ma’am, it’s just gonna be taller when it falls.”
“Perhaps, Captain,” Valerie admitted. “But that’s my decision; and as you said, you take orders from civilian authority…”
Manning tuned out Valerie’s voice as she heard a sound: a distant hiss drawing closer, barely audible. It was faint but definitely something she’d heard before…
“Get down!” she blurted, throwing herself on top of Valerie O’Keefe just as an air-to-ground missile slammed into the rear fans of the flitter and a wave of heat and pressure slammed them both into the cracked cement at the base of the stands.
Manning felt the wind go out of her, the shock of impacting the solid block of cement almost drowning out the lesser hammerblows of debris striking the back plate of her armor. She fought for breath but she knew she didn’t have the luxury of waiting till the pain ebbed: the missile that hit the flitter was only the first strike.
She rolled off of Valerie, taking a moment to yell “Stay down!” and vaguely realizing that she couldn’t hear herself shout; the explosion had left her ears concussed and ringing. She wished she’d had a helmet to go with her body armor, but wishes and horses and all that…
Her night vision glasses had been knocked off by the pressure wave from the explosion, but she didn’t really need them anyway: the burning hulk of the flitter lit up the interior of the auditorium, throwing menacing shadows from anything left standing, and lighting up with awful clarity the crimson pool spreading around the body of Valerie O’Keefe’s pilot. The big man had been closest to the blast and he’d taken a large chunk of shrapnel right through his throat. A good trauma team could likely have got him to a medical center in time to save him; but it wasn’t a trauma team that was in the VTOL aircraft that was descending through the hole in the roof on a dust cloud of screaming turbojets.
Manning frantically began working at the action of the grenade launcher attached to the underside of her carbine; it was loaded with a fragmentation round and she desperately needed to switch to armor-piercing. Before she could even pull the loaded grenade free, something streaked through the air from her left and punched into the thin metal of the aircraft’s right rear vectored thrust nozzle.
Manning had just enough time to think that Franks must have fired the round before a gout of flame exploded through the upper fuselage of the plane. A wave of intense heat hit Manning even from a hundred meters away, then billows of smoke began pouring from the VTOL nozzles and the aircraft’s right side began to sink. She threw herself back on top of Valerie O’Keefe, forcing the woman back to the ground as the VTOL flipped over and crunched into the stands on the opposite side of the auditorium with an impact she could feel through the floor.
She’d expected the aircraft to explode, but it had not. Clouds of smoke were streaming from it, and a fire was crackling around the starboard vectored thrust nozzles but the plane was mostly intact; even as she watched, the port boarding hatch was kicked open and an armored figure stepped through, carrying a rifle. She rolled off of Valerie O’Keefe and brought her carbine up, having to shoulder it and bring the optics to eye level since the glasses she’d worn that were connected wirelessly to the targeting reticle were somewhere lost out in the darkness. She fired as the optics came to bear, putting a burst into the armored figure at center mass even as another trooper stepped up behind the first.
The lead man pitched forward and, since the aircraft’s boarding ramp hadn’t extended due to the crash, dropped the two meters to the concrete floor. Manning couldn’t tell if her rounds had penetrated his body armor, and she didn’t have the time to worry about it because two more armed and armored troopers were jumping out of the burning plane, falling to a prone position next to their downed comrade and opening fire at her.
Manning ducked down behind a protruding cement stairway, noting that her hearing had recovered enough to register the heavy rifle rounds punching into the other side. Manning took a second to make sure her grenade launcher was primed, then popped out from around cover just in time to see both the shooters going down under fire from Drew Franks. Franks was positioned just inside the nearest of the entrance tunnels to the arena, crouching next to the wall and firing his carbine from the hip, his night vision goggles still in place and connected with his weapon.
Satisfied he had the dismounted troops handled, Manning shifted her aim to the open hatch of the VTOL jet, where she could see another armored trooper trying to lean out and get a shot at Franks. Pressing the control on the carbine’s optics to switch to the aiming reticle for the grenade launcher, she elevated her weapon slightly and pulled the trigger. There was a sharp push against her shoulder as the grenade was kicked free by a puff of coldgas propellant, then its onboard rocket ignited and it streaked toward the downed aircraft behind a dull red flame.
Manning’s fingers automatically switched the weapon’s optics back to the reticle that reflected the aiming point for the carbine’s magnetically stabilized rifle barrel but her eyes never left the target. The grenade’s trail disappeared into the aircraft’s hatch and a bright flash briefly lit up the two shooters in the doorway before they were both obscured by a haze of black smoke. She couldn’t see the shooters, but she did see a rifle fall out of the hatch and clatter to the ground beneath it. Then there was silence.
