“Save your lies for someone who’s listening, you dirty piece of sh—”
“Delilah,” I said, cutting her off. “Bruce said we need to be looking for Delilah. She has the humans or is involved in this somehow.”
Her face became a stone mask and her eyes went dead.
“Delilah’s dead. I should know. I killed her.”
That something I saw in her eyes earlier flickered again. It wasn’t sadness or disappointment. It was fear. Luca was scared of something.
“Bruce said—” I started.
This time she did use a fist.
NINE
I WOKE UP in the back of a TAC Ops van. The right side of my face was swollen and tender from Luca’s answer to my revealing Delilah’s name. I’d never seen Luca scared. She was a hardened operative with years of field experience. She didn’t spook easily, but I was sure that was fear in her eyes.
I assessed my situation.
Three TAC Ops officers surrounded me. One on either side and one directly across. All of them were alert and ready with weapons drawn. None of them wore combat headgear. It made sense. I was unarmed, cuffed with kagome metal cuffs, and my handgun, and Thorn were missing. What kind of threat could I pose against the three of them?
A solid steel partition divided the cargo area from the drivers. This was to prevent any prisoner from accessing the front of the vehicle. I always thought it was foolish. The driver would be the last one to know when something went wrong. They tried to deal with this blind spot by installing mini cameras in the interior of the cargo space.
I was in a standard-issue TAC Ops vehicle. This meant the metal they used wasn’t reinforced with titanium ribbing. It was basically a cargo van with an overlay of steel. This had more to do with cost than my threat level.
The titanium tanks were expensive to operate and only used for high threat targets. Bruce would ride in one of those once I caught his ugly ass.
The van was stationary, which meant they were awaiting orders for transport. Division 13 incarcerated its prisoners in a supermax underground facility named, Sheol. If I let them get me in there, it was game over.
I felt my forearm and realized I still had my techbrace. For a few seconds the surprise almost overwhelmed me. I recovered before I did something stupid like roll up my sleeves and point out their oversight.
Something was off. That should’ve been the first thing they removed along with my weapon. I didn’t bother trying to talk to the TAC Ops. They usually did their speaking violently.
I flexed my forearm and sustained it for several seconds, silently activating Cait. By accessing my brace this way I could communicate silently through the neural network. I didn’t know how much of a charge she had, but the Faraday batteries were kinetically powered. As long as I could move my arm, I could keep my brace powered.
I’d never gotten used to hearing her voice in my head. The head of the Division 13 Sciences Department, Reese, had tried to explain how it worked once the neural net was established. The techbrace was connected to me on several levels and was designed to work with an operative’s unique DNA signature.
He’d lost me when he started showing me the schematics and how the brace interacted on a molecular level with the host operative. He was especially excited about the enhancing properties of the brace, which I had to admit geeked me out a bit too.
Of course, it would be in the officer that was farthest away from me. The brace could enhance my strength and reflexes, but not enough to destroy a pair of kagome cuffs.
Shit. I needed to wait until we were moving. I moved my jaw, which still felt tender from her caress of pain. Luca was a ruthless and skilled fighter. I didn’t want to tangle with her if I could help it. If she left my techbrace on, she was trying to tell me something. I just had to figure out what the message was.
This meant I still had access to body enhancing and med kits but all protocols were disabled. I was on my own. I wasn’t going to be calling any death from above with a disabled brace.
I heard the fake conversation between Bruce and me again. Parts of the conversation were original, but there were some recycled sections, too. It meant someone either hacked into Cait or had Bruce’s office under surveillance. It also meant something else. Someone wanted to burn me.
TEN
THE BANGING ON the side of the van got the driver to start the engine. Sheol could only be accessed from Randalls Island and we had to cross first into Brooklyn then Queens and over the HellGate Bridge to get there. From lower Manhattan, I had a good two hours or so before we even approached the bridge.
If Bruce was scared of Delilah, or whomever she was working with, I needed to know who and what they were capable of. Anyone who could scare a troll into evacuating his own club concerned me. Trolls were notoriously territorial. Most would rather die than give up their homes or places they called their own.
Bruce had evacuated as soon as things got heated and it wasn’t because Division 13 arrived on the scene. He had tried to have us erased kobold style. No. Whoever showed up after us put a real fear into Bruce. I just didn’t know where Delilah fit in. She was supposed to be dead.
The van started moving and I set a two-hour timer in my head.
It was taking Cait a while to answer my request on Delilah, which meant it was sparse at best. I took a moment to observe the TAC Ops in front of me. They wore full combat armor and carried a small arsenal on their bodies. None of them looked at me directly. They were trained not to engage with targets or prisoners, no exceptions.
Disabling them was going to be unpleasant and painful. After a few minutes, I heard Cait’s husky voice in my head.
Delilah had been a Division 13 Operative from the beginning. She was the one Director Sauveur called when things got terminal and needed a final solution. We nicknamed her Azrael, but never to her face or within earshot. Anyone who called her ‘Angel of Death’ usually met a swift end.
Delilah was the only one skilled enough to be considered a threat by Luca. When Delilah defected, it was Luca’s job to bring her down, dead or alive. Luca opted for dead.
These A.I.s were getting sassier with each upgrade and Cait was one of the most sarcastic. Some group of techs somewhere thought the more sarcastic, the more human they would appear to be. When I found those techs, I would introduce them to my fist repeatedly.
Was Delilah still
alive? Luca didn’t think so, but Bruce certainly did. He believed it enough to port out of his club. Enough to think his life was in danger. I really didn’t want to have to deal with the ‘Angel of Death’ if I could avoid it.
Cait’s voice purred in my ear again.
