Kill the Queen! (Chaos of the Covenant Book 4)

by M. R. Forbes

  Of course, the beauty of the place was in direct proportion to the rainfall. The sky was overcast, and a light mist had settled amidst the steel and glass and wood and leaves.

  “I haven’t been here in thirty years,” he said. “It looks the same.”

  “I’ve always enjoyed it here,” Pahaliah said. “It’s like being on another world without having to leave Earth.”

  “Have you ever been off-world?”

  “I went to Tro once with my parents. They were working on a deal to sell some specialized farming equipment to a major corporation there. Did you know there are varieties of fruit on Tro that can weigh over fifty kilograms?”

  “No,” Olus said.

  “They have some of the tallest fruit trees in the universe. Anyway, have you heard the stories about Trover females?”

  “Of course.”

  She laughed. “They’re all true.”

  Olus smiled. He had been to Tro a few times himself. While the jokes about Trover women were exaggerated, they weren’t that exaggerated.

  “There it is, up ahead,” Pahaliah said, pointing. The base of the center tri-tower had appeared almost suddenly, coming into focus within the mist. They could only see about one hundred meters up the side of it before it vanished into the haze once more.

  “Check your comm,” Olus said. He lowered his voice to a soft whisper. “Killshot. Check. Check.”

  “I read you, Killshot,” Pahaliah said. “Pali. Check.”

  “I read you,” Olus replied. “Patch Goillisi in.”

  The fingers on Pahaliah’s left hand moved slightly, the rings on them entering commands through the TCU embedded in her seraphsuit.

  “Pali,” Goillisi said, the reports of his snapping beak audible behind the translation.

  “Driver,” Pahaliah said. “We’re in view. Is everything ready.”

  “Ready and waiting,” the Rudin replied. “Driver is at the helm.”

  “No signs of interference?” Olus asked.

  “Captain, you wound me,” Goillisi replied. “What manner of black hat technowizard do you take me for? I’ve been loitering in the tri-towers security network for days without even a sniff of interest. It’s rather boring, actually.”

  “Boring is good. Let’s keep this clean and efficient, and we’ll all go home happy.”

  “Roger, Captain,” Goillisi said.

  “Killshot,” Olus said. “Call me Killshot.”

  “Roger, Killshot.”

  Olus and Pahaliah approached the entrance to the building. Twin glass doors slid aside at their approach, revealing an intermediate atrium that was nearly as green as the world outside, though the plants were more tropical in nature and the humidity had been kicked up a bit. The doors closed behind them as soon as they were through, holding in the atmosphere. A path split around a large pool in the center of the atrium, where dozens of individuals were sitting, having lunch and talking. They had discussed trying to get into the building at night when nobody was around. The evening security was much tighter, and the value of losing the bystanders minimal. If they did this right, they would get in and out without anybody knowing they had been in.

  If they did this right.

  This was Pahaliah’s first real mission. Olus had tried to convince her to let him go it alone, but she was adamant. She was funding the operation. She had trained for this. He was only there because of circumstances. Fine. He was eager to prove himself after his last round of failures. Freeing Abbey and the Rejects had been his last win, and he wanted another.

  She was holding up so far. He could see her in infrared through the glasses. She wasn’t overly nervous or excited. She had trained with the best she could find, desperate not to let happen to her what had happened to her lover. The Children had caught up to them outside of a club in New York. They didn’t care if she wasn’t in the game. They smelled her out as a Seraphim. They would have taken her if her girlfriend hadn't been carrying a gun. Lia had shot them, standing her ground while Pahaliah had run. She had told him she would be damned if she would ever run again.

  They made their way through the atrium. There were guards at the real entrance to the building, ready to check passes.

  “Activate the ID sync,” Olus said.

  His face altered to match the identification Goillisi had downloaded from Tridium’s network. So did Pahaliah’s. In a moment they changed from a pair of infiltrators to a pair of scientists with full credentials into the building, courtesy of the Rudin.

