SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  “Time to go, pendejo.”

  I smiled at the words, even as I winced. I could just make out the nondescript black fatigues and black balaclava in the reflected glow from the flashlight. No patches or insignia, nothing to indicate who the person was. But I’d recognize Hernandez’s voice—and her distinctive greeting—anywhere.

  I was happy to hear her voice, and felt like shit that she’d risked her life and freedom to try to bust me out of prison. She still had a life waiting for her, a job, a daughter. Now she was standing in a prison cell, flashlight in one hand, blocky pistol in the other.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” I muttered.

  “Bite me, Campbell,” she snapped back. “Take this.” She passed the pistol over to me. The grips settled comfortably into my palm, and the weight felt…good. It wasn’t my old forty-five, but it felt good to hold a weapon again. At least if someone tried to shiv us on the way out, I’d have brought a gun to a knife fight.

  “Load?” I asked, as she dug a couple of spare magazines out of the pouch on her web gear.

  “LTL,” she replied.

  I nodded. “Less than lethal” rounds in a nine-millimeter meant instead of jacketed lead slugs, the gun would fire “rubber bullets.” They weren’t actually rubber—that shit had a tendency to bounce around like a super ball and cause all sorts of collateral damage. Instead, it would be a lightweight polymer round designed to collapse on impact and spread the force of the strike out over a much wider area. A well—or poorly, depending on intent—placed shot could still be lethal, but for the most part, it was like shooting hard right crosses from a heavyweight boxer.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked, dumping the extra mags into my front left pocket.

  Hernandez snorted. “Plan, hermano? I’m surprised we made it this far. The plan’s simple, though. As you’ve said more than once, we didi fucking mao.”

  Chapter 4

  I followed Hernandez into the corridor.

  She wasn’t alone. Two more black-clad shapes blended into the darkness, but I saw enough from the backscatter of the flashlight to make some educated guesses. One was big, as big as me, male, and moved with the grace of a tiger that had gone pro on the dance circuit. He carried a stubby bullpup rifle that I recognized, even through the tacgear mounted on the rails. Al’awwal. The literal First synthetic. And, so far as we knew, the only one not subjected to the conditioning that left the other synthetics incapable of violence against their “creators.” The other…

  “Mother fucker,” I cursed under my breath as I took in the petite female form that the battle dress uniform couldn’t quite hide. There was only one person it could be. I had no idea what had persuaded Silas and the others to think it would be a good idea to drag Tia Morita into this, but I felt a surge of anger at the thought of putting her into danger to save my sorry ass. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t a cop. She wasn’t even a…whatever the hell Al’awaal was. Bored rich guy with money enough and time enough to get training from the best. She was a student. An assistant medical examiner. A soon-to-be doctor. And…shit. And I had feelings for her.

  Okay, so she was holding the tactical shotgun with surprising professionalism, the barrel of the twelve gauge down and away, but the frame of the weapon off her body and tight against the tac-strap so she could bring it to bear in an instant. And yeah, she’d surprised me more than once with her courage and tenacity. But, dammit, I didn’t want her in danger.

  Hernandez must have read it on my face, because she said, “Save it for later. We got more important things to worry about right now.”

  She was right. And as much as I wanted to yell at them, or maybe wrap them all up in my arms—especially Tia, but even Al—now was not the time. “What’s the plan?” I asked again.

  Hernandez gave my cell a quick once over as she said, “Boo Radley’s got the place in lockdown. He and Scout went through the firewalls like they weren’t even there. Full commo blackout, and anything tied to a computer—which is everything—is ours. Most of the guards are in lockdown, trapped behind their own magnetic locks. This is the only block we shut everything down on. Safer that way. Never know what little detail might be missed, otherwise.”

  It took me a moment to figure out “Boo Radley” and “Scout.” It had been a long, long time since I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird, but I realized it had to be a reference to Silas. Which meant that “Scout” was probably referring to LaSorte. We were safe enough with the power off, but it sounded like Silas and LaSorte hadn’t killed power everywhere.

