“We’re getting it done, sir, and it’s not a burden. It’s an opportunity and an honor. I expect you can’t stay long, so what is it you need me to delve into?”
Dashiel’s senses instantly spiked to high alert, and his body hummed from the surge of adrenaline released into the pathways of his body. Nika’s training, plus a few tweaks to his routines she’d recommended, kicked in with impressive speed and efficiency, even if it was likely already too late.
His eyes scanned the park, despite the fact that his recent dalliances with invisibility made him doubt what he saw. “Your message said you had something you wanted to discuss with me.”
Vance blinked. “No, I—” Abruptly his Manufacturing Director folded like an accordion and collapsed to the ground.
Dashiel knew he should run. But again, it was surely too late, so instead he knelt beside his fallen friend. “Vance, talk to me.” He got no response. The man was breathing, but unconscious.
He froze at the press of cold metal against the base of his neck. His shoulders twitched.
“Don’t even think about fighting back. At point-blank range on your port, an energy pulse will wipe all your programming and leave you a blank. I don’t want that, and I’m certain you don’t want it. Stand up slowly. Don’t resist, and this won’t be painful. Yet.”
The voice sounded familiar, but he didn’t risk glancing back to see the speaker. Instead, he did as instructed. Wrist restraints locked into place, pulling his arms tight across his back.
Nika!
A faint tingle passed over his skin, and his comms died.
“Now, now, no cheating. She’s a smart woman, I’m sure she’ll figure out what’s happened to you soon enough. No need to give her a head start.”
43
* * *
WAYFARER
Mirai
YOUR HEADQUARTERS has been compromised.
For a nanosecond, time stopped. The words hung frozen in Nika’s virtual vision, each letter painted in vivid prismatic strokes.
Then the clock of the world ticked forward.
Her combat routines activated, though she didn’t yet have anything to strike out against. Her strategic ones began spinning out implications and next actions in branching diagrams.
She sent a response demanding more information, but didn’t wait to hear an answer. Next she pinged Perrin while sprinting into the cockpit.
Get everyone out of The Chalet.
Nika? I’m not there right now. What’s wrong?
Activated the in-atmosphere engine.
They know where it is, or how to access it. Justice, the Guides, someone. I’m on the way.
Oh, no! I’ll meet you there.
Lifted off. Entered the destination coordinates.
No, don’t go home. Start working on finding shelter for people. Is Joaquim at The Chalet?
Um…no.
At one kilometer altitude, engaged the emission dampener and cloaking device.
Ryan?
I think so.
I’ll contact him and have him start moving people out all the doors.
What are you going to do?
Engaged the autopilot so she could think.
I’ll have figured it out by the time I get there.
Flying horizontally in the atmosphere was a rougher ride than she’d expected. The skies were stormy today, and the hull shook as it pushed through turbulent air currents.
The thunderclouds acted out her churning thoughts in real time. Whether the enemy knew The Chalet’s physical location and attacked from the street or came through the d-gate doors, she’d need to create an alternate exit—
Nika!
She jumped half out of the cockpit chair. A single word, a consequential word, the urgency it conveyed bleeding through the sterile transmission mechanism to choke off her breath.
Dashiel? What’s happened?
No response arrived.
She’d never hated being right so deeply as she did at this moment.
Her hand hovered over the controls, and she almost turned the Wayfarer around. But where would she turn it toward? She had no idea where he was and no way to find out.
Everything was coming apart, everywhere and all at once. Now, as she sat there suspended in the sky, buffeted by terror and paralysis, it felt as if she were as well. Bit by quantum bit, disintegrating.
She held her hands out in front of her and stared at them with a sort of detached curiosity, expecting them to crumble to dust while she watched.
Was this even a fraction of what he’d felt when she’d disappeared five years ago? How did he survive it? The emotions that used her body as a playground all had names, catalogued and coded into algorithms to enable the fullness of sapient, living experience. Hopelessness to make her hands shake and her lips tremble. Despair to deny her air from her lungs and trigger a strong compulsion to hyperventilate. A wretched melancholy to narrow her vision into a walled tunnel, where all she perceived was the raging thundercloud ahead.
She could fly into it and never come out. End her fractured farce of a life and leave the world to its fate. To the Rasu—
Stop! She slapped herself across the cheek, then clung to the pain, the smarting sting left behind, letting it sharpen her focus.
She didn’t want to let go of the emotions burying her, because they signified something deep and powerful and true. But for the sake of all the people she owed it to save, she must. So as a single tear carved a path down her cheek and fell to the floor, she shut off her emotion processes.
Breathed. Reasserted control. Analyzed the facts as they existed at this instant.
She couldn’t save him. She didn’t have the information or the tools required to do it. Not at present.
But if she was fast and smart and unrelenting, she could save everyone else.
MIRAI
The Chalet was situated among a sea of factories that stretched across the eight hundred kilometers of grasslands between Mirai One and Mirai Two.