  “So far, so good,” Olus whispered. “Keep your eyes open.”

  “Roger,” Pahaliah replied under her breath.

  They reached the checkpoint a moment later.

  “Scrubbing,” Goillisi said in his ear.

  “Good morning, Doctor Carlson,” the guard said, beginning to run the foreign object detection wand over him. Goillisi was patched into the system, forcing it to return false negatives.

  “Good morning, Robert,” Olus replied. His voice wasn’t his voice, but instead a recording of the real Carlson spit out through a speaker attached to the back of Olus’ teeth.

  “New glasses?” Robert said. “I like them.”

  “Thank you,” Olus mouthed, triggering the recording.

  He moved his hand over to the biometric scanner. A glove made of the same material as the mask he was wearing provided the good doctor’s fingerprints.

  “Chrysanthemum,” he said, triggering the next recording.

  He knew the guard would be able to see the results of the security details on contact lenses in his eyes.

  “Business as usual,” Robert said. “Have a good day, Doctor.”

  “You, too, Robert.”

  Olus passed the guards and entered the main lobby. Pahaliah joined him there a few seconds later. They didn’t speak as they moved to the tubes together.

  “What floor?” Olus asked Goillisi.

  “Two-seventy,” the Rudin replied. “Top floor. The local data terminal is in a clean vault. Once you’re inside, you’re on your own until you come back out.”

  “That’s why there are two of us.”

  “Unless you can get the CEO of Tridium into the room, you’ll have to bypass security manually. I can’t help you once you make it that far.”

  “That’s why you brought me along.”

  They waited for the tube with other employees of the company. The place was big enough that they didn’t collide with anyone the real Doctor Carlson knew. The tube platform arrived, and they stepped on. It bypassed the first two hundred floors and then pausing intermittently to release passengers.

  They were the only ones on it when it made it to two-seventy.

  “Re-sync,” Olus said.

  They altered their features again, matching them up with a separate pair of employees who had more regular access to the vault.

  “You’re sure you can get us in?” Pahaliah asked.

  “No,” Olus replied. “But if I can’t, nobody can.”

  She smiled. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  They crossed the corridors to the center of the floor. The entrance to the vault was obvious. A cylindrical room fully encased in clear glass. There were desks around the cylinder, where data clerks were monitoring the systems, ready to respond to access requests, and otherwise goofing off.

  They entered the room together, approaching one of the desks.

  “Feeds are injected,” Goillisi said.

  “Can I help you?” the clerk asked. She was young, probably fresh out of college.

  “No,” Olus replied, slipping a small dart launcher down his cuff and triggering it.

  A tiny needle launched into her neck and delivered a sedative. She looked at him, confused, not having noticed the maneuver. Then her eyes got heavy, and she slumped back.

  Olus rounded the cylinder from one side, Pahaliah on the other. They put the rest of the clerks to sleep.

  “The easy part,” she said.

  Olus walked over to the vault entrance, p
ulling a cable from a tightpack on the seraphsuit and running it to the bottom of the security panel on the wall beside a heavy door. The vault was encased in rhodrinium, able to survive a nuclear blast if necessary. Not that nukes were much of a problem on Earth anymore, though he supposed Thraven could change that if things got too much further out of hand.

  The cable transmitted access through the thick material, giving him a command line in the seraphsuit. The tools loaded onto the SoC were different than standard Republic fare. They had all been designed by Watchers, and as a result were primitive in some ways and more advanced in others. He wiggled his fingers, entering commands as he started the work to unlock the vault.

  Pahaliah circled the cylinder, keeping an eye out for employees heading their way. The vault was in the center of the structure and clearly visible from every side. They didn’t have a lot of time. A few minutes at best.

  Olus entered commands quickly, running three simultaneous systems against the door security to bypass the key code entry and retinal scan. Only the current CEO of Tridium, Bryce Paul, had direct access and was as likely a stooge for Thraven and the Nephilim as anyone.

