by John Appel
Fathya opened her mouth to say more, but Toiwa cut her off. “Your service is accepted, pending clearance from the medics.” She gathered them all by eye, then spoke to the room. “We have our operational concept. Time is short. Let’s turn this into an actual plan.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Meiko
Ready Room B, Constabulary HQ,
Ileri Station, Forward Ring
Meiko stepped through the door Zheng held open for her. She saw Fari sitting on the floor among her neatly ordered kit, legs stretched out before her in a medical exoframe. She didn’t bother looking up from the belt in her lap, into which she was loading spare magazines for the wicked-looking autocarbine on the floor beside her. Meiko’s djinn pegged them as armor piercing rounds.
“I’m through discussing this, Grandmother,” Fari said.
“But what about Ifedapo?” Fathya Shariff, standing over her granddaughter, pressed.
“We’ve talked.” Fari thumbed the ammunition pouch closed, picked up a fragmentation grenade—Meiko didn’t need her djinn’s help recognizing that—and hefted it. “She understands why I need to do this.”
“I don’t.”
“I can’t help you there.” Fari carefully slid the grenade into the carry loop and stroked her thumb across it, activating the gecko fibers that held it in place.
Meiko carefully stepped aside to let Zheng slip in behind her and they hovered near the doorway, unwilling to intrude. She thought of her own leave-takings, back when she’d been young enough that leaving her parents had been an event worth marking. When did that change? She couldn’t remember. With a start, she realized that it had been a long, long time since she’d had anyone in her life close enough to make saying goodbye as hard as what she was witnessing.
Shariff ignored the newcomers, turning to harangue Noo instead. “And what about you? Even for you, this is daft. Who do you think you are, an action hero like Ming-Tse?” She stalked over to loom over her partner. “Do you want to end up like Daniel? Or worse?”
Noo slid a magazine into her sidearm, the massive twelve-millimeter hand cannon that made Meiko’s wrists ache just looking at it. She double-checked the mechanical safety and slid the pistol into the tie-down holster strapped to her right leg, then finally looked up to meet Fathya’s eyes. “No. I’m trying to make sure no one else winds up like Daniel. Or worse. And so that cunt Dinata doesn’t have any excuse to use a conversion bomb against the station, or on New Abuja, and kill the people I love.” She grabbed the arms of her chair and pulled herself upright. “There was a time you would have understood that without someone needing to explain it to you.”
That rocked Shariff back on her heels. Finally, she spoke, so softly that Meiko would have missed it if her aural implants and djinn hadn’t noticed her focus and boosted the gain accordingly. “I can’t lose the rest of you, too,” she said. Her hands twitched forward into the space between the two.
Noo reached out and took her old friend’s hands firmly. “And if we do nothing, that’s just what might happen. This is all hands to damage stations, no drill.” Her voice was still pitched low, but loud enough to carry. “You’ve seen those constables and soldiers. They’re as played out as we are. Everyone’s been on duty since Miguna’s buttonheads made their move, snatching a few hours’ sleep, a bite to eat when they can.” She glanced around the room. “But that means the other side has got to be worn down too. We’re about evenly split, they’ve just got the heavier gear. Or did, until Pericles came through.”
She let go of Fathya’s hands and stepped back. “Let us go do what we have to. You keep Toiwa safe and give her good counsel.” Shariff nodded and raised her hand to her eyes. Probably to wipe away tears, Meiko thought, but she couldn’t see.
They embraced. Fari stood and walked over and took Noo’s place in her grandmother’s arms. Shariff turned to go, but Noo called out to her. “Fathya?”
The old woman stopped, and half-turned. “Yes?”
“If things go poorly, give this to Daniel, please.” Noo tossed her a data packet.
Shariff nodded. “I pray the merciful Father watches over you both, but should his eye wander, I’ll see it done.”
“I know you will.” Noo sat down again and Shariff headed for the door. Meiko and Zheng stood aside quietly.
