Specter Protocol

by Eddie R. Hicks

  Miyuki crawled across the floor backward, trembling hands holding her chest. Her eyes, full of terror, watched as Yanmei’s body jerked and shook, the nanites were inducing violent muscle spasms. The RWs were attempting to disable her. Neither RW finished Yanmei off. Miyuki dragged herself up and peered beyond the console. The RW’s stopped to pull spare nanotubes from their arms, along with extra ammo clips. The RW duo was out of ammo and nanites, and once they rectified that Miyuki and Serge were dead. And this time, Yanmei wouldn’t be able to cleanse them of hostile nanites.

  Miyuki took another glance at Yanmei’s twitching body. Yanmei’s hands were free. She saw why when looking behind Yanmei. She’d dropped her plasma rifle as she ran to save Miyuki. The RWs finished reloading. One stood and scanned the lab as the other tossed his second empty nanotube to the floor. This was it.

  Miyuki ran. Bullets flew in response. She dove. The rifle’s blazing muzzle followed her. She rolled across the floor. Bullets perforated it in her wake. She grabbed Yanmei’s plasma rifle and checked to see if her MEP gauge was ready. It was. She ghostwalked out of trouble. The two RW’s looked confused, their emerald eyes scanning the area they last saw Miyuki. Their weapons took aim at Yanmei’s twitching body instead. Miyuki aimed, pulled, and held the trigger. A flurry of plasma fire cut through their Defense Matrix.

  The first targeted RW collapsed, his body half incinerated by plasma. The second spun and fired, at nobody. His panicking face showed he was still unsure why there was an invisible target in the lab, a face that melted from Miyuki’s point-blank shot. Smoke lifted from his burning skull—it looked a chimney on a cold winter night—before she kicked the body down.

  Yanmei was herself again less than a second later. The nanites that’d been controlling her shut down at the death of the RW. Moving quickly, Yanmei injected new nanites into her body. She exhaled joyfully when the task completed. It cleansed her. The muscles in her body returned to normal. Miyuki made a note of that.

  She motioned to Miyuki. “Very good.” Yanmei retrieved the prototype TEK suit, once again lifting it over her shoulder. She spoke into the radio. “All teams fall back and fortify the launch pad!”

  “Understood,” Wu said over the communication channel. “There’s a transport attempting to leave.”

  Yanmei frowned. “Secure it! Do not let it escape!”

  Then facing Miyuki, Yanmei made an after you gesture. She wondered why at first and then looked down realizing it. Miyuki held the only working plasma rifle now. Yanmei didn’t and her hands weren’t free either as she carried the prototype. And Serge, he was the human who needed protection. Miyuki had to take point now, and she wasn’t ready for that.

  She ghostwalked once again. In the base’s halls, she found the optimal path for their escape. They had to climb several flights of stairs, as the launch pad was on the rooftop according to Serge. Alarms had been buzzing at that point, louder than the ones from earlier, forcing her to eliminate PMCs that got in the path. She’d wonder if they had families later. She needed to honor the dead she cared about the most, by making sure the prototype TEK suit left the base.

  A PMC soldier stood in their way to the exit for the launch pad. She shot him in the head, and it blasted into smoldering pieces. The exit door behind him dripped with gore and pink chunks while his unmoving corpse fell to the floor. She waved Serge and Yanmei to follow as she pushed the door open. Arctic winds blew against her face.

  The three were racing to the launchpad now. The shuttle Serge spoke of idled ahead surrounded by members of the Specter team with plasma rifles flashing with pulses of light in all directions, Miyuki saw why as they neared. TEK suits from below leaped up to the platform using the jets strapped to their backs. Specter team members on cooldown weren’t ghostwalking and therefore had to cover behind the shuttle’s landing legs. That made them targets for the TEK suit soldiers, and it created a complex barrier of exchanging weapons fire Miyuki had to lead Yanmei and Serge through. They had to keep low one moment, running the next, stopping altogether another. Crisscrossing bolts of plasma energy dashed back and forth. It was like playing level six of the Imaginary Protectors arcade game.