These weren’t the sexy factories of the industrial sectors where Dashiel’s assembly plants resided and the shiniest gadgets of a prosperous civilization were constructed. No, this was where the decidedly unsexy but necessary materials that supported such a civilization—piping, basic building materials, recyclers, linens and so on—were churned out by the millions of tonnes. The factories were almost entirely automated, and had been for so long that their existence and functionality was taken for granted by most people.
The Chalet had once been such a factory, owned by someone from Joaquim’s former life whom he knew and trusted. To repay a debt Joaquim had never shared the nature of, the owner had agreed to fudge the numbers so it appeared the factory continued to operate. In return, they had a hidden place to live.
She was landing on the roof of The Chalet when two Justice transports materialized on the horizon from the direction of Mirai One. She had no time!
But the full cloaking system was engaged, and if the Rasu hadn’t detected the ship, Justice transports weren’t likely to, either. The roof should suffice as a staging area, for a time.
Ryan, you’re going to have incoming in a few more seconds. I’m guessing their plan is to blow a hole in a wall and come through it.
Shit. We’ve still got about twenty people inside.
She opened the hatch and extended the ramp, then returned to the cockpit and fired up the laser. The tiniest bit of power, aimed at the roof.
A gaping hole opened up instantly, and she hastily shut the laser off before it tore through three levels and into the ground beneath the building.
Get everyone upstairs to the third floor dorm wing.
But the doors—
Will be taken out when Justice creates its own entrance any second now.
On it.
She unlocked the Wayfarer’s grapnel and hurried outside. A torrential downpour greeted her, and in seconds the rain had soaked through her clothes and into her skin.
As she crouched beneath th
e hull, a shudder cascaded across the roof, bringing with it a rumbling noise so deep and low her bones vibrated to its cadence. Time was up.
She gripped the tensile fiber just above the grapnel’s claw with both hands, then dragged it over to the hole in the roof she’d created. Designed as a last-resort tool to secure the ship to an object in space, usually one without either a dock or gravity, the fiber was twenty centimeters thick and the claw a meter wide. So not lightweight.
When she reached the hole, she heaved the claw through it, then looked back at the ship; the illusion of its nonexistence held, and the rain appeared to fall through where she knew it stood.
She leapt down after the claw to land on the floor below.
The sound of running preceded three people rounding the corner. She swung around, Glaser raised—
Dominic jumped. “Nika! Where the hells did you come from?”
She pointed at the hole and motioned them toward her. “Hurry. Up the cable. Where are the others?”
Dominic gave Josie a boost up into the opening. “Most everyone was right behind us, so I don’t know. Ryan and Ava are trying to hold off the dynes at the base of the staircase to buy us time.”
“Okay. You stay here and get people out as they arrive, but if the shooting moves too close, you head up, too. There’s a cloaked ship on the roof. The ramp is extended, ten strides to the east. AEVs are patrolling the vicinity, so people need to get within the ship’s cloaking field as soon as they reach the roof.”
“Understood. Where are you going?”
But she was already sprinting down the stairs. She passed two groups of people on the way and motioned for them to keep heading up.
The discordant roar of an invasion grew deafening as she reached the final landing. Through the stairwell entry, crisscrossing laser fire shredded equipment, furniture and walls beneath billowing smoke.
She lobbed a projectile grenade over Ryan, Ava and IkeBot’s heads and out onto The Floor as she slid in behind them. “Let’s go.”
“Stars, Nika! A little warning? And we can’t go yet. Geoff and Lily are trapped on the second floor of the other wing, hiding in the tank room. Damned if we can get through to them.”
“Who’s Lily?” She might not be as plugged in to the hearts and minds of every NOIR member as Perrin was, but dammit, she knew their names.
Ryan leaned out to sweep a round of Glaser fire across the breadth of The Floor, then ducked back against the wall. “New girl. Ally who got injured at the transit hub explosion. Perrin let her stay here to get patched up.”
“Noted.” She checked her belt. Two grenades left.
She handed one to Ryan. “When I say, use this to take out the base of the opposite stairway, then get your asses to the third floor.”
He nodded shakily and took the grenade.
She turned her kamero filter up to full, crouched low, and scrambled onto The Floor.
Ηq (visual) | scan.infrared(240°:100°)
The energy signatures of the security dynes made them stand out like the gaudy billboards in the Southern Market. She counted six, spread out across the open space. WheatleyBot buzzed around them in a crazed, jagged non-pattern, harassing them with its lasers and so far evading theirs.
Three thermal signatures lay unmoving near where the doors had been before the gaping hole in the wall had consumed the entryway. Her muscles fought to move her toward the signatures while her brain forced them to move her toward the stairway. If she tried to save those people, she’d only share their fate and cause everyone else here to do the same.
Haphazard laser fire veered in her direction. She flattened onto the floor, but not fast enough, and pain lanced into her left shoulder. Just a graze, so she let the damage mitigation routines leap into action and crawled the remaining three meters to the stairway. Her left arm wasn’t much help as she clambered up to the first landing and around the corner, then finally stood to vault up the remaining stairs to the second floor.
Now, Ryan.
