by Skyler Grant
The SantaFe offices came into view. Twelve stories tall, the building facade was adorned with festive banners proclaiming the glories of the old west.
It was also being patrolled by gunslingers sporting sheriff badges, body armor, and wearing cowboy hats. You had to love SantaFe—except for when it was trying to kill you.
They started shooting at the land speeder as soon as we made our appearance and Masque swerved down an alley.
I was out the door before the vehicle stopped moving. The SantaFe guards might be in body armor, but they weren't wearing helmets. I dialed my weapon penetration almost all the way down and dove out of the alley.
Bullets peppered around me and I let off several rounds as I rolled to the other side. They weren't my best shots, I think I'd only found my target with two of the five, but they were head shots and likely taken those guards out of the fight.
I felt woozy. Ismene really hadn't fully gotten the wound in my belly healed yet.
A figure abseiled down on a rope and threw something. They'd prepared for our assault and had people on the roofs. Suddenly I was in a tangle net—a nasty device that could cause short-term paralysis and long-term nerve damage.
I tried to shoot and couldn't lift the Silversmith.
Ismene took over, my arm rising and firing a shot, the round exploding in the skull of the attacker.
"Sorry," Ismene said. "They had your nerves all kinds of confused. I could work your arm, but I had to bypass them and go straight to the muscles."
The benefits of having a nanotechnological AI construct living inside of you.
"Can you get me out of the net?" I thought.
"Oh yeah, sorry." My muscles again responded to her commands and soon I was free of the net. Once I had control of my body again I put a few more shots into the corpse—because I was in just that sort of mood.
Another two stepped into view around the corner at the far end of the alley. Before I could fire off any rounds they went down in a spray of fire from behind me. Masque had stashed the car and joined things.
"There are a lot of them," I said.
"And more closing in on your position," Ismene said through the Comm.
It was no surprise. If they were tapped in through my feed, I was easy to locate now. Given that SantaFe was hunting me, of course they were tapped into my feed.
"How do you want to play this?" Masque asked.
"Keep back and give me cover."
Masque nodded and took position by the corner. I rolled out again. There were more of them out there than I remembered. I hit another two in the chest, then got a shot to the shoulder which was absorbed by my armor, but sent me scrambling for cover once again.
I sheathed the Silversmith and drew my spear. When I heard the chatter of Masque's machine pistol I dived out again. With my Olympian reflexes, jinking as I ran, I managed to avoid most of the shots coming my way. My armor took another two hits to the chest that would leave me bruised at best, and might have broken a rib at worst.
I'd worry about my injuries later. I swept the pistol from a surprised guard's hands and drove the point of my spear beneath the chin of another, swinging his body towards a third raising his gun. The corpse jerked and twitched as it took the shots and I charged forward crashing into them with the body of their comrade.
It left me breathless. Even with my enhanced muscles these men were all larger than me. My small physique really did have its disadvantages. I abandoned my spear to draw the Silversmith again and shot the remaining guard in the face.
Any feeling of satisfaction I got didn't last for long. More guards were converging, and bullets were impacting around me. They weren't accurate at this range, but that would change in a hurry. I fired off a few more rounds with the Silversmith, but didn't do much better, only one guard going down.
I reclaimed the spear and pulled back towards Masque.
I took a bullet in my ass for the trouble, although again the armor kept it from penetrating.
Each round battered me a little more and I was really beginning to feel it. I hurt and that was starting to defeat the adrenaline coursing through my veins.
"Can I burn again?" I asked. It hadn't been that long since the last time.
"Not a chance. Your body wasn't made for that much and I'm still patching up the recent holes you put in it," Ismene said.
That took away the biggest force equalizer I had.
Well, if I couldn't do a frontal assault I had to think of alternatives.
"Get the car," I told Masque.
Using the abseil rope I climbed to the rooftop.
I spotted several snipers positioned where they could watch the street. I didn't engage them—I didn't want anybody knowing I was here. They weren't looking up for me yet and while the news would surely come through soon because of my stream, I hopefully had a minute or two. That would be enough.
I leapt from roof to roof closing the distance to the SantaFe offices. I finally got my first visual of the junction box. For all the trouble it was causing, it didn't look like much and I didn't have time to figure out why it was important. I dialed the Silversmith to maximum penetration and shot out the power converter.
The snipers were starting to leave their rooftop perches.
One took a shot that just grazed my arm and I threw myself forward. The Silversmith wasn't ready to fire again yet, but I didn't need it. In hand-to-hand fighting these men were no match. I broke his jaw and flipped him over the edge of the rooftop to go crashing onto the ground.
I claimed his rifle and chambered a round. The next sniper I saw I shot in the leg, the heavy round more or less tearing his limb clean off.
His screams followed me as I returned to the rope and slid down to the street. Masque had the speeder waiting and I climbed into the back seat.
"Go," I said.
We hadn't made it more than two blocks before the block behind us was torn apart by a massive explosion. A fireball climbed into the sky. The SantaFe offices were collapsing, the building crumbling into itself in a spire of flames.