  New TEK suits leaped up from the surface, two maybe five, she didn’t know. All she knew was they needed to run up the entry ramp of the shuttle before those new targets acquired them. Miyuki sprinted. Her combat HUD highlighted hostile targets that could place Serge in weapons range. Still sprinting, she held the plasma rifle steady at those highlighted red in her vision and pulled the trigger. She didn’t miss.

  To her left, three suits arrived to join the fun, the exhaust from their jets obscured the battlefield with blinding white mist. Miyuki shot at them. She missed. The targets were moving too fast. She continued firing at the airborne TEK suits, hovering in the skies like superheroes. She grimaced, and her MEP gauge trickled lower.

  5 percent.

  4 percent.

  3 percent.

  The targets remained shooting.

  And she was out of MEP, Miyuki hit the cooldown phase and was visible.

  Yanmei and Serge stomped up the entry ramp, reaching the safety of the shuttle with the prototype in tow. They left her. Miyuki was alone, not even the Specters had remained outside to fend off the TEK suited PMCs. She retreated, heart beating fast, hairs on her neck looking out for incoming blasts of plasma.

  She had no idea how she got inside the cockpit alive standing with the Specter team.

  “Smith,” Yanmei said tossing the prototype suit in the corner. “You still have access to their network?”

  Serge was sitting on the pilot’s chair with his tablet plugged into its console. He held it, accessing his apps. “Yes, and I’m trying to do something.”

  Yanmei stood behind watching six new TEK suits leap up to the launch pad via the windshield. “Do it faster!”

  “Naw, I was thinking about doing it slower, you know?” Serge sneered. “Make this escape so much more dramatic—”

  “Watch your tongue, human!”

  Plasma from multiple angles crashed against the hull of the shuttle. The entry ramp lifted, and its main entrance shut and locked. It didn’t stop Miyuki from checking seven times to ensure none of their enemies had boarded. The floor rumbled as the plasma barrage increased. She looked again—nothing. She wasn’t convinced.

  And then the rumbling stopped. She saw the six TEK suits ahead through the windshield, their robotic looking helmets inspected their guns that were no longer firing. The six gave their weapons hard knocks with fists, not that it’d make them work.

  The Australian in the pilot’s chair erupted into laughter. “There! Let’s go!”

  Yanmei leaned forward watching the TEK suited PMCs struggle with their rifles. “What did you do?”

  “I have their codes remember?” Serge said. “Took a while, but I uploaded malware into their weapons, and shut ‘em down.”

  The shuttle vibrated again, this time because of its engines flaring. The battlefield shrunk from view through the windshield, dark skies, and falling snow becoming prominent. They were airborne. They were also shaking a lot. It threw Miyuki’s balance off and forced her to grab ceiling-mounted handlebars.

  Yanmei pointed. “The Pacific Ocean is that way.”

  “I’m not a bloody pilot,” Serge said fiddling with his pad. “I’m remotely operating this with my tablet by hacking the autopilot.”

  “And we’re traveling east, not west.”

  “Give me a second to figure this shit out. It’s like playing a video game without going through the tutorial missions!”

  Everyone tumbled forward. So did the prototype suit, it slid and hit the dashboard. Miyuki crashed into one seat ahead, and she clenched it. The rumbles of the shuttle continued. Dark skies weren’t visible on the windshield now, the snow-covered surface filled it and enlarged more and more every second. She felt safer fighting the TEK suits.

  “Now we’re crashing,” Yanmei growled.

  “Just shut the
fuck up!” Serge said and grimaced. He kept his attention to his tablet’s screen. He wasn’t kidding, it looked like he was playing a game app.

  The snow-covered ground vanished, and the sight of a neon glowing city swung into the windshield’s view, its size was expanding. Serge scowled at the city beyond the battering of snowfall.

  “Oh bugger,” he said. “There’s another hacker inside this ship. This might be a good time to strap in!”

  Thirty-Four

  Ray

  Access granted.

  It was the words on Ray’s screen that made him sigh in relief. Ahead at the base, on its rooftop landing platform was an exchange of plasma rifle bolts. And then an idle shuttle shut its doors, before launching to the skies. The shuttle had a vulnerable icon hover above it when viewed from his glasses.

