It hadn't rained in over a week—a major drought by SolarisCity's standards—and the tunnel was dry. Night goggles weren't allowed, but overhead cracks allowed just enough gray light to seep through to give shapes to the shadowy piles of rubble and refuse. She couldn't see far, but anyone playing by the rules would be just as blind.
Jazz took three steps right, then lowered herself by a clump of debris left by some past flood. Nonstinking, she was glad to note. Bracing her carbine, she lined up on the drain entrance and waited.
A hundred count. No sound from the way she'd come, no moving shadows.
She climbed silently to her feet and faded from cover to cover until she reached a T intersection. Slipping around the right corner, she secured her carbine and drew her pistol. It was a blunt twelve millimeter— nonregulation, but quick to target and deadly in the tunnel.
The side tunnels were feeders. A few paces past the juncture in either direction, the ceiling dropped to about one and a half meters. Which meant, barefoot and with her helmet off, she would have just been able to stand upright.
Bent low, she picked her way around loose gravel, making sure each foot was firmly planted on silent concrete before trusting her weight to it. After a dozen steps, she paused, listening, with her back against the wall and her weapon aimed back the way she'd come. Another hundred count.
Reversing course, she crab-stepped back to the main tunnel. Quick look. Again. Then a spin across the opening, handgun leveled at the empty shadows of the storm drain.
Jazz bent low, handgun thrust ahead, and jogged down the other feeder tunnel. Stealth was secondary to speed at this point, but she varied her pace out of long habit, messing up the timing for anyone tracking her in the dark.
The metro spur leading to what had been the low-rent district of the Black Hills had been pretty thoroughly demolished in the bombardment. The tunnels were blind cave-ins a hundred meters in both directions from the abandoned station.
Most defenders ignored the subway station, figuring it was a dead end. But for scrappers as small as Jazz, a jagged fissure in the tunnel wall provided a secret entrance.
Gravel spilled as she squeezed through the break but it couldn't be avoided. She cleared the position fast and took cover by a ruined kiosk. Two one hundred counts later she was reasonably sure the platform was empty. Having seen no one on the defender team under one- eighty centimeters, she wasn't worried about anyone following her through the crack in the wall.
At the top of the stairs, Jazz paused with her eyes at sidewalk level, scanning the area surrounding the subway entrance. Nothing. The storm drain shortcut had put her close to the middle path—messing up what little planning her squad had put into this assault. Now she had to decide whether to cut back out to her original course or head straight in.
She'd made good time along the north route. She'd worked that section before and there hadn't been many changes. Added with the shortcut, Jazz figured she should be a little ahead of the two pairs on their southern arcs and about even with the pair going up the middle.
Only she saw no sign of the hotshots. Either they were slower than she thought and were behind her, or faster and ahead.
Or they were dead.
As soon as the thought formed, she was certain of it. At least one defender had decided not to wait for the aggressors to breach the perimeter and gone hunting. Jazz knew she'd felt the hunter on her tail.
Rules of this match were chemical projectile weapons—slug guns—edged weapons, or bare hands. She hadn't heard gunfire, so whoever was after her was the close-and-silent type.
With a hunter loose, moving back out to the north approach was a waste of precious time. Choosing a shallow angle left that carried her through some good cover to a low-walled park, she sprinted forward.
Six steps into a dead run, she jumped left hard enough to risk an ankle, fetching up in a shadowed doorway.
The patch of gray urban camo dropped back below the lip of the park wall. If the defender was stupid, he was waiting for her to move again. If his IQ approached double digits, he was moving—probably left.
Quick look to be sure another defender wasn't hiding inside, then she was through the doorless doorway into what looked like the lobby of a bank. Crabbing below the windowsills, Jazz cut through the open space, ignoring the black half globes of the cameras. She took the extra five seconds to worm through a barricade instead of jumping it, taking the grit working its way down her collar as cheap price for the cover.
With her left eye half past the door frame, she scanned the street and the low wall of the park. Nine out of ten guys would move to that slight dip in the wall, giving them a false sense of security. Too far for her handgun. She switched her carbine to her left shoulder and waited. She kept her head still but her eye moving, taking in as much of the scene as she could without calling attention to her position.
Scoring was simple. Aggressor team—hers—made it past three to four defenders, taking out as many as they could, to reach a specific house in a target area. Then they cleared the house. A win was one aggressor in the house, alive at the final whistle. Pay—the important part—was based on points earned through kills and captures. Clearing the house doubled the aggressor's money.
Double bonus with three kills would be enough to keep her off public dole for another six months. If she was frugal.
She breathed slow and shallow, waiting for the defender in the park to make today's first contribution to her freedom fund.
He was candy. He actually stuck his head over the wall, looking toward where she had been. His first clue as to where she'd gone was a marker round in the temple, just below the edge of his helmet. He'd have a good four days of headache to remind him that patience was a virtue.
