Elodie glanced behind her, but she knew that if the other woman was there for her – and it seemed unlikely that this was a bizarre coincidence – then they’d have her retreat covered. She felt the first spots of gritty rain touch her skin as the beleaguered weather-control system attempted to use what was left of the planet’s water system as a heat sink. She looked up and decided to let the other woman come to her. She put her hands on her hips. Her P-sat was ’facing imagery and sensor data direct to her neunonics.
Fuck you, Scab, Elodie thought.
‘Elodie Negrinotti?’ the woman asked.
‘No,’ Elodie suggested.
‘I think you are.’
‘Then why did you ask? I know what you want, and I haven’t seen him in more than ten standards.’ Then she saw what she was looking for – a slight atmospheric disturbance just behind the woman. Something was definitely jamming her P-sat’s active scans, and they were smart enough to use the ambient nano-pollution to help them do so. They were good and they were packing high-end cloaks. ‘I’ve had every bounty killer and wannabe in the surrounding systems ’face me or visit me, demanding to know where he is. I don’t know, I don’t care and I don’t owe him anything. Now I’m going to get on with my day, okay?’
Elodie started to move past the Monk. The Monk moved slightly to stand in the feline’s way.
‘Look,’ Elodie said, trying to hold onto her waning patience, ‘you have resources and appear to know what you’re doing, so you must know I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and all you’d get is exactly what I’ve just told you.’
‘How many of them did you kill?’
‘Everyone that didn’t take the hint. You know what I do for a living, right?’ Elodie said, simultaneously trying to keep her temper and look for more of the atmospheric disturbances.
‘You’re a kick-murder and intrusion specialist. You work physical as well as information intrusion. In short, you’re a thief and a murderer.’
‘I only murder when the thieving isn’t going well.’ Like now.
‘You’re also one of the few bounties who got away from Scab. Or, more accurately, that he allowed to get away.’
Elodie was pretty sure she heard disgust in the Monk’s voice. Is this where the hostility is coming from? She thinks I whored myself.
‘If you think I fucked him and he let me go, then you know as little about me as you do about him. I can’t help you, you judgmental bitch.’
The Monk bristled in a way that didn’t strike Elodie as terribly professional. There was something about her that was getting under the human’s skin. Perhaps she was just another human racist, envious of the effortless sexual attractiveness of the female feline.
‘We don’t believe that’s the case. I don’t think he has been in contact with you because he has no use for you at the moment. But other than his partner, Vic Matto, you’re probably the person with the greatest insight into him. We think this insight could aid us in finding him.’
‘What’s he done?’ Elodie asked, genuinely interested now.
‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll pay you the going rate for your services.’
Elodie was nodding, trying to look interested. ‘I’m expensive.’
‘I bet.’
‘Well, let’s agree on a price so I can at least pretend I have a choice in this.’
‘How much—’
Elodie scorpion-kicked the Monk. The Monk staggered back as her nose spread over her face, blood squirting from the nostrils. Elodie took a step and executed a reverse turning kick. It made contact with something, apparently in empty air, just behind the Monk. The soft-tech-augmented kick impacted hard enough to crack the cloaked militia soldier’s composite combat armour and the soldier staggered into the Monk. The soldier’s form was revealed as their armour struggled to project an image of the surroundings fast enough to react to the sudden movement and maintain the cloak.
Elodie’s braid darted forwards over her head. The pointed ornament on the end of the braid was now a potent viral-delivering stinger. Cross-eyed and frantic, the Monk clapped her hands together, capturing the braid, the dripping point inches from her face. Elodie cartwheeled backwards, tearing the braid out of the Monk’s grip. Elodie’s foot caught the Monk in the chin, hard. The Monk’s reinforced bones stopped the blow from powdering her jaw, but the force of the kick sent her staggering back into two of the cloaked militia.