  The tools did their work, bypassing the two wards. Or at least, Olus thought they did. As the vault door slid open, a signal went out from the panel and into his SoC. A moment later, he felt a burning against his thigh as the chip began to melt.

  He didn’t make a sound, putting a hand over the area as the chip tried to melt it away. The seraphsuit contained it, but the readings to his glasses went offline.

  “Frag,” he whispered.

  The good news was that the panel wasn’t networked to anything. It couldn’t send an alarm out to the rest of the building, or anywhere for that matter. The signal to his chip was intended to disable him, but the designers hadn’t been counting on the increased protection of the suit he was wearing.

  The door finished sliding open.

  A pair of guards were waiting behind it.

  8

  Olus didn’t hesitate. Years of training made that impossible. Instead, he bounced toward the two guards, charging them, targeting the one on the left. The guard was ready, already aware the external security had been cracked. He engaged Olus, catching his first blow against the arm of his lightsuit, grabbing his wrist and trying to break it.

  Olus turned with the motion, letting the guard lead him until he got better leverage, and then using it to slip the grip and snap out his foot at the guard’s knee. The guard sidestepped, moving fast, reversing and throwing a punch that caught Olus on the side. The force knocked him back, and instead of fighting it he bounced with the momentum, getting his feet against the wall and pushing back, spinning in the air and getting a foot into the guard’s faceplate.

  He felt the helmet crack under the pressure. The guard was thrown to the side, up against the terminal Olus was trying to reach.

  The other guard jabbed a nerve stick into Olus’ side. Olus jerked, feeling his body start to go numb.

  Something happened inside of him.

  He could feel the Gift suddenly, like a rush of adrenaline, the tingling of the spreading numbness replaced with a warm tingling of healing. It spread across the afflicted area and down his limbs, giving him a sudden burst of life he wasn’t expecting. When the guard tried to jab him again, it seemed as if he was moving in slow motion, his arm reaching tenderly instead of snapping forward.

  Olus bounced back, grabbing the arm and yanking the stick from the guard, pivoting along his back and then kicking backward into him. The force knocked him hard into the second guard, and they hit the ground in a tangle.

  Then Pahaliah was on them, firing multiple laser pulses into them.

  “You didn’t have to kill them,” Olus snapped at the result.

  “I’m not taking any chances.”

  “That’s not why. The vault isn’t networked, but odds are their vitals are linked somewhere. You just told them someone’s up here.”

  Her face tightened in sudden fear.

  “Frag,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Olus ignored her, moving to the terminal. His SoC was shot.

  “We need to get the data off this thing. Whatever we can grab.”

  She moved in beside him.

  The lights went out.

  “Frag,” she said again.

  “Focus,” he said. “We need the data. Better to die trying to get it than to leave empty-handed.”

  She nodded, plugging her cable into the terminal, her hands moving as she accessed it. The security protocols on the box were rudimentary. The other layers were supposed to stop intruders.

  “What do you want me to pull?” she asked.

  “Everything. We don’t have time to be picky.”

  “There are hundreds of petabytes of data here.”

  “It should support concurrent outputs.” He pointed to the base of the terminal, where a machine waited to dump requests to data chips. “Write as many as you can.”

  “They’ll be time-wiped.”

  “Then we ought to be quick. I’ll monitor outside. Let’s do our best not to kill anyone else. Not every employee of Tridium knows about the Nephilim.”

  She nodded, beginning the data dump. A series of green lights at the base of the terminal showed it was writing six chips at once.

  Olus moved out of the vault, walking around the perimeter. He didn’t have to wait long for the first guards to arrive. They came into the hallway carrying portable shields instead of wearing armor, taking position behind them and aiming their guns over the top.

  Olus ducked behind the nearest desk, grabbing the clerk there and pulling her down behind it. He didn’t need them shooting innocents.