Jazz cut across the street, staying low in case her kill had a partner. Moving along the inside of the wall, she gave the defender a no-hard-feelings pat on the shoulder as she passed. He glanced pointedly at the doorway, some sixty meters away, from which she'd made the offhand shot and shook his head in disgust.
Unarmored vital point, one-shot kill, degree of difficulty two—maybe two and a half. A couple more like that and she'd be able to afford meat this month.
Jazz hadn't always had to count each kill in terms of food rations. Not too long ago she'd had a run in prime- time matches as one of Darcy's Divas. They'd been contenders on the infantry circuit. Had an agent, were being scouted by some serious stables.
Until they'd gone up against a dirty-tricks unit that had thought to give themselves an edge in a marker match by using live ammo. Live ammo was a penalty, but didn't automatically cost you the match unless you killed somebody. Mostly the idea was to scare the other team into not putting up a fight; get them to keep their heads down so you could walk over them.
Well. Darcy didn't scare and neither did her Divas. Even after their first casualty—especially after their first casualty—they went after the dirty-tricks unit full bore. Paint rounds weren't deadly, but they could hurt. And when you got close enough there were always gun butts, boots, and knives.
When it was over Darcy Yarrow and four other Divas were dead. It was Jazz's highest rated match ever, her almost-death even made it onto a couple of major distribution highlights holovids. But it pretty much ended her career.
The other team got banned from the games for a year or two; some of them even did some jail time. Big deal.
It took Jazz a month to recover from her wounds. By the time she was on her feet, Jamice—the only Diva to come out of that final match in one piece—had joined a new unit, one that didn't need another scout.
She'd lived on her winnings for as long as she could, trying to hook up with another established outfit. But the fact was nobody thought she was as good as she knew she was. Add to that her scars—and her lopsidedness—and she no longer had the camera appeal to be a frontline scrapper.
The last eighteen months had been showing up for cattle calls and hoping she'd strut her stuff well enough to get p
icked up by a team with some future. If the rest of the defending squad was as candy as her first kill—
Jazz hit the ground and rolled, the memory of a marker round slapping a tree trunk keeping her moving until she was in cover. If she hadn't been reflexively varying her speed—mixing up her step—while daydreaming about prize money, the round would have hit her low on the face.
Keeping to cover, she checked out the angle of the paint smear. The shooter had been high, probably on the roof of the three-story building across the street. No doubt this guy was already moving. If it were her, she'd go to ground level and come in from an angle while the target was still checking windows. Then again, she'd never take a high sniper position in the first place. Best watch the ground and the windows while figuring her move.
To her right was another camera pylon, the black fer- roglass globe low enough to get good coverage below the tree cover. She glanced at it out of habit. Then glanced again.
On the underside of the globe was a light smear. The reflection of a face, white, against the shadows of dense foliage. From the angle and size, she made it to be ten to a dozen meters past the pylon, about even with her position.
No odds at all that the defender who liked to hunt with knives was sidling up for another silent kill.
She faded back, not as silent as she wanted to be on the detritus under the trees, moving to get both her targets in the same quarter. She was fairly sure there was a hollow a few meters back, directly behind her quarry's position, that might give her cover. If she didn't get boxed in.
It was tempting to try to figure Knife Boy's exact location from the reflection and saturate the zone with short bursts, but she discarded the idea. Blind burst fire was a low-points move and only worked about half the time.
If she wanted max points—and max money—she'd go for a live capture.
She lost the pale reflection by her third step, but not before she'd seen he was moving, too. Hard to tell with the curve, but it looked like he was paralleling her, heading toward the same hollow.
That's what he thought.
Cutting sharply right, she went on the attack.
Bent double, she dashed under the low hem of a conifer, cutting close to the bole, then angling out on a new vector. He had to have heard her coming and she made an apparent stumble left before jumping right just as she broke cover. Speed trumped evasion this close in and she made a straight dash, clearing a massive log with a low hurdle to land at a crouch, her carbine leveled at Knife Boy's head.
At Knife Boy's helmet, perched on a stick.
She took her right hand off the carbine, holding it by the fore stock in her left, and swung the gun gently away from her body as she pivoted slowly left.
He stood five meters away, black hair blending with the shadows under some flowering branch, with his own assault rifle—much heavier than her carbine—leveled at her. No knife this time; she'd earned that much respect. She could see the massive blade hung hilt-down in a shoulder sheath, its marker-orange-striped grip covering his heart.
Instead of killing her, he gestured for her to drop her carbine. He'd evidently done the point math, too, and was going for a live capture over a shot in the back.
Her first shot took him in the sternum, two fingers to the right of his knife's hilt.