Elodie kicked another militiaman coming up behind her as she completed the cartwheel, her boot catching him in the head with enough force to crack his helmet. Back on her feet, Elodie ran at the skywalk’s railing. One foot on the railing and then she was over and diving gracefully into Ubaste’s sky, miles above the surface. Her P-sat zipped after her.
The Monk was angry. It wasn’t that Elodie was necessarily faster or better than her. It was a sucker kick, but a good one. The Monk hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t read the movement in Elodie’s body.
‘All units move in,’ the Monk ’faced to all her personnel. The twenty or so militia on the bridge with her became fully visible. They would be moving too fast for the cloaks on their combat armour to be effective once they stepped off the skywalk and into the air. The weak AG drives on the P-sats clipped to their armour slowed and guided their fall, sending them after Elodie. The Monk threw herself off the skywalk into free-fall, her augmented vision just about able to make out the plummeting feline. Four G-carriers banked around a nearby building and sped after their prey. There was no way she could escape now. It was just a question of how long the feline wanted to draw this out.
Elodie had dropped several miles, travelling at terminal velocity in the .8 G. She was heading for the side of one of the other arcologies. She held out one hand and her speeding P-sat extruded a handgrip. One day this isn’t going to work, she thought as molecular hooks on the handle bonded to her palm. Her neunonics sent signals to her soft-machine-augmented physiology and the correct muscle groups and joints were reinforced. It was still going to hurt. She ’faced the order to the P-sat to brake. The P-sat tried to reverse her momentum and pull her arm out of its socket. As she hit the side of the starscraper, hard, she bent her knees, augmented physiology managing to absorb most of the impact, but it was still jarring. Sharp, predatory teeth clattered painfully together.
Aided by the P-sat, she was running horizontally around the building. Scan data told her that the Monk had hit the arcology starscraper behind her and was giving chase with the aid of her own P-sat. Presumably that had been cloaked as well. The militia were landing behind the Monk.
More worrying were the G-carriers. One of them dropped down level with her, its coaxial strobe gun tracking her movement. She killed the P-sat’s AG drive and pushed off the building back into free-fall. The G-carrier dropped into a dive after her. There was another behind that and two more spiralling down, trying to lock on to her position from further out.
It was a long dive. Elodie took them out of the weak sunlight and into Ubaste’s dark levels where the lights on the arcology starscraper windows resembled a strangely regular star field. She gave herself much longer to decelerate this time. It still hurt her arm. Nanites flooded to the area, trying to repair damage to strained muscles and stressed joints. She still hit the side of the enormous building hard. She slid down the outer wall, her armour protecting her, using the P-sat to slow her descent. She landed on the roof of one of the parasitical shanty-town buildings bonded to the side of the arcology starscraper. She heard shouting from within the structure.
The Monk hit the side of the starscraper level with the shanty-town rooftops and started running horizontally along the building towards Elodie with the aid of her P-sat. Elodie beckoned the other woman towards her. Two of the G-carriers dropped down to cover her but they’d had all the time in the world to burn her out of the sky and they hadn’t done it. They could try killing her and pick her up when she cloned
, but her clone insurance was black and they couldn’t guarantee they’d find her before she was back on the street.
The armoured militia started landing on the roof.
Time to teach some lessons. She axe-kicked the closest militiaman in the head, cracking his helmet. Her P-sat started firing its laser, momentarily lighting up the energy-dissipation matrices on their combat armour. The Monk’s P-sat opened fire on Elodie’s. The feline couldn’t risk losing it. Elodie’s P-sat stopped firing and plummeted out of sight. She was already spinning to face the next militia soldier. The sting on her braid shot through the cracked helmet of the militia soldier she’d kicked, found warm flesh and injected its viral venom. He started to fall, already dead, until his P-sat caught him, dangling him in mid-air.
Elodie went low and swept the legs out from underneath another militiaman with a tail. She assumed he was a lizard. As he fell off the side of the building, she ’faced a hack to his P-sat. Church security resisted the hack for a moment, but this was what she did for a living. His P-sat unclipped itself from his armour. He started screaming as he dropped. Elodie continued spinning.
