He approached the third room and saw the lock indicator turn green. He very slowly pushed down on the handle and applied pressure with his knee until it began to swing inwards. He could see no reaction from the target, who was still busily interacting with a terminal or desk while seated facing away from the door. He removed his hand from the door handle and pressed a button on the top of the glove he wore. The glove would now deliver an incapacitating electrical jolt when any part of the palm or dorsal side made contact with someone. Using his lower body to slowly push the door inwards, he pointed his pistol where he knew he would shortly see the back of the target’s head.
Pearce entered the room when the door was open enough for him to slide past, and now had a clear view of his target. He had to suppress the urge to simply pull the trigger. The briefing on this particular nutjob had been thorough and packed with grizzly details of his nefarious exploits, from the dozens of murders he had committed to the human trafficking rings he was in charge of.
None of those landed him on Omega’s radar, however. He was also the head of a Separatist Front cell responsible for dozens of bombings and attacks against civilian targets over the last few years, using his hardline independence stance to win followers over with a near religious fervor. The diminutive man seated at this office desk hardly seemed big enough to fill the shoes of the monster in the dossier, but appearances could be deceiving.
The office itself didn’t provide any insight into the occupant’s ideology or sociopathic tendencies. By all appearances it was a run-of-the-mill corporate executive style office, with artwork adorning the walls and hardwood furniture throughout. An enormous curved screen that had to measure at least 200cm diagonally dominated the desk, and he worked at via a combination of gestures and peripherals. The data appeared to Pearce to be related to financial markets, with price and commentary information taking up the majority of screen real estate. The target looked thoroughly engrossed, and was four or five quick strides away from Pearce. He didn’t realize that in just a handful of seconds that he would be shocked senseless, and dead shortly thereafter.
Just as Pearce was about to pounce, something happened on the screen and the terminal began frantically beeping, causing him to hesitate. The screen was flashing and numerous alerts were popping up, and suddenly the target appeared extremely agitated. Pearce would have thought that he had somehow been detected, but the sudden chaos on the screen looked market-related, as he could see several numbers and charts dropping precipitously. Bad day in the market for this guy, but his day was about to get much worse. This was the perfect opportunity to make his move.
The few seconds of hesitation proved costly. The target suddenly jumped to his feet, sending the rolling chair spinning backwards and nearly hitting Pearce where he was coiled. Hitting a button on his comm system, he began shouting instructions at someone about transactions and the news, mentioning something about an attack. He then frantically grabbed something off of the surface of his desk and turned around as if to leave.
He took half a step before freezing as he noticed Pearce, who was already sidestepping around the chair that was still spinning between them. Pearce moved with near super-human speed, taking two steps forward while reaching out with the open palm of his gloved hand to almost gently slap the target’s cheek just as he opened his mouth to scream for help. All he got out was a gasp of air as his head took the full force of a short but powerful electrical shock. The lights went out behind the target’s eyes and he began to fall backwards. Pearce caught him by the front of his shirt, preventing him from making a loud crashing sound, and deposited him gently on his ass, with his back to the desk.
He knew he had to work fast now. Even as he quickly closed the office door and locked it again, a voice responded over the comm system, asking for instructions. It wouldn’t take too long before a lack of response would cause someone to investigate.
He quickly assessed the computer hardware under the desk. Just as the intel had stated, there seemed to be multiple units, and at least one of them would be offline from the planetary network and restricted to a physical connection. He saw the biometric hand and eye readers situated on the desktop and quickly retrieved the chair and sat the target in it.
The biometrics were nearly un-hackable, which is why he couldn’t afford to kill the target upfront and had opted to incapacitate him with the glove’s nanosecond electrical pulse instead of drugs or even just a sharp blow to the head. Drugs and concussions could screw with a person’s retinal scans, while a nsEP would simply knock someone out for a few minutes with zero physical side effects. He used the unconscious scumbag’s handprint and held open his eyelid as the scans were verified, and with a single beep a new window appeared on the screen, giving him access to the restricted contents of the secure and offline terminal.
He removed a tiny device from his belt and inserted into the transfer port of the terminal, which would be active now that he terminal was unlocked. The device wirelessly connected with his VIA and immediately began a cyber-warfare attack that would take over all aspects of the system and begin copying data. His VIA estimated less than 2 minutes for the data transfer to be completed. He would have to stay within range of a few dozen meters until it finished.
The person on the other end of the comm system had asked for instructions three times when Pearce’s OHUD suddenly displayed, “Threat detected”. Pearce whipped his head towards the direction indicated and saw that someone was about to exit the first room in the hallway, likely the same person calling over the comm. He watched the red outline as it made its way through the door and into the hallway, approaching the office. He knew that his VIA was using an override to keep the door locked, but that would only work for a few moments at best before the situation drastically escalated. Knowing it was better to try and take down the threat silently, he ordered his VIA to unlock the door and quickly moved to the side of the room, behind where the door would open.
