by John Appel
“Hold a moment,” Ogawa said over the tactical link. “Aminu, turn back. No, left. There, hold. Shit. That’s an explosive charge. Yazumi, they’ve rigged the place to blow up.”
Three louder cracks followed by the crash of falling masonry drowned out the gunfire for a few seconds. They heard more shooting from a different direction, further away by the sound of it. Fari’s head swiveled, looking for new targets while Noo covered her own sector.
“That’s from outside,” Teng said. “Shit, they blew a hole in the side wall.”
“Yazumi, you need to get your people out now!” Ogawa’s voice was insistent. “They’re using classic insurgent tactics. We were lured in.”
Yazumi cursed and ordered zer people to withdraw. “Closest exits,” ze said. “Go go go! Exterior teams, try to contain them.”
“Check the emergency exits for booby traps before you open them,” Teng said. “I’m going outside.”
Noo and Fari scurried back the way they’d come as fresh bursts of automatic fire, answered by shotgun blasts, echoed through the cavernous interior. They came across a constable struggling to drag her wounded partner down the main access hallway. Fari darted forward and helped hoist the injured officer into a chair carry while Noo covered their withdrawal. The shooting intensified, seeming to come from all directions now.
“Fuck, they’re going for the aircars,” Teng said. Noo cursed as her little party hurried down the corridor.
Automatic-weapon fire continued to rattle from inside. A stay-behind? Noo wondered as they burst into the foyer. Zheng, one hand clamping a bandage to her bleeding forehead, motioned them through the exterior door. “Move! We’ve got to get clear,” she shouted, as they passed from one bundle of chaos into another.
Rain crashed down on them; big cold drops that hit like rubber bullets, stinging and chilling all at once. Noo was instantly soaked despite her rain jacket. The wind buffeted them, pushing them off course as they struggled towards the dubious safety of the closest aircar. She heard the steady popping of a single weapon and spotted Teng kneeling as he emptied his magazine at one of the aircars as it rose, slightly wobbling. The car steadied into a smooth, curving climb as Teng’s rounds bounced ineffectually off the armor.
They’re getting away. Sudden rage filled Noo. Her quarry was so close.
The other aircars sat there, beckoning.
Noo grabbed Fari’s arm, tugging hard. “Come on!” She yanked with all her strength. “If we go now, we can follow them.” Fari stopped to lower the wounded constable to the ground. They staggered and slipped, fighting both the wind and the rain-slicked concrete as they lurched across the parking lot to the second aircar.
Zheng seemed to have the same idea. She fumbled a fresh magazine into her pistol as she plunged through the howling storm, her forgotten bandage behind her on the pavement. Ogawa emerged from between the shelter of a ground car and raced towards them.
Rain blinded Noo as she fought the headwind. It seemed like all the wind in the world blasted her, sucking her breath away. Lightning flashed, rendering the world white-blue. Roaring thunder followed almost immediately, a deafening blast that she first mistook for the bombs in the manufactory going off. Hoarse, shocked voices echoed across the team link as Yazumi struggled to get a head count, trying to determine if all of zer people had gotten out.
Where the fuck are the reinforcements?
She must have said it aloud, or at least subvocalized it into the link.
Noo’s breath came in ragged gasps as she struggled across the last few meters to the car. Fari, a few meters ahead, banged on the door. It opened and Fari scrambled in. Noo’s foot slipped on the rain-slicked concrete and she would have fallen, but someone grabbed the back of her jacket and arrested her descent. She glanced back and discovered that Ogawa had caught up with her, breathing hard but not nearly so much as Noo herself was. They made it to the car together and Fari’s outstretched hands pulled them inside. Seconds later, Zheng arrived and scrambled in herself. Ogawa reached across the constable and closed the passenger compartment door.
The pilot goggled at them in his rearview mirror. “What are you waiting for?” Noo growled. “Get us up in the air and go after them.”
“Are you out of your minds?” he said, and his copilot turned in her seat to frown at them. “In this?”
“I’m a licensed investigator in hot pursuit of a suspect,” Noo said hotly. “I suggest you comply.”