  “Come out with your hands up. You’re surrounded.”

  Olus looked back toward the other side of the vault. They weren’t surrounded. Not yet. The guards should have synchronized better.

  He spread his fingers, feeling the Blood flowing through him, alive to the trouble he was in. This wasn’t the Nephilim’s Gift that had been altered to thrive on and enact violence. It couldn’t create fire or invisible force or otherwise do direct harm. It was the Gift of a once peaceful race and their once peaceful god.

  He would have to handle the violence himself.

  He bounced from behind the desk, springing toward the wall, turning and planting his feet and launching toward the guards. They opened fire at his approach. Not heavy slugs. Stunning rounds. Most of them missed, but not all. A few sharp charges coursed into him, intended to bring him down. They didn’t. The Blood managed the shock, dispersing it, and he came down in the middle of the group, grabbing one guard and throwing him into the wall, bouncing away from a second to punch a third in the chest, ducking and spinning and tackling the fourth. In the course of four heartbeats he had the entire squad on the ground, disoriented and out of the fight.

  “Killshot, do you read me?” Goillisi said.

  “I read you,” Olus said. “I thought you couldn’t reach in here?”

  “I amped the signal. They’re going to trace it back to me. I need to evacuate. Go now. You kicked the hornet’s nest.”

  “Roger. Thank you.”

  Goillisi was already gone.

  Olus heard the motion on the other side of the vault. Another set of guards was coming. There would be more after them, units that were sure to be better armed and shooting to kill.

  He returned to the vault, ducking down to retrieve the chips.

  “We need to go. How much did you get?”

  “Not a lot. I ran some queries to try to narrow down what I dumped.”

  “Good thinking.” He shoved the chips into tightpacks. “How long until they wipe?”

  “Two hours.”

  “It will have to be long enough.”

  The terminal was secure. So was the data on it. The chips would be copy-proof, and would both self-delete and self-destruct in two hours. He was sure they would also have added protections to prevent screen capturing or other eff
orts to permanently store the information.

  “Let’s move.”

  They headed out of the vault as the guards were circling toward them.

  “Take the left,” Olus snapped as he moved to the right, grabbing a shield and pulling it aside at the same time a pair of stun bullets hit his chest, dispersing their energy. The guard looked surprised when he didn’t collapse. Olus hit him with the shield, knocking him back against the wall.

  He spun and put the shield up, catching another volley of the rounds with it before vaulting forward and quickly disabling the guards. He turned to see Pahaliah at work, finding the other guards already down.

  “Nice work,” he said. “This way.”

  They moved away from the vault, back toward the tube. Olus looked down through the transparent shell. A squad of soldiers in battlesuits was on the way up.

  “Not that way,” he said, reversing their direction.

  “It’s going to be the same on the other side. We’re trapped.”

  “Not yet.”

  He closed his eyes, quickly recalling the layout of the tri-towers, thankful he always committed those details to memory. This wasn’t the first time he had lost his computer in the middle of a mission.

  He led her down the hallway and away from the vault at a run. The floor was eerily vacant, evacuated the moment the initial alarm had been tripped.

  “Where are we going?” Pahaliah asked.

  Olus shrugged off his jacket as they ran, and then tore away the shirt over the seraphsuit. “I suggest you strip,” he said.

  She didn’t question him, removing her jacket and blouse. They paused for a moment to pull off the pants that were covering the suits, leaving them dressed only in the form-fitted, silver outfits.

  They turned the corner. A pair of soldiers appeared at an adjacent intersection further down. They didn’t order them to stop. They started shooting, bullets coming too close as they hurried past.

  Olus pulled his gun, setting the toggle to three and firing back. It hit the wall and detonated a few meters ahead of the soldiers, hopefully acting as a deterrent. He crossed another hallway and slammed his shoulder into one of the doors, the force pushing it out of the way. They burst into a large room of terminals and cubes, with a full row of windows along the outer wall.