  That pair could probably have hacked their way into an individual light bulb in the prison, but leaving the power on in the rest of the facility made sense. It would afford better control for opening and closing doors, monitoring the bad guys, and generally finding us a path to freedom that didn’t end with the four of us in an even less-comfortable cell. At the same time, killing the power in my cellblock made sense, too. When you were securing the package, checking for injuries, gearing up, you were at your most vulnerable. Why take the risk of missing a camera or alarm or of opening the wrong cell when you could kill the whole block?

  “Roger that. Extract?”

  “We walk out the front doors,” she said, and I caught a flash of white through the mouth hole of her balaclava as she grinned. “When I said full commo blackout, I meant it. No signal is getting into or out of this place right now. And according to Boo, there’s no scheduled system handshake for,”—she paused, pulled up a sleeve to reveal a wearable screen wrapped around her wrist—“the next fifteen minutes. We’ve got that long before they realize the shit has hit the fan.”

  “Stack?”

  “I’ve got point. Then you. Then the Doc. First brings up the rear.”

  It made sense. Hernandez and I had done this sort of thing before—by which I meant the stack up and enter a dangerous situation. We were sort of in the opposite business from prison breaks. We’d be the point of the spear. Al’awwal, codename, apparently, First, had proved himself a steady hand in the raid on the Walton Biogenics lab, and it was always a good idea to have an experienced person covering your six. Which left “the Doc” in the most secure position in the middle of our stack. That was normally where the protectee would go, but no way I was going to push Tia into a more dangerous position.

  “Right. Let’s get to work.”

  The hallway was filled with smoke and darkness, and even the beams of the flashlights did little but diffuse against the wall of gray. It was difficult to breathe, and I heard occasional coughs not only from my would-be rescuers, but also from the cells on either side. The hurled insults and laughter hadn’t started up again. I was locked up with petty criminals, but most criminals were survivors. They were smart enough to lay low when grenades started going off and people with guns showed up.

  We moved into the corridor, lining up single file and staying close to the wall. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned to look into the warm brown eyes of Tia Morita. I couldn’t see her face, not behind the balaclava, but I didn’t need to. She didn’t say anything, just gave my shoulder a squeeze before returning her hand to the pump action of her shotgun. That gesture brought a surge of emotion to my throat and I had to swallow hard against it.

  I turned my attention back to where it should have been and I heard Hernandez mutter something. She wasn’t talking to me, I realized, but into the throat mic taped to her neck. “All right,” she said briskly, “Boo says it’s time to go. We’ve got a clear path through this block, but some of the guards are showing surprising initiative farther down the line. We may run into some trouble.” She drew a steadying breath, let it out in a long sigh, and said, “Move out!”

  A well-oiled strike team could move through an open corridor like this, hugging the wall for cover while simultaneously keeping all possible avenues of approach under a watchful eye and waiting trigger finger. We weren’t that. I could practically
feel Tia’s nervousness behind me, and whatever training he may have had, Al’awwal had, as far as I knew, only done this once. I mentally cursed myself. I was spending too much time worrying about the people at my back and not enough doing my job. Hernandez had point, and was responsible for everything in front of us, but that was a big job for one person. As her second, it was my job to watch her back and pick up anything she missed. Tia and Al’awwal were rear security and backup. Stick to the plan. Stay alive. I tried to put the two behind me out of my mind and focus on the task at hand.

  “Coming up on B-Block,” Hernandez said in a voice just loud enough to carry. “Power’s on there. We’ll have lights, and Boo and Scout can give us real-time intel. Stay sharp.”