“They just shot up some of your colleagues,” Fari shouted. “They planted bombs in the factory—”
“Yeah, we heard,” the pilot snapped, cutting them off. “But I’m not taking off in this.”
Hot rage washed over Noo, and she yanked out her hand cannon and leveled it at the pilot’s head. “I’m not asking, constable.”
The pilot’s eyes widened in shock. “You’re bloody insane. Dead now or dead when we crash, what’s the difference?”
“I’ll do it,” the copilot blurted out. The pilot glared at her. “I’m serious. She’s right, it’s dangerous as hell, but we’ve got to go now.”
The pilot cursed, hit the quick release on his harness, and slipped out of the aircar. The copilot spun the engine up as the door slammed closed. Someone banged on the passenger compartment door, and Noo turned to discover Teng hammering on it with his fist. Ogawa popped it open and he jammed himself inside as the copilot took off, spun around to the west, angling the car up between the tempest-lashed towers of Kochi towards the looming Black Claws.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Meiko
Kochi Airspace
“I don’t suppose any of you know anything about sensor ops?” the pilot asked as she whipped their craft between the skyscrapers clinging to the lower slopes. Meiko glanced over at Zheng, who was arguing with the incredulous and profoundly outraged Yazumi over the link while Fari tried to bandage the lieutenant’s head wound.
“I do,” Meiko said. “Probably not the specific systems you carry, but I’ve done planetary survey work.”
“You’re hired,” the pilot said. “I need to focus on the terrain-following systems and the other instruments. You’ll need to take the pilot’s seat for me to cut you into the system, though.” The world suddenly tilted to the right as the pilot banked hard, sliding past a building that seemed to sprout directly in their path. The car hit an air pocket and lurched downward, then bucked sideways as they hit a shearing wind current, artifact of the city’s complex aerodynamic landscape. Meiko closed her eyes, then opened them again as their flight steadied. She popped her harness release and began the perilous two-meter journey across the crowded passenger cabin to the cockpit. Okereke did her best to help, bracing her as the craft jerked and bounced in the turbulent air. Teng pulled himself into the seat Meiko abandoned.
“Tap my djinn,” the pilot said once she’d strapped in. Meiko reached over and brushed her djinn against the pilot’s. Augmented-reality windows and head’s-up displays opened around her like tree leaves in the dawn. She queried for the help files, slurped them into her djinn along with a regional map file the system helpfully offered. She opened another AR window for the map as she tentatively probed the forward-looking radar controls.
“Shit,” said Zheng behind her. “The bombs went off.”
“Did Yazumi and the others get clear?” Fari asked.
“Yazumi did. Ze’s getting a fresh head count. But it’s going to be another toxic spill problem.”
She heard a meaty thump and glanced at the mirror to see Okereke pounding her left fist into her thigh. “This entire operation is a clusterfuck,” Okereke said. “We’re stumbling around blind, chasing this turd, and he’s making us look stupid.”
“That’s one view,” Teng said, snapping the last buckle into place.
“Well, we’re on his tail now,” the pilot said. “Or will be if you can get a
lock on him.”
Meiko located the interface for the search systems. “Do these craft have transponders?” she asked as she warmed up the search radar. “It would be easiest to track them that way.”
The pilot gave her the other craft’s ID and she located the air-traffic display. There was no result when she fed the information to the system. “They must have disabled it somehow,” Meiko said.
“That shouldn’t be possible,” the pilot said, as the aircar dropped a good twenty meters without warning. Her stomach lurched and Meiko was glad for her long experience with abrupt acceleration changes. Behind her came the sounds of retching and a scramble for airsickness bags.
She pushed aside the fear, focusing on her tasks as they screamed through the ever-darkening sky scant meters from the concrete-and-steel towers, chasing a group of heavily armed killers who’d shown no hesitation when it came to cold-blooded murder. This was the key, for her: find something to do, then do it. The shakes would come later.
The aircar hit an air pocket and bucked upwards, then dropped precipitously again. She hung the interface windows right in front of her face to minimize how much she needed to move her head. She heard someone new throwing up in the back.