The Monk was charging Elodie as she leaped at the next militiawoman. The Monk was in the air, a flying kick aimed at Elodie’s back when Elodie landed on the militiawoman. Her right hand shot forwards, hardened claws penetrating the helmet’s reflective visor and the militiawoman’s flesh. The momentum of the blow carried both of them off the roof and into the side of one of the hovering G-carriers. The militiawoman’s P-sat sprang its clip. Elodie knew she wasn’t going to be able to pull that trick too many more times – the Church’s electronic warfare specialists would be on to her now. Both of them dropped. The Monk flying-kicked the side of the G-carrier and dropped after them.
Elodie pushed the dead militiawoman away from her. Her envenomed claws had done their work. She controlled her free-fall and reached out. She felt her P-sat’s handle and grasped it. The P-sat was under relentless electronic attack now. Elodie knew how to protect her own gear, but they would get through eventually. Still, three of them were dead. Two more had scrambled uploads and would have to use older backups when they were cloned.
One of the G-carriers dropped in front of her and she used the AG to change course again. Her arm was almost pulled out of its socket and she hit the top of the G-carrier a lot harder than she wanted. The G-carrier stopped. The four roof-mounted strobe guns turned towards her, but she ignored them. When one of the roof hatches opened, she started to run. The militiaman was climbing out of the hatch when she punted him in the head, cracking the visor on his helmet and breaking even his reinforced neck. As he started to slip back into the G-carrier, Elodie let go of the P-sat and caught him. She pulled him out of the hatch. A different hack to a different part of the militiaman’s kit activated the four thermal grenades on his webbing. The Monk landed on the G-carrier behind her just as Elodie dropped the militiaman back into the vehicle, cartwheeled to one side and then somersaulted off the side. Above her the G-carrier lurched and then started to drop, smoke pouring from the open hatch. The Monk had thrown herself off the vehicle and was diving after Elodie.
As the P-sat struggled to stop her momentum, Elodie felt something rip in her arm and screamed. She hit the roof of a shanty-town structure messy and hard and staggered to her feet. She didn’t like how easy the Monk made her landing look. G-carriers swooped in level with her. The militia started dropping in, keeping their distance, landing on other structures nearby, covering her with their advanced combat rifles.
The downpour intensified. She flinched as rain turned to steam in the red laser light as one of the strobe guns on the closest G-carrier took out her P-sat.
‘Finished?’ the Monk asked.
‘I think I’ll force you to kill me. See if you can find me, and then we’ll play chase again, on my terms.’
‘You understand who we are, right?’ the Monk asked, obviously struggling to control her temper. ‘The amount we’ll pay for you? Whoever your black-market clone insurance is with will offer you up gladly. Cost us money, but frankly save us the hassle.’
‘Fine. You still have to come and get me.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ The Monk shook her head. ‘Realise it’s over.’
‘Was it worth it?’ Elodie asked.
‘They’ll be cloned! We could stop that happening to you!’
‘Why are you so angry?’ Elodie wondered out loud. ‘You know him, don’t you?’ The Monk didn’t answer but it was written all over her face. She knew Scab and hated him.
‘I could try and explain this to you,’ the Monk replied, ‘the importance of finding him, but you wouldn’t understand. You see, it involves being able to look beyond your own gratification, your own selfishness, and I just don’t think any of you people would get it.’ She sounded genuinely exasperated. Elodie thought about her words and dismissed them. They were just people trying to grab what they could. Scab had clearly got in the way of something the Church wanted.
‘You know he’ll kill you, don’t you? I mean properly kill you.’
‘What for? Messing with his girl?’ the Monk mocked. Elodie was surprised, and a little concerned, that the Monk wasn’t using the conversation as an opportunity to close with her. ‘Is it love?’ she asked sarcastically.
Elodie’s laugh was humourless. ‘Never.’ Not with Scab. ‘Ready?’
