“Lucy is connected into the network downstairs, and is monitoring their actions,” Emma replied.
“Velen, Aily, and Cherlyn are holding station in the hall and stairway to relay the signal.”
Pearce was impressed. Having no way to connect to the planetary net, they had instead created an ad-hoc wireless network. “How many threats?”
Emma looked slightly sick as she replied, “All of them. The building is now under lockdown. Fifteen men with weapons are approaching the 8th floor via the stairwells.”
Pearce looked at the collection of weapons, which had been procured to offer a variety of mission capabilities for one or two individuals and not to arm a large group of combatants. There were six pistols of various types, specializing from long range to rapid fire. Two Entech rippers, a class of close-quarters Personal Defense Weapons that were illegal on most planets and would be enormously useful inside the building. There were no carbines or assault rifles, but a covert sniper rifle was disassembled and packed into a carry case. A handful of explosive devices of various types rounded out the supply. Pearce would have been much happier with a Confed armory but they’d have to make do.
He handed five of the handguns to Emma one at a time, who passed them back to her fellow AGIs. The sixth was a tiny needler used for up-close assassinations and wouldn’t be useful. Next he grabbed the two PDWs and quickly deployed them into combat mode. He kept one for himself and handed the other to Emma. He grabbed two stun grenades and the sniper rifle case, leaving everything else behind.
“This is all we have for now; grab whatever weapons you can from the enemy. I’ll go first and draw their fire, and once they are concentrated on me you can sweep up any remaining targets.” Pearce considered for a moment, then added. “Only armed threats or those actively attacking you should be considered targets. Do not harm anyone else.” These AGI’s were brilliant, fully functioning personas, but he had no idea how their morality had been programmed or evolved.
Pearce waived the Dutchies out of the safe room and resealed it. He guessed that the next person to open it would be a surviving member of the gang downstairs in the aftermath of what was about to happen, in which case they’d be vaporized when the room self-destructed. He led the newly freed AGIs back into the hallway and to the stairs, where another half-naked AGI was waiting.
“They are about to enter the 8th floor,” it said softly. Pearce noted the internal inconsistencies he was experiencing towards the AGI’s in this situation; he was already improperly thinking of Emma as a female while attributing gender-less pronouns to the rest of the AGI’s. It was simply not a situation you faced every day. He inwardly shrugged at the madness and started down the stairs.
The fire stairwell was a dog-legged half-turn design, with no well space and only a solid wall between each opposite flight. That meant that there was no way to be spotted from below, and allowed Pearce to rapidly descend until the tenth floor where he began to approach more cautiously, taking pains to muffle any sounds his footsteps made. On the way down they picked up another AGI who had been relaying communications and they finally ran into the third halfway to the 9th floor. All combined that meant Pearce was being followed by fifteen exotic sex robots in various states of undress, and operated by sentient artificial intelligences that had just been freed from a life of abuse and servitude. Crazy.
Pearce sent a comm for them all to remain where they were until he signaled, then slowly crept down towards the landing that would allow him to view the 8th floor. In his hands he gripped the ripper, which was fully powered and ready for combat. His VIA was in Combat Mode, his body had been primed with enough adrenals to kill a small animal, but he remained calm and steady, nearly in a battle trance.
He took a step backwards out onto the landing and peeked around the corner towards the door to the 8th floor, leading with his weapon. A solitary tango was standing halfway inside the frame, shoulder braced against the door to hold it open. He was aiming a large automatic shotgun into the hall beyond.
From the landing, Pearce couldn’t see the tango’s face, which meant he couldn’t be spotted either. He listened, and could hear the sounds of movement and voices from inside the doorway, but nothing else in the stairs. From a tactical perspective, it would make sense to leave someone to guard the door while the rest of the team proceeded onto the floor and into the rooms. There was likely no one else in the stairway.
Pearce kept his aim on the rear of the targets head and slowly made his way down the stairs until he was nearly directly behind him. The goon must have sensed some periphery movement because he suddenly glanced back over his shoulder at Pearce. Before his eyes could even finish widening in surprise Pearce snapped his left hand into the exposed side of his neck, crushing the vagus nerve and knocking the man unconscious.
Pearce caught him as he collapsed with his left hand while covering the hallway with the ripper, and lowered him to the ground with a minimum of noise, his body still holding the door open. There was no reason to kill him; he would be out for the remainder of the fight to come. His VIA tagged the tango as neutralized and relayed the information to the AGI’s waiting on the ninth floor.
There was no one else in the hallway at the moment, and the door to the stairs at the far end of the hallway was closed. Muted pastel lights poured out of several open doorways, and the shadows of movement from within were visible in them. Pearce took cover in the doorway and dropped to a knee before yelling “He’s out here! South stairwell!”
Men rushed out of the open doorways, all aiming towards the south stairwell, which was directly opposite the one Pearce was aiming from. He waited a beat until he counted a dozen men, and one of them began to turn around towards his position. Then he tightened his grasp on the foregrip of the weapon and squeezed the trigger.