  Ray had a feeling whoever boarded the shuttle was bad, and it wasn’t because the base’s TEK suited personnel had swarmed it, and at one point started blasting the shuttle’s armored platted hull. It was because the shuttle had originally entered a course to the west, to the Pacific Ocean, via autopilot at that.

  Ray hacked in and began overriding the shuttle’s autopilot. He issued a course correction command. The shuttle rotated and turned back. He spun it again. Someone was fighting Ray, kicking him from the shuttle’s computer only for Ray to reconnect and kick them out. Then they’d come back and repeat. The back-and-forth actions sent the shuttle into a spin, nearly causing it to crash. The hacker aboard the shuttle prevented the plunge and then sent it flying to Anchorage. That hacker aboard the shuttle was good.

  The shuttle moved out of the range of Ray’s laptop, tablet, and phone. Error messages stating the signal was weak flashed brightly making Ray’s face look red. “Fuck!”

  Theo looked back and snorted. “Lost your video game?”

  “Let’s get moving!” Ray yelled, pointing at the shuttle vanishing into the distance. “Follow them!”

  Bashiir put the car in motion. It sped through the snow-covered streets in pursuit, swaying now and then with slabs of snow kicking up behind. Ray’s connection to the shuttle faded in and out. Distance lag gave the hacker aboard the advantage. Their car needed to arrive at plowed roads and fast before the shuttle flew out of range and returned to its previous course, a flight over the Pacific.

  “You sure these are the right people?” Theo asked.

  “Positive,” Ray said, his eyes still focused on his laptop’s screen. “Those RWs infected with the virus had to have been killed by them. They took whatever it was in the lab and brought it to the shuttle.”

  “And who are they?”

  Ray sent Theo a copy of the video he captured of the RW’s battle. It replayed on the car’s dashboard screen, two Asian women whose eyes were synthetic, like an RW, only it was a ruby glow rather than emerald. A brawny Caucasian assisted the women.

  Theo watched the video and grimaced when the RWs got killed, bringing the footage to an end. He replayed it again, and then a third time.

  Theo grunted. “I wanna say Federation, but…”

  Ray lifted an eyebrow. “But?”

  “I dunno, it’s hard to tell with this video,” Theo said. “You can barely see the two women. You sure the file isn’t corrupted? It’s almost like, those girls weren’t really there.”

  He was positive the captured video had no issues. “What? Like it was edited?”

  Theo shrugged. “Just seems weird, man.”

  “Well, my drone watched them enter the shuttle,” Ray said. “So, they do exist.”

  “And were in and out of existence from the RWs point of view…” Theo paused mid-speech. He realized something. “No, it can’t be…” Theo looked at Bashiir manning the wheel as his eyes remained forward to the city of Anchorage now coming into view. “Yo, Bashiir.”

  “I am focused on driving right now.”

  And Ray should have been concentrating on hacking. He returned to his laptop, issuing what little malware commands to the shuttle’s autopilot that he could. He made it drift to the left and right, reducing its speed. It was the best he could do. He had to slow it down to keep his laptop signal in range. It was the only way to prevent it from seeking a course to the Pacific Ocean. Malware appeared on his laptop. Ray’s face dampened with sweat. Now he was being hacked.

  Ray countered by uploading malware of his own back at the hacker. The progress bar moved from 0 to 80 in three seconds. Lag made it hold at 80, and again at 81. 100 percent. Now the hacker was too busy removing Ray’s malware. It allowed him to deal with his laptop’s vulnerabilities and remove what malware he could. The sounds of his fingers typing the keyboard were like machineguns, and he imagined the hacker on the other end was moving their fingers at the same speed. This was a hacker fight and computer viruses were the weapons used.

  Both vehicles were in the city now, and the plowed streets below made it easy for Bashiir to tail the shuttle as Ray forced it to keep with them. It was like flying a kite and Ray’s wireless connection was the string keeping the shuttle in the skies. Bashiir pulled onto the highway, and swerved around several cars, but his foot never let up on the pedal. Ray’s drone kept pace behind, there was no time to retrieve it, only time to force it to follow.