She got the search radar online, and the infrared detectors as well, and Meiko had a fleeting sense of pleasure for having solved the puzzle of the controls. Their car flew through a gray world now, up among the clouds. The craft bucked again as the pilot worked to keep them aloft and pointed in what Meiko hoped was the proper direction. Finally, they cleared the towers and put the first ridge of the Black Claws between their aircar and the city proper. Somewhere below lay a narrow, steep-walled valley. The reverse slope of the ridge appeared to be too steep to build on, though radar showed clusters of low-rise structures lining the narrow river along the valley floor.
She adjusted the search radar to sweep ahead in a wide arc. She got an airborne return almost immediately, far off to their south, running fast along the river’s course. “Contact,” she said, and fumbled again with the interface as she hunted for a way to share data with the pilot. “Bearing one hundred and sixty-three degrees, range one-five kilometers.”
The pilot cursed and swung the aircar onto the given bearing and put the nose down. “I think they’re going for Moonstrider Gorge,” she said. “It’s the first gap in the range from here.”
“I wonder why the hell they’re running this way,” Fari said. “They couldn’t have known we’d come or have aircars they could steal.”
“Catch the goat-fuckers first,” Noo wheezed, “and you can ask them while I tickle their balls with a fucking torch.”
Strong winds buffeted the aircar, shaking it like a child’s rattle. The pilot put on as much speed as she dared. Once they reached the center of the valley, she dropped them down below the level of the towering ridges, and the ride smoothed out fractionally. Meiko managed to confirm that their quarry was the correct model of aircar, indexing the infrared emission patterns of the engines with the radar return off the fuselage, and comparing that to another helpful file the craft’s system offered. She reported her findings aloud. “There’s nothing else in the air at the moment, anyway,” the pilot said, which Meiko’s air-traffic display corroborated. “No one else is mad enough to fly in this.”
Lightning struck them at that moment. The world turned brilliantly blue-white, dazzling Meiko’s eyes before the canopy polarization kicked in. She smelled ozone and a hint of burnt composites, but the engines roared on steadily. The sensor systems all reset and rebooted, though, and the car dropped abruptly, losing a good fifty meters of altitude.
Meiko glanced over at the pilot, her face taut with fearsome concentration as she fought to maintain control. They steadied out and began climbing. The pilot shot her a look, grinning fiercely. “Like I was saying.”
Someone in the passenger compartment retched again. “Why are you doing this?” Meiko asked the pilot. “They could cashier you for this. You might never fly again.”
The pilot didn’t answer that immediately, and Meiko took the opportunity to get the search systems looking for their target again. It had vanished, and the pilot grunted. “They must have turned west, up the gorge like I thought.” Another bout of turbulence interrupted her as she fought the winds for a moment. “You’re after the people who shot the minister,” she continued at last. Meiko acknowledged this was true. “Ita was from my district,” the pilot said. “My family has known his for generations. Hell, we’re probably cousins of some sort.” Were cousins, Meiko thought. Shearing winds rocked the car as they approached the gorge which kept the pilot busy for a moment. Their flight steadied and she continued. “I even met him twice, once when I graduated from flight school, then again when I got a commendation for a rescue operation.” She began banking the aircar into a turn to the east, lining up to follow the river that carved out the gorge. “They killed one of my people. If there’s a chance to catch them, I want in.”
Zheng spoke from the backseat. “Constable, if your command gives you any shit for this, let me know. I’ll have Commissioner Toiwa give them a piece of her mind.”
“I’d pay to see that,” Fari quipped.
They entered the gorge, and the ride actually became worse.
Moonstrider Gorge wasn’t especially narrow, but it did wind more tightly than Meiko would have expected. The planetary-surveyor part of her brain started to model the effects of the clashing air masses involved, but she shook off that impulse and refocused her attention on the sensors. The overlay painted the river’s course below as it snaked between the high rocky walls to either side.
Clouds still enveloped them, though the ground gradually rose as they fought their way up the gorge. The pilot had no time for chatter as she battled still more eddies and pockets of turbulence; keeping them aloft required her full attention.