A high pitched whine not all that dissimilar from a power drill roared through the hallway as the ripper spewed light and death. The Entech weapon fired focused blasts of energy at a rate exceeding a thousand bolts per minute down the hallway at six times the speed of sound. The bolts expanded rapidly at range but in close quarters were exceptionally deadly. At a quarter kilometer getting hit would feel like a bad sunburn. At just a few meters, the densely packed bolts blasted clean through soft tissue and bone.
In the first second his shots ripped through four bodies before finally halting, leaving dozens of centimeter sized holes in each person. The ripper’s rounds imparted no kinetic energy on their targets, who simply collapsed to the floor like ragdolls. As they fell, Pearce was already adjusting his fire to new targets further down the hallway.
In just two more seconds he had gunned down everyone standing in the hall. Pearce stopped firing and an eerie quiet combined with the smell of ozone was all that remained. Only the twelve deathly still and smoking bodies littering the hallway provided any evidence that something had just happened. With the unconscious body at his feet that made thirteen tangos down, leaving two unaccounted for.
There was a shout from within one of the rooms, which Pearce’s VIA-enhanced hearing quickly pinpointed using passive echolocation, and his OHUD painted a red circle approximating the tangos location. Based upon the tactical situation, Pearce figured the last foot-soldier would be holding position by the elevator banks, which were just off the main hallway. He shifted his aim to that corner defensively and waited.
The elevator guard quickly proved himself dimwitted as he attempted to glance down the hall towards Pearce without leading with his own weapon. The ripper whined once again for just a fraction of a second, and the entire left side of the enemies face simply disintegrated. Pearce instantly was on his feet and moving down the hallway towards the doorway to the room with the last remaining tango. The OHUD had placed the enemy in the second open doorway. While he had no reason to distrust the AGIs, he still cautiously approached and cleared the first open doorway that several of the men had burst from.
He slid silently past several more closed doors, feet tight and rol
ling, knees slightly flexed to minimize his upper body movement. His aim never moved a centimeter from the doorway in question. Along the way, he passed by and over the first group of dead bodies. There was no blood, as the wounds were all self-cauterizing, but the smell of burnt flesh assaulted his nostrils. His VIA automatically dampened his sense of smell, and he forced his body to relax as he reached the edge of the doorway and began to clear the corner, pivoting around the apex.
When he completed the maneuver without seeing his adversary, he simply reached out to the door control panel and closed it. After locking it, he blasted the controls with a burst from the ripper and then blasted the emergency manual release panel as well. It would take the occupant quite some time to get out, by which time Pearce would be long gone. There was no reason to make a risky entry into the room with an armed and barricaded enemy.
With the last target effectively neutralized, he signaled for the group of AGIs to rendezvous at the stairwell. They were bounding through the door before he made it halfway back, efficiently looting the weapons of the dead. They moved with a speed and precision that mimicked the best operators Pearce had served with.
Pearce shook his head again; this would be a hell of a war story someday for sure.
SIXTEEN
Vegas, Orchard System
United Sol Confederation Protectorate
The building lobby was nearly empty of security, with one large group of enforcers headed to the spaceport and the other dead or neutralized upstairs. There were only two guards left, one near the caged window that sold drugs and other illicit substances, and another near the door that led to the gambling salon. Near the reception area, Lucky sat at a desk behind where the woman who had greeted Pearce stood. There were still men guarding the front entrance, but none in immediate sight of the doors. The working girls and johns that had been in the lobby earlier were all nowhere to be found.
Out of the stairwell stepped a lithe and dark-skinned woman, fully nude from head to toe. She silently padded towards the reception area with her hands behind her back, pushing her already voluptuous bosom into an even more prominent position. A sly grin adorned her face and she walked with almost a skip in her step. She caught the eye of the reception girl, who turned and said something to Lucky behind her. The smile he had worn like a badge earlier was missing, a frown occupying its space. He slowly stood to his feet with a puzzled visage.
“Gloria, what are you doing down here?” he asked the AGI. Pearce could see the confusion writ across his face. This was impossible. The Dutchies were caged in, shackled to their rooms, unable to ever leave let alone waltz across the main lobby. A wiser man would have instantly realized that something was seriously wrong. Would have pieced together the fact that an armed raiding party had just headed up to the 8th floor with the undeniable reality of the female figure in front of him. Whether it was hubris, stupidity, or simply being distracted by the Nubian goddess, the end result was that the proper response to such a development was ignored. Rather than sounding an alarm, Lucky quite literally gaped.
And then the AGI shot him through the forehead.
The weapon was essentially a low-powered railgun pistol which fired frangible slugs. It made almost no audible sound as it fired, making it a perfect close range assassination weapon. The wet sound of Lucky’s head exploding was louder than any noise the pistol itself made. Before his body even began to fall the AGI named Gloria shot the woman at the reception counter, who was the only other one with a panic button in immediate range.
That left the two stunned guards in the lobby who were quickly fumbling to raise their own weapons as they saw the violence erupt in front of them. As they reacted to engage the beautiful yet deadly shooter, Pearce and another AGI quickly pushed open the stairwell door they had been peeking from behind and took them out with their own weapons, twin suppressed pistols that produced heavy coughs as they fired. Loud, but from their firing position inside the doorway hopefully not loud enough to alert anyone outside.