  Ahead of us, a security door, apparently still on the grid, buzzed and swung open, leading into another dimly lit cell block. B-Block was a lower security area, with doors made of steel bars rather than solid material. Hernandez instinctively moved away from the wall and toward the center of the corridor, out of reach of any grasping hands that might slip between the bars. Nearly every door framed an inmate, most silent, but some calling out to us as we past. I didn’t have much brain power to spare for what they were saying, but most of it was simple calls to take them with us, that they could help us get out. Calls of desperation.

  “Shit,” Hernandez cursed, slowing down, though not stopping. “Trouble ahead.”

  I almost ran into her, but managed to catch myself. Tia and Al’awwal, apparently tuned in to whatever information Hernandez was receiving, had also slowed. I wished they had thought to bring along an extra radio, but I supposed beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “What is it?”

  “A group of guards have managed to lever one of the locked doors open. According to Boo, they’re not armed with anything more than billy clubs, but there’s a half dozen of them headed this way.”

  I grunted. “What’s the plan?”

  “We take them down, hermano. With prejudice.”

  I nodded my head just a bit in the direction of Tia. She must have caught the motion because she punched me in the back with her free hand. “Don’t worry about me. I grew up in the bayou. I’m more comfortable with a bolt action, but I’ve handled a twelve gauge before.”

  There was a big damn difference between sport shooting or hunting and engaging in a close quarters gun battle. I knew it. Hernadnez knew it. Hell, Tia probably knew it. And she’d showed up anyway, knowing what might come. “She can run the gear, Campbell,” Hernandez said. “And she and First are backup anyway. Now shut the hell up and get ready, because we got about fifteen seconds.”

  We couldn’t take up a better position, not with the inmates on either side. If the bad guys had guns, it would have been a Wild West-style shooting alley with the potential for mass casualties on either side. But that was the value of superior intel—we knew the bad guys didn’t have guns and we knew when and where they were going to show up.

  I moved up beside Hernandez, who quickly passed me a pair of earbuds. For a second, I thought they might be for the radio, but they were just cheap foam hearing protection. Still, as I knelt beside her, I stuffed them gratefully into my ears. Tia and Al’awwal took up standing positions behind us, and the muzzles of their weapons were close enough that even through the hearing protection, I was going to be in for a bad time. I had just enough time to draw a steadying breath and settle myself more comfortably into position, finger easing from the slide of the nine-millimeter and onto the trigger. Then the corrections officers came surging around the corner.

  It was a long damn way from a fair fight.

  But like I said, fair fights are for victims.

  I opened up first, but only by a second. I kept my shots center mass—not that I would have normally tried anything else, but the polymer bullets could still kill if they found an eye or landed on someone’s throat. I didn’t want that on my conscience, so I exercised some extra caution. I only managed to squeeze off a pair of shots, both hitting the lead man and sending him stumbling before the others joined in. The world exploded in sound and fire, the pops of the pistol shots lost beneath the bark of the Israeli five-five-six, and then even that drowned out by the dragon’s roar of the twelve gauge. When the big shotgun spoke, it spoke with authority.

  It took maybe ten seconds, and even that was overkill.

  There was a long moment of silence—well, probably. My ears were ringing, so maybe it was just hearing damage. Then the cells on either side erupted in a combination of incoherent shouts, laughter, and sounds of celebration.

  Turned out, inmates didn’t like guards much. Having had my screens routinely destroyed and an attempt on my life ignored, I couldn’t really blame them. It did raise an issue, though.

  There was no being heard over the general racket, so I just moved forward, checking on the guards. Tia was at my side in an instant, making sure no one was dead, but I was more concerned with keeping the injured officers out of the grasping hands of the prisoners. Most of the guards were groaning and half-conscious from the debilitating pain inflicted by the polymer rounds. Some were unconscious, either from the pain or from a head shot. But they all seemed to be alive, at least. I grabbed the nearest by one leg and dragged him to the center of the corridor. A bean bag rolled off of his chest as I did and I winced in sympathy. The polymer rounds from the nine were like getting hit with a punch, but a bean bag round from a twelve gauge? That was like getting kicked by an angry mule. He wouldn’t be good for much, not without medical treatment.