Password required on my own techbrace? Luca was going beyond paranoid.
This was Luca. I had to think of this from her perspective.
ELEVEN
LUCA’S VOICE CAME through clearly.
What if I hadn’t gotten the password?
I shook my head. Typical Luca. Warm and cuddly as a porcupine with rabies.
Why the hell was she taking this risk? Would I do the same thing for her? My answer was immediate—yes. We’d saved each other’s lives too many times to allow a setup like this go unanswered. I’d risk it all to help her.
< Provided you escape your current situation, Division 13 will issue an SOS. That couldn’t be helped. I arranged for the Cuda to be moved to Dragonflies. I left a ghostcase for you inside. Honor has it.>
In the Division, an SOS wasn’t a cry for help. SOS stood for sanitize on sight. It meant I would have the full force of Division 13, the world’s elite operatives, after me. Wonderful.
Somehow, I had to get to Dragonflies in the Reeds, or just Dragonflies as I called it. It operated as a central Archive and provisional neutral location run by Honor, a mage and old friend.
Shit. I couldn’t go to anyone in the Division. I’d have to use my dark contacts and some of them would prefer to shoot first before doing business with me.
Even though she was in as much danger as I was, this felt dangerously close to my being the bait again. If Delilah was alive, she would be gunning for me. If the Division had been breached, every mission Luca took could be a potential death sentence. I still felt like bait.
Compassion was never her strong suit.
I needed to get out of this van before we crossed into Sheol. Or I would be the next thing deleted.
TWELVE
MY WORDS CAME tumbling back to me: You don’t see most of the things coming, and when you least expect it, you get whacked in the nuts. The only person you can trust is you.
I didn’t see this coming and now I had to get out of a moving van without getting shredded or killing three TAC Ops officers. I was really going to have to Bourne the hell out of this.
Once I gave her this instruction, she would dump the equivalent of eight hundred milligrams of caffeine into my bloodstream over a period of two minutes. The effects were immediate and shot my body into overdrive. My reflexes and reaction times were heightened along with my hand-eye coordination.
The Deathwish state, named for my favorite coffee, lasted about a minute, but for that minute, I was a Tasmanian devil of pure devastation. If I tried to push it longer than a minute, I was entering cardiac arrest territory. Nothing will ruin your escape attempt more than having a heart attack in the middle of it. I narrowed my eyes and focused on the TAC Ops around me.
There were pros and cons to being highly trained. On the one hand, responses to threats were ingrained and efficient. The OODA loop of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act was streamlined to the point that no conscious thought was required. The key to dealing with highly trained individuals was to get inside of and disrupt their loop.
The downside was that TAC Ops and most highly trained units worked based on a decision tree. This meant they had an encyclopedia of tactics they could use to restrain or neutralize a target. All those choices made them slow in the heat of battle.
Division 13 operatives worked on a decision stick model. We removed the two slowest parts of the OODA loop—orient and decide, and trained to shorten it to Observe and Act.
When faced with a combat situation we used simple devastating techniques enhanced by our braces to neutralize and eliminate our targets. I didn’t want to eliminate these officers, but I needed to get out of this van—fast.
Technomancy is a misunderstood hybrid of magic and technology. I figured Technomancers were considered rare because we interacted mostly with machines. Most of the gifted hackers I knew were Technomancers of some sort, they just didn’t know it. The really skilled had an affinity for machines and mechanical devices that allowed them to push machines past their limits and capacities. Wizards disliked us because of the level of study required and mages thought we were too similar to wizards because we used our braces to focus our abilities.
Some magic-users were notorious for not being able to use anything electrical without eventually destroying it. A wizard in Chicago was infamous for his ability to destroy most modern tech, sometimes with just his presence.
Technomancers were at the other end of that spectrum. We were able to make machines do things most would consider impossible. Could I do the things I did without my techbrace? Yes, but Cait allowed to me refine and focus my abilities. This meant a world of pain for the three TAC Ops officers around me.
I never got along with the other ‘mancers.’ Necromancers spent entirely too much time with the dead or nearly dead, and Negomancers just wanted to end it all and see the world burn. Bottom line, no one liked technomancers much. We made people feel unsafe.
This was why organizations like Division 13 were a perfect place for us. We were able to hide in plain sight and help keep our respective cities safe from greater supernatural threats and the misuse of magic.
A standard TAC Ops vehicle, while hardened against conventional attacks had no way of dealing with an EMP burst set off inside the vehicle.
I leaned forward slightly, shifting the weight of my body to my toes. Once Cait stopped the van, I’d need to move fast.
THIRTEEN
TEN SECONDS LATER the van started slowing down. I pulled forward and shattered the steel chain holding the cuffs in place. I leaped across and smashed the officer’s face in front of me with the kagome cuffs, making sure his head bounced off the side of the van with force. Using his unconscious body as leverage, I kicked back and introduced the second officer’s head to my foot, taking him out.
The third officer managed to raise his weapon part way before I kicked it to the side, spraying the inside of the van with rounds. That was going to get attention. I shoved the first officer’s body across at him and drove an elbow into the side of his head as he fumbled to dislodge himself.
I grabbed the key from the first officer and removed the cuffs. We had come to a full stop now and I knew procedure. Since the EMP burst took out the cameras, the driver and his partner would have to do a visual check. They would approach with weapons drawn. I threw myself in the center of the van and lay on my side, facing the backdoors. The clock in my head told me we had been moving for close to an hour. That put us on the border between Brooklyn and Queens.
I accessed my mental map of the city. The route the TAC Ops used would put us in the middle of what used to be an industrial district. An up and coming neighborhood called Hunter’s Point.
The Operative : A Division 13 Story Page 4