There was a knock on the door. “Nathan, are you still in there? Nate?” The handle turned downwards and the door began to open. With any luck he would see his boss slumped in his chair and, assuming it was a medical emergency, rush to his side. Just as he started to enter the room, a chorus of shouting came from farther down the hallway, and his VIA notified him of three more approaching threats.
He saw the man standing in the doorway hesitate, looking over his shoulder towards the commotion. As he turned back to face the room, he shouted back “somethings wrong with Nathan!” and scrambled into the room to check on him. He only made it a step inside before Pearce put a 10mm round through the side of his skull.
The noise wasn’t insignificant; the pistol coughed, the skull cracked, and the body tumbled to the floor with a thump. Pearce thought just maybe it could have been mistaken as heavy footsteps by the three approaching threats. As he turned and examined their outlines through the walls, they didn’t seem to be taking defensive postures, just walking quickly.
It was time to go on the offensive. He waited just inside the open doorway. One of the targets was approaching from the right side of the hallway, and the other two from the left. He positioned himself so that his pistol was held straight out at the ready, directly at the head of one of the duo, and quickly leaned out just enough from the doorway to get off two quick shots.
Before the blood had even finished splattering on the wall behind the second person, he was sidestepping across the entire hallway and rotating around to face the third threat. His eyes found the target a split second before his gun hand did, and saw that he had recoiled in shock and was opening his mouth to shout. He pulled the trigger the instant that the triple dots of the pistol sight crossed the edge of the target’s head. Right before his face exploded, he managed a stilted, high pitched yelp.
Three tango’s down in as many seconds. As Pearce’s VIA began displaying new threat indicators, however, he knew that the combination of noises and yelling had stirred up the rest of the hornet’s nest. He could escape
back up to the roof and disappear before an effective response could be mounted, but he couldn’t afford for the data transfer to be interrupted. So he would have to hold his ground and delay them.
He quickly sent a thought to his VIA to lock all of the doors in the building and shutdown the single elevator. This trapped the majority of the buildings occupants inside various rooms and offices. As he looked all around he could see the outlined forms of potential threats spread out throughout the five floors of the building. Some remained seated, oblivious to what was happening. Others were trying to open doors in vain. His VIA reassigned their threat color to orange one by one. Then he saw two people in aggressive stances pass through a stairwell door on the third floor. Security, with override codes and probably the same assault carbines as the two out front.
Pearce’s OHUD removed the orange threat indicators leaving only four red ones. Two belonged to the pair advancing up the stairs, while the other two were the guards at the main door. Luckily the stairs the guards were using were not the same as the ones that led to the roof which Pearce had taken earlier, but rather a second set on the far side of the building.
He quickly retreated back down the hallway to the door he had entered from earlier, performing a tactical reload and replacing the slightly used magazine of his pistol with a full one as he did so. He heard a pounding behind him; the two remaining occupants on this floor were banging on the door, which was just opposite the stairwell door Pearce stood inside. Luckily there was no window, and the door seemed sturdy enough. Pearce ignored them and turned his attention to the other end of the hallway, taking a crouched shooting position behind the cover of the doorway.
The guards slowed as they reached the door in their stairwell to the fifth floor. He watched as they communicated with hand signals, the lead guard signaling that he would open the door while standing tall and allowing the second guard to sweep into the hallway low. As they prepared to make their move, Pearce aimed precisely at the spot that the second guard would appear and took a deep, steadying breath. The hallway was nearly 30 meters long, and he wanted his aim to be sure.
As the door was flung open the guard swung his carbine past the frame of the doorway, already taking aim down the long hall. With Pearce’s perfect battle awareness of the situation, he never had a chance. He fired a single shot that hit the leading shoulder of the guard squarely, sending him reeling backwards into the door and the first guard.
As Pearce had predicted, the shoulder injury both jerked his rifle upwards and caused him to flinch in pain, squeezing the trigger and ripping off a blast of automatic gunfire which was nearly deafening in the small enclosed space. As pieces of ceiling tile fell to the floor like snowflakes, Pearce fired off three more rounds, pinging them off of the metal doorframe just above the guards head with a loud metal on metal clanging sound.
He could have easily killed him, but an injured comrade would reduce the effectiveness of the second guard, and he wanted them both to relay the situation to any others responding so that their attention would be focused on this hallway. The injured guard was quickly grabbed by his partner and pulled into the stairwell as people all over the building began shouting.
“Don’t come any closer or I’ll kill Nathan!” Pearce shouted with a dramatic edge of hysteria. “I’ll kill all of you!”
He fired off three more shots which rang off the doorframe to further reinforce the point; the hallway was on lockdown and he had a hostage. This fiction would be a double edged sword. It would hopefully force the guards to wait for reinforcements to arrive before trying to storm the floor with overwhelming force, giving him enough time for the data transfer to complete. On the flipside, it would bring those reinforcements into play. He silently cursed whatever incident had spooked the markets and caused his target to react the way he had.