Fari cocked her head at the newcomers. “I thought you’d be gearing up yourselves.”
“Soon. You have further to go than we do.” Zheng stepped over to inspect the array of lethal implements and gave a low whistle. “Borer AP rounds? The Fingers have these? What the hell for? Do they regularly need to shoot through bulkheads or something?”
“Sales to colonies in the New Arm, mostly,” Noo said.
“Shit,” Zheng said. “You’re telling me someone probably shot at me with weapons and ammo from here, back when I was in the peacekeepers?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Noo said.
The Ileri woman looked as tired as Meiko felt; the tale of the last few days was evident in the way they all moved. Meiko put her left hand on Noo’s shoulder and as if on cue felt a twinge from her barely healed wrist. “You have enough in the tank to do this?”
The ghost of a smile flickered across Noo’s face. “Not really. But that’s what this is for.” She pulled an autoinjector from the left cargo pocket of her newly fabbed battledress.
Meiko read the label and nodded. “That’s potent stuff, all right. Just don’t use more than one dose.”
“Why not?”
“Because a second dose can cause organ damage bad enough to require freshly cultured replacements,” Toiwa said from the doorway. She was alone but for her hulking bodyguard, who Meiko glimpsed a few meters away down the corridor. Toiwa came into the ready room and closed the door, scanning each of the women. “And the old ones will hurt the entire time.”
“Well, that’s a motivational anecdote if I’ve ever heard one,” Noo said, and turned back to her preparations.
Meiko realized that the governor was running on fumes as much as she and her companions were. “It’s what the doctor told me when I asked for more,” Toiwa said. Leaving Noo to her own devices, she approached the others and put her hands onto Zheng’s shoulders. “I wanted to see you off, Maria, and this is the only chance I’ve got.”
Zheng flashed her a grin. “It’s all right.” She shared the grin with her... boss? Mentor? Surrogate older sister? Some combination of those, Meiko thought. “Thank you, Governor. It means a lot.”
“You have everything you need?” Toiwa asked.
Zheng nodded. “The armorers were able to top off the stores in the Commonwealth marine suit I borrowed, and we’ve got another armored trooper kitted out.” She tilted her head towards Meiko. “Ogawa and the others have non-powered hard-shell suits. Your watchdog frigates spotted the robot and the cannister with their passive optics, and it’s right where Loh’s people think it should be. We’d have the easiest run of the three if it wasn’t for being an EVA.”
Toiwa held her underling’s gaze for a moment longer, then nodded, dropping her hands to her sides. “All right then.” She looked at Meiko. “You’ve got experience with this sort of operation, M. Ogawa?”
“Things like this, yes.” Twenty years ago, but that didn’t seem worth bringing up.
“Watch yourselves out there, then.” Toiwa turned to Fari. “I understand you’re escorting M. Okafor?”
The young woman nodded. “I might not be fit for the assault element with this,” she said, slapping the hip cradle of her medical exoframe. “But I’ll get your tech wizard where she needs to go.”
“Good. We’re counting on you, and her.” They shook hands, and Meiko saw Toiwa start towards Noo, only to stop after a tentative half-step. “M. Okereke?”
“Hmm?” Noo looked up from her preparations, h
er hands full of spare magazines.
“May the Huntress guide your steps.”
The two looked at each other for a long moment, and Noo gave a slow nod. “Thank you.”
I guess that’s as close to a peace treaty as those two are going to reach.
Toiwa stepped back, swept them with her eyes. “Good hunting, ladies,” she said, and backed out the door, closing it behind her.
Noo finished packing her ammo and stood back up. “Shit, that almost makes me want to like her,” she said.
“It’s all right, Auntie,” Fari chimed in. “She’s a politician now. She just wants your vote,” and the room rocked with their laughter.
Zheng and Meiko couldn’t help but join in. They stood there, the four of them, and whether it was the exhaustion or just the sheer absurdity of it all, the laughter consumed them. It took several minutes before they regained their composure, wiping tears from their eyes.