“You good?” she heard Franks yell to her from fifty meters away, raising a hand in an “okay” sign.
“I’m golden, “she told him. “The pilot’s dead, but Senator O’Keefe is all right.”
Franks jogged over quickly and they both helped Valerie to her feet. The Senator looked pale and shaken as she stared down at the corpse of her bodyguard; she didn’t even try to wipe the dirt and dust off of her clothes, just coughed fitfully at the smoke beginning to fill the building. She didn’t resist as Franks led her down the entrance tunnel with Manning walking backward behind them, covering their back.
We need one more person for this, she reflected clinically. Too bad the bodyguard bought it.
There were no threats in the tunnel, though, and apparently none
still alive in the arena and they emerged from the side exit, sheltered from view by an entrance alcove. Franks and O’Keefe halted still behind cover, while Manning went ahead to check out the street. There were probably insect drones out there monitoring their movements, but she didn’t think even Ayrock would risk armed drones. Those were so illegal that manufacturing them or even storing them between uses would have caused too huge of a stink for him to get away with it. Hell, they couldn’t even get approval to use them against the biomechs, much less against people. So all she had to worry about was humans…
“It’s clear,” she said after a moment. “Let’s go.”
“He was a good man,” Valerie said quietly, staring into space as if Manning hadn’t spoken. It took her a moment to realize that the Senator was speaking of her pilot.
“We have to get you out of here, ma’am,” Franks said gently, taking her by the arm. “Come with us and we’ll find a place we can smuggle you back into Capital City.”
She glanced up at him, a furtive movement like a songbird that had spotted a raptor. “And then what, Captain Franks?” she demanded, seeming to come back to reality. “Ayrock just tried to have me killed. You think I can just go back to work in my office like nothing happened?”
“He risked this because you gave him the opportunity, ma’am,” Franks countered a bit hotly. “We have to move.’
Franks didn’t wait for a reply, just headed out, leaving Valerie to follow and Manning to bring up the rear. She put a hand on Valerie’s back to guide her forward in case she got recalcitrant, but the Senator just jogged after Franks silently. Manning kept her eyes and attention on the darkened streets, but she hissed a curse under her breath, wishing she still had her night vision goggles. Without them, every shadow seemed alive with menace, every tangle of weeds an enemy shooter. Still, there was an art to watching for threats in the dark, and it was one that Sergeant Major Crossman had drilled into them during the Q course.
Even concentrating on that, she couldn’t shake a lingering anger. They were extremely lucky there hadn’t been more shooters or another VTOL. Likely, Ayrock hadn’t had much time to react after his surveillance had discovered Valerie heading for the Old City and he’d scrambled the most convenient team of mercs he could find.
She swung her carbine around at a flicker of movement, but relaxed when it turned out to be a cat slipping sinuously between the rusted bars of a window. She shook her head slightly, looking around. She’d thought they’d be heading for the subway entrance, but they were going the opposite way, back to the parking garage where they’d stashed the flitter. She knew what that meant and, although it made sense, it pissed her off even more. They’d been counting on that vehicle to get them back to Capital City when the time came.
They reached the garage in just a few minutes and Manning chanced using her visible weapon light as they were swallowed up in the blackness of the shadows within the old structure. The rusted hulks of old gas-powered automobiles squatted on the remaining shreds of rotted tires, like the skeletons of long-dead animals picked over by that ultimate scavenger: time.
“Can you pilot a flitter?” Franks asked Valerie, rounding on her as they came to a halt next to the vehicle.
“Yes,” she replied tersely, her voice and the set of her eyes showing some resentment at Franks’ anger. “I can get it home.”
“Put it down within walking distance of your offices,” he instructed her. “I’m going to program the autopilot to bring it back here.”
“They’ll follow it back,” Manning snapped. “It’ll be useless to us.”
“One crisis at a time,” Franks said with a shrug.
“You think this is my fault,” Valerie accused, looking between the two of them. “Tony’s death…that was because I insisted on meeting.”
Manning inferred that Tony had to have been the bodyguard and she wondered suddenly just how close the two of them had been.
“Your friend Tony is dead,” Franks said harshly, “because Ayrock’s mercenaries killed him. He died trying to keep you safe and we’re going to make sure that’s exactly what happens.”