  The shuttle lowered to the city level. It was meters away from the surface of the highway. Close enough to see its blazing blue thrusters keeping it moving and airborne.

  “That your doing, Ray?” Theo asked.

  Ray looked up from his laptop’s screen, wincing at the rear entrance view of the shuttle ahead. He shook his head, an uneasy, “No…”

  Its rear entrance slid open. Plasma soared from the shuttle, like Roman candles aimed horizontally. The plasma raced toward their car.

  “Fuck!”

  Theo clasped his glowing purple palms together. An electrokinetic barrier cocooned the car, absorbing the plasma fired at it. They veered sharply, car wheels screeching in the darkness, same with the others around. Theo leaned out the passenger side window, his fists raged with electrical thunderbolts.

  He retreated inside, his teeth gritting. “I can’t fuckin’ see ‘em!”

  “What do you mean?!” Ray yelled and pointed at the transport. “They’re right fucking there!”

  “The shooters, malaka! That shuttle ain’t got no guns! How are they shooting at us?”

  Ray looked. The door to the low-flying shuttle ahead was opened and shots were being fired. But that was all he could see. Looking via the drone, Ray noticed something different. He saw four or five gunmen dressed in black, wielding plasma rifles pointed at their pursuing car. Ray winced. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Gonna hit cooldown!” Theo yelled, holding his glowing purple hands up.

  Bashiir nodded. “Understood.”

  And he turned the wheel quickly, forcing the car into a sharp turn. Bashiir brought it to an offramp leading to the lower levels of the highway. The line of sight to the shuttle broke.

  Now Ray was gritting his teeth. “Bashiir.”

  “It is for our own good,” Bashiir said, keeping his steady hands on the wheel.

  “Electrokinesis barriers can take a lot out of me,” Theo said. “Give me a minute for cooldown to end.”

  “We might lose them in the next minute,” Ray said.

  “One of you two figure something out then!” Theo roared. “Cause I’m all out of tricks.”

  As for tricks, Ray turned to his laptop, still connected with the shuttle, and viewed his limited options via his app.

  SRS Hack

  Infects a short-range transport shuttle computer with a trojan, allowing for control of certain operations. Available commands:

  Redirect autopilot

  Disable cabin lights

  Eject reactor

  Force left turn

  Force right turn

  Decrease speed

  Increase speed

  The best option he saw was ejecting its reactor. Given the shuttle’s lower elevation, the other optio
ns might have worked, but they were running out of time and needed a quick and guaranteed fix before Ray lost the connection, this time for good. And the upper level of the highway above only weakened the signal.

  Ray selected Eject Reactor. Malware issued cracked passwords to the shuttle, convincing its computers that the shuttle sustained critical damage and the reactor needed to be ejected. Without the power from the reactor, the shuttle would be forced to land and unable to fly back to the Federation. He executed the malware. His screen sent back the confirmation message. The shuttle ascended to a safe distance and ejected the reactor. For good measure, Ray set it to auto-destruct. No need to have a fusion reactor crash down onto the city.

  The sky brightened as if the sun had suddenly risen. Bashiir was free to find the next on-ramp and return to the upper level of the highway.

  Theo unshielded his arms protecting his eyes from the burst of light that was like a second sun. “The fuck was that?!”

  Ray grimaced. “The right thing to do,” he said. “I hope.”

  Bashiir found a ramp, turned onto it, and brought their car to the upper deck. He pulled over when a clearing in the mass of skyscrapers appeared giving the three a glance at the mountains in the distance. And the glowing object flying toward it. The object lost altitude, leaving behind blackened smoke in its wake. At that point, Ray lost connection to the shuttle, and there was no way to get it back now unless he got closer. That wasn’t an option anymore, not from where they idled on the highway, watching.

  Ray grinned at the sight. “It dropped its reactor.”

  Theo smiled, keeping his eyes on the shuttle losing power. “Nice, looks like the blast damaged it too.”

  “They won’t have enough energy to keep flying, and it’s on fire,” Ray said. “They have two options now, land with what little power they have left, or crash—”