The Monk just shook her head. The burst from the ACR hit Elodie in the knee. The armour-piercing tips of the caseless rounds tore through her armoured boots and her armoured skin. The rounds exploded when the smart bullets sensed flesh around them and the bottom part of Elodie’s left leg spun off. She cried out and collapsed onto the roof as pain shot through her. Her internal augments flooded her system with analgesics, shutting off the pain reaction in her brain.
Controlling herself, Elodie stared at the Monk, shaking with a rage born of helplessness. The Monk kept her distance, but knelt down so she was level with Elodie.
‘What is it with you people? Does sociopathy so heavily outweigh common sense? You’re coming with me. I’ll take you apart piece by piece if I have to. You won’t be the only fucking self-inflicted quadriplegic helping us with our fucking enquiries, believe me.’
‘One day we’re going to revisit this.’
‘I don’t care who’s harder. It can be you. Can we just get going, or do you need to lose more limbs fir—’ There was a rush of air, Elodie’s mask was torn off her face and it became hard to breathe. Everything was bathed in red. Incredible heat bubbled and blistered the skin of the feline’s neck and the Monk disappeared, replaced by a cloud of red steam.
Something tried to suck Elodie off the roof. She dug her claws in, panels of the composite roofing material tearing off and tumbling past her. She watched as a lizard-made power disc cut the face off the nearest militiaman to her. Over the roaring from the powerful sucking wind she heard the sound of firearms and superheated air exploding so rapidly it became a constant noise, one bang running into the next.
Ordnance hit the militia around her, destroying sections of their armour and exploding the flesh beneath it, leaving behind messy red cavities. Others were lit up, dressed in the neon of heavy laser fire, the energy-dissipation grids on their armour rapidly overwhelmed, the flesh beneath superheated and cooked inside the fused armour.
Parts of the arcology were scorched or burst open as militia and the structures they’d been standing on ceased to exist in bursts of red light. An explosion bounced Elodie into the side of the arcology and she dropped back onto the roof of the shanty-town structure. Her neunonics were telling her all the ways she was hurt now. The sucking wind started dragging her across the roof again and her claws made deep rents in the composite material. She watched militia torn off the roof and then shot or lasered in the air.
Everything had happened so quickly, it was only now that she turned to look behind her. She was bat
hed in the blood-coloured light of Red Space and her mind struggled to deal with the concept of the rent in space inside Ubaste’s atmosphere. A ship was coming through the rent. She didn’t recognise the configuration – it looked custom, expensive. Its smart-matter hull was flexing and changing the ship’s configuration, presumably for atmospheric operations. A yacht, she guessed, but a heavily armed one. Its laser batteries raked the side of the arcology, seeking out and utterly destroying the fleeing militia. One of the G-carriers was already superheated wreckage tumbling into the darkness. The other two had dived, all eight of their top and bottom strobe guns rotating at full speed, pouring laser fire onto the ship but barely making its energy-dissipation grid glow.
A ramp was open at the front of the ship. There were two figures on it. One of them was just short of seven feet tall and had four arms. His lower limbs were firing a strobe gun. His upper limbs were firing an ACR. The other figure was shorter, only two arms. He was clipping an empty automatic shotgun to the back of his servo-assisted combat armour with one hand whilst smoothly drawing a double-barrelled laser rifle with an underslung disc gun over the other shoulder. He started firing short, rapid double bursts, killing the remaining militia as efficiently as he could. The ship was moving ever closer to her.
Elodie heard panicked screams from within as the shanty town structure started to fall away from the starscraper. The nose of the ship dipped as it surged forwards, the open hatch closing on her like an open mouth, tearing up the roof as it approached. She tried to fall into it and felt power-assisted hard-tech hands grab her armoured bodice, crushing it as they gripped and yanked her inside the craft. She fell against someone as the ramp closed and the craft reared up, rose and banked hard. There was a disconcerting moment before the ship’s G-field kicked in and she was able to tell which way was down.
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