The room is clear.
Pearce and his unorthodox squad swept into the lobby, weapons at the ready. He had incorporated the AGIs into his VIA’s tactical squad suite, which allowed him to easily monitor their positions and provide orders and directions. What they lacked in experience and training they made up for with their instantaneous robotic acceptance of any commands he sent. Accordingly, as they took control of the lobby with strategic cover and firing positions, they looked nearly as good as a professional soldiers. Sans the vast majority of clothing and armor, of course.
Pearce took point, and with the other two AGIs with stealthy weapons trailing just behind approached the main doors. There were no hostiles visible immediately outside of them. With the thinning out of the ranks, Pearce figured that only the checkpoint at the end of the driveway and the vehicle turret would be manned. With their attention all focused outward, with any luck.
The trio reached the entranceway as Pearce swapped his pistol for the sniper rifle he had slung across his shoulder. Leading with the barrel, he peered down the driveway through the scope. Only a handful of men stood guard near the street.
Pearce sent a command and the rest of the makeshift squad quickly hurried to catch up to them, while keeping an eye on their exposed rear. He had them spread out across the entrance surrounding the sliding glass doors, so that they could provide covering fire down the driveway as best as possible. Pearce was worried about exiting through the doors as he recalled how they had made a racket when he came through them earlier, but he banked that it was a sound the guards had all gotten used to. Given enough time, a person could learn to live with any annoyance. It was human nature.
The doors slid open as Pearce touched the open button, and sure enough not one of the guards turned to look. Pearce took a few steps forward, when he suddenly heard the revving of a massive engine from further down the street. He froze, noticing the guards suddenly snapping alert and readying weapons and the autocannon turret operator swinging the twin-barreled death machine towards the source of the noise.
Emerging from around a corner came an enormous armored gunwagon with an even larger autocannon turret than the one parked in the driveway. Pearce quickly pieced together what was happening; a rival gang must have sensed an opportunity in the lightly manned defenses and decided that it was the perfect time for a surprise attack. Time seemed to stand still for a moment and then all hell broke loose.
There was a tremendous roar as both turrets began firing at almost the same instant. The defender poured 20mm auto-cannon shells into the side of the approaching enemy, but the vehicle’s armor mostly shrugged them off in a tremendous display of sparks and ricocheting fire. Its own turret blasted back, but not at the stationary AV; rather it swept wildly across the barricade where the other guards hunkered for cover, mostly in vain. As several guards were gruesomely killed by the powerful weapon, Pearce saw the guard with the anti-tank launcher struggling to bring it to bear. As the vehicle sped closer to the barricade it shifted its fire up the driveway in a whiplashing arc, chewing up pavement, banging off the side of the defending AV, and heading straight toward the main entrance.
Get down!
Pearce was already moving even as he transmitted his warning across the comm. Being already exposed outside of the doorway, he opted to dive forward towards the sparse cover the support pillars and low garden walls of the porte-cochere offered. The action saved his life, for less than a second later he literally felt the wind from the auto-cannon rounds slamming into the ground just behind him as the telltale cracks of nearby supersonic ammunition rang through the air.
Gloria and the second AGI that had been right behind him were cut into pieces as the large caliber shells pulverized their robust artificial bodies. The arc of fire kept right on going, tearing through the windows of the entranceway and into the lobby beyond. Pearce crawled his way to the nearest pillar while enduring a hurricane of sound and tried to regain his senses and battle awareness.
Th
ere was an even louder whump of a massive explosion as Pearce felt a blast wave of heat roll over him. The heavy cannon fire suddenly stopped, and as Pearce’s ears rang he quickly looked around and assessed the situation. He thought maybe the defenders had gotten that anti-tank rocket off and taken out the attackers.
He quickly discovered he was wrong. The parked armored vehicle was destroyed, a gaping hole spouting flames from the place where the turret had been. The damage was consistent with a plunging-style missile attack and not from autocannon fire, which meant somewhere nearby was an additional attacking group sporting heavy weapons. Pearce saw that the defending guards had been wiped out before being able to fire their own rocket in response. The attacking vehicle was nowhere in sight.
His sniper rifle was laying on the ground a meter away from him where had dropped it while diving for cover. He quickly crawled out and grabbed it, returning to the cover of the pillar. He scanned the surrounding areas with his eyes, his head moving so quickly that his actual vision was a blur. He trusted his VIA to automatically notice and tag any threats in his field of vision, as it could process the visual data from his ocular implants far faster than his mere brain. It didn’t pick up any threats in range, but it did analyze and place a tracing arc on the calculated flight path the incoming missile had taken.
Adjacent to either side of the pillar were low concrete flower boxes just a quarter meter high. Whatever flora had once graced them was long gone, leaving behind only tightly packed dirt and some twigs. Pearce used one as a forearm rest for the rifle and took aim through the scope towards the direction his VIA indicated the missile had come from, back near where the enemy gunwagon had appeared from. He observed nothing but long shadows draped between narrow bands of soft red sunlight, but continued to cover the area. Then he finally checked on the rest of his group.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 20