Fari reached up, putting her arms around Noo on one side and Zheng on the other, and then Noo and Zheng had theirs around Meiko. She put hers around them in turn, and felt a tightness in her chest, coupled with warmth. It had been years—decades, really, if she was honest—since she’d felt this way. Operating solo for so long, one forgot the joys—and pains—of being part of a team. She dipped her head in towards the others, who followed suit, and for a moment they just stood there, breathing each other’s breath. She felt the sleek tautness of Zheng’s shoulder muscles, the relative softness of Noo’s, the heat of Fari’s head where it met her own, and fancied she could hear the beating of their hearts.
“It’s been quite a ride, ladies,” she said, and was surprised to find herself choked up.
“It’s not over yet,” Noo said, her own voice thick. She pulled back, and Meiko and the others did the same.
“See you when it’s all done,” Zheng said.
Fari nodded. “Let’s clip the bastards.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Okafor
Service Passageway 928-F, Ileri Station,
Forward Ring
The armored glove on Josephine Okafor’s elbow gently guided her to the right. “Low pipe,” Fari Tahir whispered into her ear. They picked their way forward for several more minutes before Tahir pressed gently on her shoulder. “Here. Last bulkhead before the junction. We’re under cover.”
“Will we be here long?” she whispered back. Tahir affirmed it would be a few minutes at least so she parked her butt on the floor. She tugged at her ballistic jacket, trying to shift it to ride more comfortably. As a civilian analyst, her duties had never required her to wear body armor before. She found the weight uncomfortable, and despite having been made to her measurements, it felt painfully tight in the chest, and constricted her movement, limiting her ability to twist and bend.
She felt the warm presence of Tahir as the other woman took a knee beside her, the subtle change of pressure, heard the woman’s slightly labored breathing and the soft hiss of the pneumatics of her exoframe. If things were going according to plan, their assault element should be taking up their final positions before popping the hidden access panel leading from their secret passage—she wanted to chuckle, just thinking of that phrase—into the data junction. She and Tahir formed part of the tiny technical group, along with a Shariff infonet specialist and a Constabulary hardware technician. They were supposed to be holding position five meters behind the lead element. A few meters behind her group lurked the operation’s second-in-command and the rearguard. She was safe, or at least as safe as anyone could be on Ileri station right now.
But she resented her dependence on Tahir, was irritable at having to be guided. Between her cane and her gauntlets, she was used to moving about independently. But her cane was impractical in the tight spaces they’d traversed, and they couldn’t risk the emissions from the ladar, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasonic sensors of her sensorium, at least during this phase of the operation.
That would change once the shooting started.
These smuggler’s ways were deliberately uncharted and fitted, Loh had told them, into something he called ‘squinches’. “Think of the spaces on either side of an arch supporting a bridge,” Loh said. “Our passages fit into spaces like that. The intersections can be confusing to people who don’t know them.” His analogy hadn’t made any sense to her; blind since birth, she couldn’t visualize the shapes he described, and their relationships to each other. Tahir, grasping the reason for her lack of comprehension, had formed the shapes with a couple of foam-covered cable ties and guided Okafor’s fingers across them, allowing her to understand Loh’s meaning.
The ready signal came, and she started to rise, but the insistent pressure of Tahir’s hand on her shoulder kept her down. She shifted back into a kneeling position.
She felt the flash of heat and the mild pressure wave against her skin as the cutting charges went off. The sharp smell of burnt metal seemed to bite somewhere deep in her nostrils as the door clanged to the deck. A brief rush of air blew past her as the flow within the passage suddenly changed, spilling out into the data-node chamber beyond. The mixed force of constables, soldiers, and Fingers people surged forth.