They rounded a tight bend, coming onto a comparatively long, straight stretch, and the search systems pinged. “Got them!” Meiko exclaimed. The blip abruptly disappeared again as their quarry darted left, ducking into a branching valley about five kilometers ahead. Meiko flagged the point for the pilot, who gritted her teeth as she gunned her engines before swooping into a banking turn into the new valley.
They roared along their new heading when Meiko realized that they had overshot their prey. The other car had turned around, hovering just above the treetops a few hundred meters up the valley. “There!” she cried as they screamed overhead.
“Shit!” the pilot said, and slewed the aircar around to the right, trying to reverse course without dumping too much speed. They swung seriously close to the right-hand wall of the valley, a nearly sheer cliff of dark basalt, so close Meiko thought she could have reached out to touch the stone. They swung around, leveled out—
Suddenly they were falling. No, not falling, being pushed towards the ground. Alarms sounded. “Downdraft!” the pilot said as they plunged, spinning, slewing sideways, left and then right as she fought to regain control.
Now the fear came. Meiko’s whole body tensed and she clenched her armrests.
The pitch of the port-side engines dropped abruptly as indicators across the cockpit flashed red.
“Shit! Lost thrust—”The pilot’s words were cut off as they smacked the cliff.
Metal shrieked and tore and there came a horrible ripping sound. Meiko’s left side slammed against the inside of the compartment and she yelped as fresh pain stabbed through her still-healing arm. The car tilted to the right and the pilot tried to compensate, but that put them into a counter-clockwise spin. The front of the aircar hit the cliff and they bounced backwards. Someone, Teng from the sound of it, screamed, while the others, including the pilot, cursed.
Meiko was too stricken to do either, or even to take the crash position as the car’s system implored them to do in three languages. The car tipped right, the right-side engines cut out, and they plunged ground-ward.
Everything went white, then red, then black, and then
there was no sound but the rain, the wind, and the rushing river below.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Okafor
Transient Quarters, Government House Complex, Ileri Station, Trailing Ring
Okafor simultaneously hung suspended in virtual space and sprawled upon the couch of her tiny suite across the street from the massive Government House complex.
She’d spent a frustrating evening working on the material captured from the Saljuan team in the lab at Constabulary headquarters. Resigning herself to needing to allow the decryption routines time to work, she’d ridden the transit system back to the trailing ring, wishing the High Commissioner’s office had been able to find her quarters closer to Constabulary HQ. Still, the bandwidth available at Government House was equal—if not superior—to what she could get at Toiwa’s office. The Constabulary had better coffee, though.
Too keyed up to sleep, she had returned to her long-term project: probing the oldest and strangest of the illicit networks buried in the station’s infonet. Calling her map a work in progress was something of an understatement. She suspected that all the work to date had barely sketched the shadowy outlines of the hidden web. The fact that peripheral nodes continually came and went as the polymorphic code bounced from system to system didn’t help. Still, concealed beneath the ever-shifting layers lurked a central core of nodes that made up the heart of the secret grid. She was sure of it.
A slender fiber-optic cable linked her torc-like djinn to an auxiliary processing unit resting across her legs. Her VR trodes were likewise physically connected rather than wirelessly, the way most would. In part that was due to the increased bandwidth Okafor used, but in large measure it was because she fundamentally didn’t trust any network she didn’t control herself.
If her djinn was her workaday toolbox, the aux unit was like an entire machine shop, foundry, and fabber facility rolled into one. She arrayed the input fuzzers, packet analyzers, decryption toolkits, stack smashers, and all the rest of the tools of her trade about her virtual form as she contemplated her target. One of her smart agents had identified a potentially long-time compromised node, part of the command apparatus for the station’s dynamic trim system, the physical infrastructure that maintained the balance of the massive conglomeration of rock and metal and composites. She didn’t plan a full-scale assault on the node, not tonight anyway. Confident as she was in her skills and code, tampering with something so fundamental to the station’s operations without backup, or without expert assessment of the potential for causing problems, was far beyond her personal risk threshold.