It was only a regional office. I didn't know how many employees would have been inside, but still I imagined it would be hundreds.
Diva had done the planning and decided there was no good way into a facility that well-defended to take out one man. Taking out the building though, that was a different matter. Perhaps she'd brought explosives in via the sewers, perhaps she'd simply driven some sort of car-bomb right up to the front door. It didn't matter how. That junction box wasn't important, it had never been important. I was there to distract SantaFe and make them think the attack was coming from somewhere else.
It was brilliant. It was monstrous.
And I didn't want this many dead on my conscience.
"Take us back to base," I said. I couldn't let this stand.
19
The others were already back when we arrived. Drinks were out and it seemed to be quite the celebration. I wasn't in the mood to party.
"Destroying the whole building, that was not what I ordered," I said, heading straight for Diva.
She took a swig of her drink. "You told me to handle it. It's handled. If that executive chasing you isn't dead, I guarantee he sure as fuck isn't going to be chasing you anymore."
"Do you have any idea how many people you just killed?" I asked.
"How many did you and Billy kill when they interrupted your dinner? How many did you kill trying to get to that junction box?" Diva said.
That wasn't the point.
"It isn't the same. They had guns in their hands and were coming for us," I said.
"And we didn't kill anyone that wasn't helping those people with guns in their hands. They declared war on you and you're a member of this team. You wanted to make them bleed, great—mission fucking accomplished," Diva said, growing more heated.
"You crossed the line with Fang and you crossed it again here."
"Fuck you. I did you a favor," Diva said, setting her drink down. I thought fo
r a moment that she was going to hit me, but instead she stormed out.
I was right. I knew I was right. The party had gone silent.
I tried to give the others a weak smile and moved to take a seat. "Didn't mean to ruin your celebration. Well, I did, but you know what I mean."
"Not really," Hammer said, before shrugging and taking a slug of his drink.
Ismene's hologram seemed to be trying to snuggle with Sparks, which was going about as poorly as you'd expect. I don't know why they hadn't just hooked up in the Network.
She pulled herself away. "I've got some business, if you want to take your mind off the piles of bodies?"
Not the way I'd have put it, but I appreciated the effort.
"Sure, what have you got?"
Inanna pulled a chair over and settled herself down. This must be good.
"We figured out the second puzzle," Ismene said.
That was news. That was big news.
"Which means we learned a lot about Lethe in the process," Inanna said.
"It isn't actually a bioweapon at all. Or at least that isn't the purpose it was developed for. It is designed to specifically tag and deconstruct memories," Ismene said.
"So it's what, a brainwashing drug?"
"I mean, you could scrub a mind clean with it. That's probably what you'd do, if you deployed it as a bioweapon, but that isn't really what it's meant for. Instead, think of the applications to wipe out traumatic memories," Ismene said.
I had a few recent ones I wouldn't mind forgetting. I think most of the team did.
"So, it's for mental health?" I said.
"Yes, but more than that. It helps solve capacity issues," Ismene said.
I stared at her hologram. That one required some explanation.
"You biologicals have an issue when it comes to long life. Storage. Your brains are limited in the capacity they can store and long-term this really becomes a problem. I think Lethe is someone's engineered solution," Ismene said.
Inanna was silent. If she always did know way more than she was telling, Inanna might have known what Lethe was all along.
"Does Roma use life-extending technologies so much that it would have needed to develop something like this?" I asked.
Ismene glanced at Inanna and said, "You know they acquired a lot of Olympian technology after the fall of Olympus. This is advanced biochemistry and it's my belief that it is of Olympian design."
That didn't make any sense. While our lives were somewhat extended, it wasn't to a degree that required something like this. We prized sticking to the human ideal too much to fundamentally alter that experience.
"Had you ever seen anything like that?" I asked.
"No, but I recognize the construction methods for something like this. There are traces, signs. It's hard to describe, but I'd say with a fair degree of confidence this was ours," Ismene said.
That was something to mull over. It was no surprise that Olympus had secrets, but some of these pieces just weren't fitting with anything I knew.
"Tell her about the other enhancement," Inanna said.
Ismene explained, "Lethe uses certain markers to sort memories. You already have some modifications to your memory to prompt better reactions time in combat. The puzzle also revealed modifications to those existing enhancements that I believe would give you or any other Olympian eidetic memory."
A photographic memory? That made some sense I suppose, although it was almost exactly the opposite of what that drug was designed to do.
"Risks?" I asked.
"None that I can tell, except it changes your biology that just much more," Ismene said.
So, a little further away from the human norm, from the human ideal. I was already on the wrong side of that line and, by all appearances, Aphrodite wanted to push me further.
"Do it. Was there a file this key unlocked as well?" I asked.
"There was. It is different than the last one though, so far as I can tell it isn't describing any sort of threat," Ismene said.
"Then what is it?"