“Up now,” Tahir said. Okafor grasped her hand and came to her feet as the bark of weapons sounded in the room beyond. She activated her sensors, but Tahir hustled her forward before they came online. Her left shoulder pressed against the wall, and she heard the sharp, staccato bursts of weapons, commands across their comm net, and the cries of those hit. The harsh, acrid smell was strong here, close to the breach.
They huddled there by the opening for three minutes and seven seconds according to her timer. By then her sensorium was fully operational, and she carefully swept the space around them, building up her ‘picture’ of the area.
At last the assault commander called them forward. There were new smells, blood and ozone, piss and burnt flesh. She and the other two technical specialists hurried up to the node junction. Okafor heard the assault team bustling around them, rounding up the prisoners they’d taken and establishing a perimeter. The computer tech cursed as he fumbled with his tools and then she heard the sound of an access panel being slid aside. “Got it,” he said, and then he pressed the familiar shape of a fiber-optic connector into her hand. She smiled and snapped it into her djinn. Then she sat down, leaned her back against the node’s housing, and slipped into virtual reality.
Unlike most people, Josephine Okafor couldn’t visualize VR, because she couldn’t visualize anything. But the tactile sensor net had been part of her since she was five years old; she’d grown up with it, expanded it as years went on, learning to distinguish the finest gradations of sensation. At the same time, she grew to live with code. Her virtual experience was unlike anyone else’s she’d ever heard of; but time had shown that for whatever reason, she was remarkably effective in VR.
The difference between this node and a normal, unadulterated one struck her immediately. Instead of one multifaceted junction in the sphere’s center, there were two, one much smaller. That was the piggyback bridge to the Fingers’ private network. She reached out with her right hand, touched it, and felt the connection spring into place. Good; Loh’s access codes worked as advertised.
Haissani, the Shariff datarat who accompanied them, followed suit. He copied her motion, joining the Fingers infonet as she spun digital agents to seize control of this connection point, with orders to replicate and follow the myriad threads of the criminal network to its limits. She wouldn’t cut them out of it, not yet, but the agents carried instructions to copy the data they uncovered, preserving it for later examination. It wasn’t part of Loh’s agreement with Toiwa, but Okafor felt the opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Securing our flank?” Haissani asked.
“Something like that,” she said, and turned her attention to the main node. Okafor spun more agents into being around them as she and Haissani scanned the main node’s input channels. She perceived a l
oose cloud of packets. Her virtual fingers sifted through them, like through a fall of sand, and discovered they were inbound access requests from djinns, sensors, bots, and the host of smart devices that filled the station. The rebels had locked them out from the infonet, but they continued to seek access.
There. One of her questing agents discovered a series of requests that weren’t being rejected. Interesting. She followed the trace and discovered that the rebels didn’t seem to be using the dark net after all! Instead, they had found a way to lock everyone but themselves from the regular station infonet. Her digital agent harvested data from the stream, and Okafor shunted the computation-heavy tasks of decrypting it over to the Fingers’ network, saving her own onboard processing power.
It was like the difference between trying to pick a lock and simply cutting it out of the door frame with a plasma torch. Within seconds she had the keys she needed. She flipped a set of keys to Haissani and together, they spoofed access requests and fired them to the central node.
And then they were in.
The lockout program hung before her, a soft, amorphous, ever-shifting membrane just inside the outer layer of the node. She called up another agent and set it to trying the supervisory access credentials from the Ministry of Information against the chance the rebels hadn’t managed to change all of them. Another pulsed a message out via the Fingers network, sharing the skeleton key she’d fashioned. Elsewhere in the station, loyalist and Fingers hackers launched their own attacks, hoping to divert attention away from her effort. Hopefully they, too, would be able to slip inside and take the fight to the enemy.
“Shit! Countermeasures!” Haissani said, and a trio of sharp, angry forms sprang into life and began gnawing on Okafor’s avatar, like sharp pins stabbing her in the arms. She could feel the probing spikes of code seeking a way into her virtual form like a series of soft pulses. A flick of her hand brought attack agents of her own into play and she cast them into the fray.