No time to worry about that now. Pearce could see the progress of the transfer in his OHUD just passing 50%, with less than a minute remaining. Time to pick which extraction plan he would execute. With a thought, Pearce had the HOVR drone dutifully monitoring the building gain altitude to get a wider view of the area and enhance its threat detection radius.
As a map appeared in his mind’s eye the drone almost immediately detected several vehicles approaching at a high rate of speed from only a few blocks away. A quick focused scan revealed multiple occupants per vehicle. Definitely some kind of Quick Reaction Force. That the QRF was in motion so quickly and with such a significant number of soldiers spoke to the sensitivity of the building he had invaded. If they deployed to the rooftops quickly it could be a problem; Pearce had no intention of getting in a pitched firefight and didn’t want to leave a string of bodies across the city.
As the map disappeared from his OHUD with a thought, Pearce heard a door banging open somewhere beneath him in the stairwell. Glancing down, he confirmed from the moving red outlines that it was the front door guards entering on the ground level. It wouldn’t take them long to reach his location on the fifth floor.
He needed to buy a little more time, and so quickly examined the closed stairwell dimensions and the open door he was crouched next to with the assistance of his VIA. The math checked out, and Pearce fired two more discouraging shots down the hallway before he turned to examine the door.
It was a standard metal fire door, supported by three typical pin & barrel hinges that have been common for thousands of years of human history. Pop the pins and the door detaches from the frame. Pearce closed the door enough to access where the hinge-pins protruded into the stairwell and quickly placed his pistol under the top-most pin. He pulled the trigger and the 10mm round shredded half of the hinge and blasted the pin out like a missile, which banged off of the ceiling and bounced down the stairs. He did the same for the middle hinge, which nearly struck him in the arm before careening off the walls. The last hinge was too low to get the pistol underneath, so Pearce holstered his weapon and grabbed the now weakly supported door with both hands.
And then he simply ripped the door off of the remaining hinge with a feat of bio-genetically engineered strength. He carried it down to the small landing between the fourth and fifth floors, turned it slightly on a diagonal, and then jammed it into the space separating the two sets of stairs. Metal bent and concrete crumbled slightly under the force of Pearce’s powerful arms. Stepping back, he gave it a few herculean kicks which further wedged the door into a makeshift barricade, leaving only a few gaps far too small for anyone to fit through. It wouldn’t stop the guards for long, but he only had about thirty seconds left for the transfer to complete.
Pearce quickly returned to the doorway and fired a few more shots down the hall, yelling for everyone to stay back, continuing his charade. He heard the charging guards beneath him getting closer, and a glance showed them arriving at the fourth floor. He pinged a round off of the metal door-con-barricade, hoping to slow them just a bit with the loud bang. He saw them flinch and creep more cautiously forward.
With fifteen seconds to go, Pearce decided the transfer would complete successfully as he made his escape and prepared to leave. He fired off another single shot down the hall for good measure and slipped up the stairwell, performing another tactical reload as he approached the rooftop.
Just as he turned the handle to open the door to the rooftop, he thought he heard something odd, and the hair on the back of his neck stood straight out. As he swung the door open, he saw something impossible.
He was staring directly at a fully armed Confederation gunship.
THREE
Nouveau Toronto, Ontario System
Independent Colony
Pearce’s mind raced as his body went into overdrive. He didn’t have time to think about what he was seeing, he simply had to act before the gunship could react. The gunship was hovering just a few meters above the height of the rooftop of the building next door, its two huge ducted rotors creating a considerable backwash of air and dirt as they made the low swishing sound that stealth gunships produced.
He charged the gunship.
Pearce started with a quick feint to the right and then immediately juked hard a few steps forward and to the left before bursting into an all-out sprint straight at the gunship. His genetic enhancements were hardly superhuman but gave him the slimmest edge against the surprised pilot.
The AP turret, controlled by an automated tracking system, easily followed Pearce’s moves but the pilot didn’t squeeze his trigger quickly enough. By the time the turret began firing Pearce was already inside its field of fire; the gunship couldn’t hit anything within three meters of it at this height as the turret couldn’t aim at such a severe downward angle.
With pieces of rooftop exploding and disintegrating behind him, he leapt off the roof of the building arms first and plunged two stories to the adjacent rooftop. He landed in a forward ukemi roll and was instantly back on his feet and sprinting.
Pearce was now heading west and he knew that he had two exfil routes pre-planned in this direction. He queried his VIA with a thought but suddenly realized that he had lost the connection with his HOVR drone. It had simply cut out seconds before he emerged onto the rooftop. Even worse, he found that his hack of all of the local surveillance had been suddenly defeated. He was now blind and exposed, with a military gunship and at least twenty armed hostiles in pursuit. This limited his potential escape routes to only one option that led underground a few blocks away.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 5