He palmed the ID pad on the exterior of the flitter and the hatch opened with a pneumatic hiss. “One thing, though, ma’am,” he went on as she started to climb into the cockpit. She paused and looked back at him. “I know you think it’s better to live with the corruption and the lies rather than invite a civil war, but look around you.” He scowled. “Look at the dead bodies we left behind a few minutes ago. Look at all the thousands of innocent people who’ve died because some shithead thought he needed more money and more power. Senator O’Keefe, we are in a civil war.”
Valerie settled into the pilot’s seat, staring into nothingness for a moment as she considered his words. “What do you think I should do then, Captain?” she finally asked him.
“Lead,” he said with conviction in his voice and a passion Manning hadn’t seen in him before. “Lead, follow…” He hit the control to close the hatch before he finished. “…or get the hell out of the way.”
Chapter Thirty Eight
Philip Ayrock cursed softly under his breath as he watched the readings from Shannon Stark’s EEG. The Colonel slumped motionless against the restraints of her chair, her hair matted with sweat, her eyes open but glazed and unfocused from the drugs. Her uniform had been replaced by a sterile white jumpsuit, and she looked, he reflected, quite bedraggled and unimpressive. It made him feel a bit uncomfortable and somewhat dirty, as if he’d wiped his ass with a Monet.
If this had worked, she would have been a major asset, both professionally and personally. He had no thought of forcing her: that was brutish and, more importantly to him, short-sighted. True, the thought of humiliating and degrading such a powerful person did have its attraction, but the thought of subverting one was much more rewarding.
But that was, apparently, not to be. The lone technician in the room, a young man whose personal loyalty was unquestioned and unquestioning, looked from the display on the hypnoprobe and shook his head. Ayrock sighed. He’d known that Colonel Stark had received counter-conditioning by the Intelligence neuromedics, but until now, he’d had no idea just how good that counter-conditioning was.
They’d had her under for nearly twenty hours straight and still couldn’t make any headway against the psychological barriers she’d had fashioned in her subconscious. Every time he came close to breaking her, she simply lost coherence and fell into a sort of fugue state.
“I don’t know what else to try, Mr. Ayrock,” the tech told him, frustration and exhaustion in his voice. “Do you want me to use the neuronomine again?”
“No,” Ayrock said after a moment’s consideration. “It was a longshot to begin with.” He sighed with resignation. “Just get the guards back here and have them put her back in her cell.” He sniffed, his face screwing up in distaste. “Have them clean her up first. She’s soiled herself.”
“Yes, sir,” the technician acknowledged with a nod and headed out of the lab. He was probably relieved it was over, Ayrock thought. Even though the man’s loyalty was to him, he wasn’t immune to the hero-worship of Shannon Stark and Jason McKay in which the media had indulged so much over the years.
He frowned, leaning against the wall and staring at Shannon. That was what was going to make this difficult. McKay could be killed off going after Yuri and die a hero to the public; but how was he going to get rid of Stark? Despite the bluff he’d put on for her, a trial---even a military tribunal---would be potentially disastrous and he knew it. It wasn’t as if she could just be “disappeared” either; she was too public a figure for that...particularly since his last-second gambit to rid himself of the troublesome Senator O’Keefe hadn’t worked out. She’d shown up the next day on the Senate floor as if nothing had happened and that worried the hell out of him. That was why he’d had hopes for this procedure working.
Ah well, improvise, adapt and overcome. He would figure out a way to deal with her; the timing woul
d be tricky, but it might even be possible for her to share the fate of her domestic companion in Kazakhstan. It was a shame she had to die, though. Someone so ruthlessly pragmatic was handy to have around.
* * *
Bree Reno could spot a Straight a kilometer away. They were always too tan, too healthy, and too well-dressed to be in the Underground; and they always seemed to be watching where they were stepping, as if everything beneath the Old City was an active sewer. At least she didn’t have to deal with the addicts or the Housing Block gangs looking to buy guns. Her clientele was usually higher-end: political dissidents paying for hacks on government or corporate systems, vindictive former lovers or business partners looking to smear someone’s reputation anonymously, or black market fab’ers wanting to trade pirated codes without being traced.
Looking at the young Asian male stepping through the curtain that separated her shop from the others in the large chamber that had once been a subway station, she could tell that he was a Straight but she couldn’t peg just what kind. He seemed too self-assured and competent to be a jilted lover, too young to be a victim of betrayal in business and too clean to be a black market fab’er. That left political dissident; she might be able to imagine him as that, but he wasn’t your typical wide-eyed, frothing at the mouth conspiracy theorist. The harsh light of the sun lamps hanging from a bracket over her work station threw his baby face into sharp relief, adding years and gravity to it. Maybe it was just shadows and illusion, but she pegged him as a professional…at something.