  Still, a quick search turned up a bundle of zip-ties, so I bound him hand and foot. Hernandez and Al’awwal, realizing what I was doing, had gotten in on the action as well, and in under a minute, we had the six guards trussed up all nice and neat—and safely out of reach of any inquisitive hands.

  “Ten minutes until the handshake,” Hernandez said. “We need to move.”

  The rest of the exfil went butter smooth.

  We ghosted through the halls of the prison, with each security door popping open as we neared, monitored by the watchful eyes of Silas and LaSorte. We didn’t—quite—walk out the front door. Silas’s directions had navigated us around toward one of the loading docks of the prison. A van waited there, a simple, unmarked, white panel van, little more than a box on wheels. It didn’t even have a windshield for manual override. But the back door popped open to reveal Silas bent over a bank of screens and LaSorte, grinning through his model-perfect teeth.

  “Somebody call for a taxi?” he asked.

  “Two minutes,” Silas said as the engine revved to life. “I would prefer to be farther away before the scheduled system handshake alerts the world that something has gone wrong here, Detective. I have triggered the locks on the guard towers and shut down all of the lights, but we are not out of the woods yet. If a guard happened to be outside of his tower…” He trailed off, the implications clear.

  “Good to see you, too, Silas,” I said as I hopped from the loading dock. I reached back to help Tia down—because it was a four-foot drop, not because it felt good to hold her for a moment. Hernandez and Al’awwal managed on their own, and then we were all piling into the van. It started pulling away even before we had the doors shut, responding to Silas’s rapidly flicking fingers.

  I opened my mouth to say something else, but before I could, Tia, who had pulled off her mask, was pushing me from my half-crouch into a seated position. My first words were smothered by the kiss she planted on me—not that I minded. She was warm and soft and lovely—and, let’s be honest, kind of super hot in the battle dress and toting a twelve gauge. It was a quick kiss, but intense, and it took me a second to gather my breath. That was apparently a second too long, because she was already pulling at the crude bandage-job I’d done on my arm.

  “What is this? Is that a knife wound?” she demanded. “And what kind of hack wound care is this? Do the prison doctors not know how stitches
work?” She glared at me. “You haven’t even been keeping it clean.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. I’m not sure if it was the absurdity of the situation, the relief at breathing free air, or the crashing adrenaline, but I sat there, curled up against the interior of the van, cackling like a maniac while my friends stared at me in shock. It really was good to see them all again.

  Chapter 5

  The nearly imperceptible motion of Floattown was almost calming. It was hard to believe that three hours before, I’d been locked in a cell. It shouldn’t have taken three hours to get from the New Lyons jail out to Floattown, but the route we’d taken hadn’t exactly been direct. We’d switched vehicles—twice—in each case the original driving off under whatever programming Silas and LaSorte had installed in it. And we’d driven routes that took us miles out of our way, partly to avoid the cameras, and partly to avoid the riots.

  “The shit’s really hit the fan, Campbell,” Hernandez had said, popping LTL rounds out of her magazines and replacing them with the real deal as the van bounced along the city roads. “Silas and company did exactly what they said they would, and let the cat out of the bag as soon as the deadline was up. The whole fucking world had been holding their breath for it, too. So as soon as the information started showing up, every wannabe black hat hacker looking to spread a little chaos started propagating it all over the place. So did every whacko and crackpot—or maybe I should say former crackpot—who had been screaming that synthetics were human. The best cybersecurity in the world couldn’t do shit about that.”

  “Unless they shut down the entire ’net,” Tia added. She’d cleaned the knife wound on my arm, then turned her attentions to the week-old injuries I’d suffered breaking into Walton Biogenics. Her questing fingers hurt as they pushed on the various bruises and cleaned out the long litany of scrapes, but the warm feel of her hands on me far outweighed the pain.