Three seconds later the world quaked. Cracks exploded across the walls, ceiling and floor; racing clouds of debris chased her as she sprinted down the hall to the tank room—
—a streak of laser fire missed her other shoulder by barely a centimeter. “Friendly fire!”
Geoff and a woman with champagne hair were huddled in the corner behind the tank. “Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m sorry, Nika! I thought you were one of the Justice dynes.”
“Clearly. Move!”
Geoff urged the woman—Lily, she assumed—out of hiding, and they scurried into the hall.
Nika didn’t glance at the closed door to her room as they ran past it, though only through sheer force of will. Her home, and she’d never be seeing it again.
“Up the stairs.” When they reached the third floor, she grabbed their arms to stop them. “Hold here, at the corner.”
Dominic, get everybody away from the dividing wall.
Done.
She retrieved her last grenade, stepped into the hallway and studied the distance, then carefully sent it rolling down the floor toward the wall and ducked back around the corner.
It was overkill for an interior wall, but her Glaser wouldn’t cut through it fast enough.
The explosion threw them into the air. Nika’s injured shoulder slammed into the opposite wall. A chunk of ceiling landed on Lily’s head, and she crumpled to the floor.
Perhaps a little too much overkill.
Dust clogged Nika’s airways as she and Geoff picked Lily up. “Just a few more steps to go.”
They picked their way across what remained of the dividing wall. Lily wasn’t unconscious, but when she tried to make it to the other side under her own power, she tripped over a chunk of wall and landed face-first in the rubble.
Ryan appeared out of the dust-laden haze. “IkeBot, come here and help her!”
The dyne ambled over and lifted Lily into his arms to carry her to the hole in the roof, where two people leaned down into the hole and hoisted her up.
Nika grabbed Ryan’s arm. “Is this everyone?”
“It’s everyone who’s functional.”
Her gaze went to the still intact right stairway. “If only there’d been time to grab everyone’s psyche backups….”
“Perrin moved them all off-site yesterday. Everything’s safe.”
“Fantastic. But why did she move them?”
Ryan winced and hunched over a little. “That’s not my story to tell.”
“Hey, are you injured—”
WheatleyBot screamed around the corner from the stairway, smoke pouring out of cracks in its frame, and circled Ryan in a cacophony of buzzes and chirps. He motioned for the little drone to fly up through the hole in the roof. “Time to go!”
Nika was the last to shimmy up the cable. When she reached the roof, she found it empty, which meant everyone had made it on board the Wayfarer.
Eighteen people was a tight fit in the small ship, and she squeezed her way past several of them to reach the cockpit, start up the engine and retract the ramp.
Ryan leaned heavily against the back of her chair. “I didn’t have time to grab our hard files. Most of the server equipment got destroyed in the firefight, but I doubt all of it. There’s a lot of valuable data stored inside.”
She nodded resolutely as she lifted off. “I plan to take care of that.”
“Of course you do….” His voice weakened with every syllable.
She looked back at him in concern. “Did you get hit?”
He grimaced and clutched the headrest with both hands. “Yeah, but so did you.”
She’d forgotten all about her shoulder; it and much of her left arm were numb, and the material of her shirt was soaked through in blood. It could wait. “Dominic, Ava, get up here. Ryan needs help.”
“No, I’ll be….” His fingers slipped off the headrest as he collapsed to the cabin floor.
Dominic and Ava reached him almost immediately, and Nika fo
rced herself to let them take care of him. The repair bench on the ship wasn’t robust enough to take care of all these injuries; they were going to need access to more advanced benches, and likely a tank. She’d figure out where they might find that sort of help in a second, but first things first.
She continued their ascent until they hovered a hundred meters above The Chalet, where she set the laser to full strength and fired.
The laser cut into the roof like a lightning strike from the heavens. The roof tumbled into the third floor in broken chunks, then the roof and the floor below collapsed into the next floor. Then the remainder of the walls crumbled as the structure disintegrated to bury their home and the dynes who invaded it beneath a mountain of rubble.
44
* * *
MIRAI
PERRIN APPROACHED THE SCENE of the attack with growing dread, when she hadn’t thought she retained any dread to summon.
Amid sirens and circling drones, a turbulent ocean of rubble loomed where The Chalet and half of the buildings surrounding it had once stood. All piled up in one location as the debris was, the destruction somehow seemed even more extensive than at the transit hub. Also because it was the signposts of her life buried underneath the rubble.
A sob welled up in her chest, and she covered her mouth to silence it. In the years she’d lived here, she’d rarely seen The Chalet from the outside; its façade held no sentimental value. Silly that its demolition would.
But it wasn’t the sight, it was what it signified. Her home, gone. A place of camaraderie and friendship, gone. Everything she’d known for the last decade. The physicality of memories—the places where this and that had happened. Lives and trinkets.
On the other side of double barricades, she spotted Adlai giving instructions to a man, and possibly to the two mecha waiting off to the side.
When the man nodded and strode off toward the debris with the mecha in tow, Adlai’s gaze swept across the scene, only to freeze on seeing her. A tentative smile crept onto his face—and quickly vanished, probably on account of her miserable appearance.
Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Page 55