"The file just gives some rather basic background on one of the first big pushes to develop real artificial intelligence, years before Liberty would go on to do the real thing," Ismene said.
"Strange, and I can't see how it would be relevant to anything."
"It was called project Tiamat, an initiative of Titan Tactical."
There was the connection.
"That's a name I've heard you say recently."
"The original source of most of the Olympian genome and also Aphrodite's genome."
"Do we know anything more about them?" I asked.
If they kept coming up again and again, it would make sense to be as prepared as we could.
"Not that much," Ismene said. "Most of the references I'm finding point me back towards the Olympus archives and those are obviously no longer available."
Obviously. I was starting to wonder if some connection might be there too.
"Tell me about this facility," I said.
"It was built into a mountain. There were several entrances and all but one is now underwater. The accessible one is an emergency elevator near the mountain's peak which, because of the flooding, is now is an island," Ismene said.
"Can we get there?"
"I can find us a pilot," Inanna said. "You want to check it out?"
Did I? It really did bother me to be again following Aphrodite's trail of bread crumbs. I knew the company she kept and that her motives were probably questionable.
I was being played, but I was being played well. These strings kept connecting back to Olympus and if there was any chance that this all had something to do with the attack on the station, then following this trail could lead me to the culprits.
"Do you disapprove? Perhaps you know what we can expect to find there?" I asked.
Inanna gave me a faint smile and shook her head. "Believe it or not, I don't know everything. I have a few answers, but not all of them and I'm more curious about what's contained in this facility than you are."
I once again wished Inanna would just be open with me. I wanted to trust her. I loved how she was so smart and competent.
"Care to make a guess?" I asked.
"Whatever it is, it's something Aphrodite wants people to see. Your stream is serving her purposes with every step you take upon any path she sets for you. Always be aware of that," Inanna said.
It was good advice. I wasn't just Persephone, I was a constant presentation to the world. I and my team weren't solving these puzzles alone, the world was solving them with us. Aphrodite might want me to believe something, but more than that she wanted the entire world to believe it.
"We need sleep. If you could get us that ride in the morning we'll see what we find at the end of this particular trail," I said.
I was eager to see what the morning held. Aphrodite's first lead had proved more complex than it first appeared, I thought this one might as well.
20
In the morning Inanna led us to a small airfield on the outskirts of the city. Security allowed us to pass after she scanned her credentials. The glimpses of craft I caught through the hangers showed mostly medium-range craft that were well armed. This place was likely used either by mercenaries or off-the-book operations for corporations.
"Are we meeting a pilot?" I asked.
"I'll be flying us," Inanna said. "I keep my certifications up to date."
I wasn't really surprised, so far Inanna seemed to have a solid grounding in a large number of fields.
The airship she'd found for us lacked weapons, but made up for it with room to fit us all comfortably and stow our gear. That in addition to vertical takeoff and landing abilities made it ideal for squad transport and deployment.
Diva still hadn't come back, I wasn't sure if she would. I didn't know if I wanted her to. I still felt she'd crossed a line, but also understood why she had done it. To her mind she'd been covering for what she felt was one of my weaknesses and working to
defend her team. I got it, it didn't mean I agreed.
Inanna took the pilot's seat and, after running through some checks, soon had us rising from the tarmac.
"It will be a few hours. Get comfortable," Inanna said.
Fortunately, if being a soldier teaches you anything, it's to sleep whenever you have a moment. I dozed off and only awakened as our speed shifted.
"Good timing," Sparks said.
"Take it we're almost there?" I asked.
"More or less," said Inanna over the Comm. "I didn't want to just charge in so I sent a drone in ahead. Sending you over what I'm getting."
I keyed an emitter and brought it up. A holographic visual of the island below took form in the center of the cabin. The island wasn't unoccupied.
Several decaying buildings were all that was left of an old village. Landed near them was a vehicle that looked a lot like ours. A few figures in body armor and carrying rifles stared towards the drone.
"Looks like someone beat us here," I said.
"How are we going to handle it?" Masque asked.
"Before you make any decisions, they're inviting us down to talk," Inanna said.
That was something. Given our airship lacked any weapons we needed to get on the ground anyways.
"Signal that we are coming in," I said.
Inanna landed us beside the other airship and opened the hatch.
We stepped out with our weapons drawn. Of course, those already on the island did the same, five of them standing enough apart to give them some coverage, while a sixth stood in front of them.
They were dressed in unmarked body armor, although something caught my attention at once. All six had an Olympian appearance, and all looked to be a bit younger than myself. It wasn't just their features. Their body armor might have been unmarked, but the way they held themselves and their weapons, the cut of their hair, all spoke of Olympian military doctrine.
Their leader was silent, sizing us up—sizing me up.
"Do you have a private line set up to Sparks?" I asked Ismene.
"I do like to flirt with my man. These guys are looking awfully familiar," Ismene replied.
"I'm well aware. Tell him to key up a scrambler grenade in Olympian-specific spectrums."