His first shot fired in time with her second, but while hers painted a second disk center chest, his thwacked against the butt of her carbine as it swung through the space she'd just left. It hadn't been a jump, just a sudden straightening of her legs with no gathering of her upper body to telegraph the move.
Jazz emptied her lungs in preparation for impact, making no effort to break her fall. Instead, she spent her second of float time focused on keeping the blunt twelve millimeter in her right hand leveled at Knife Boy's chest. She squeezed off the third shot just before she hit, a flat flop that would have knocked the wind out of her if there'd been any.
She came up. fast but graceless, pushing off the ground with her carbine as she kept the automatic trained on her target.
He didn't move. With standard body armor, three hits to a vital—three hits that could be covered with a playing card—meant he was dead.
"Aerospace," the dead guy said.
That meant nothing to Jazz. She shrugged it off, already scanning for the sniper, who could have used the confusion to move in. No sign of anyone, though there wasn't much to see from the hollow.
She gave her latest victim another glance, taking the time to admire his frame. Couldn't tell if his eyes were green or brown in the shade, but she saw they were something dark that went well with the rest of his face. She winked her right eye, keeping her pretty one open and focused on him. If the rest of the scrap went right, she might offer him a dinner.
Pulling her head back to the match, she crouched low and moved right. The hollow stretched into a shallow fold, leading south. If she followed it, she had a good chance of flanking the sniper's position.
Two steps and she sensed a lack of presence behind her. A quick check confirmed dead Knife Boy had not stayed put. No reason he should, once his death was recorded. It was traditional for kills to sit where they'd fallen, but a lot of dead guys headed back to the staging area to wait out the game in comfort.
Except Knife Boy didn't feel gone.
Jazz couldn't see him, but she knew he was still with her.
Walking around dead wasn't really a violation, unless he let his position tip a teammate where she was. Or tried to draw fire from an opponent who didn't know he was dead.
She'd already killed him, so there was nothing she could do about it without stopping the game. Shrugging off the concern, she focused on defenders still in a position to help her income.
Two minutes later she was in an alley leading away from the park at the base of the sniper's building. If it was still his building. There'd been no reaction to her topping the wall and crossing the street, moving from truck carcass to shell crater to stoop. Either she'd been too fast for him or he was on the move, too, between firing positions.
Or he was already set in a new position, waiting for her to come to him.
A fusillade of distant gunfire echoed through the alley.
Two, maybe three, blocks south of her some idiot had his assault rifle set on full auto. The four jokers on the right wing must have found the defenders.
She hoped it was the target house and not just some picket. Rules were that at least three defenders hold the target, which meant—if her teammates kept them pinned for a moment—there were at most two still at large. One of them the sniper who was—if he thought like her— somewhere ahead, between her and her objective.
Jazz headed east, ninety degrees off the direct route. From the sound of things her compatriots had cleverly massed all their fire on one side of the house, making them easy to defend against but—hopefully—pulling all of the defenders to that side of the objective.
She'd take out the sniper if she could, but now her goal was getting around him and into the back door of the target house. Any kills she made after breaching the objective carried a fifty percent bonus.
Dust bin. Gutter. Wrecked car. Doorway. From the sounds of the firefight—now reduced to sporadic bursts of fire and counterfire—the target house was the roofless brownstone across the street.
No movement along the street. Nothing in the windows, most of which still had glass. No cover between her position and the stoop leading up to the back door of the brownstone, either.
She could either sprint across twenty meters of open concrete here, or she could move up a few blocks, cross under cover, and work her way back to target.
The firefight on the other side of the house was winding down. She didn't have much time.
She studied the street back along her trail, checking each window. Most snipers liked to set up, their gun leveled, and wait for their target to move into the kill zone. Which meant most snipers could be spotted if you could pick out the barrel of the rifle. Unless they staye
d far enough back so the rifle didn't show from the street.
Jazz could see nothing that didn't belong. There was an outside chance that was good news; she'd evaded the sniper. More likely it meant the sniper just wasn't where she was looking.
She glanced at each of the black ferroglass camera globes she could see from her position. No helpful reflections.
And no time.
Jump. Stutter step left. Flat run. Broad jump right.
Halfway across the street, the pavement in front of her geysered dust.
Jazz buttonhooked, almost ran back, but turned it into a two-seventy. The spot she would have stepped sprayed her with cement chips.
Real bullets. The sniper was using real bullets. She was alive only because he was going for a leg shot. He wanted to keep her out of the house but didn't want to blow the match by killing her.
Bent double, keeping vitals as close to legs as possible to complicate the sniper's sighting, she ran flat out for the basement entrance of the building next to the target. As she passed the closest point to the stoop of the target house, the curbstone shattered. The shooter had anticipated, shot where she should have gone. She jumped through the dust, faster—she hoped—than the sniper could retarget.
Up the steps, carbine on full auto, the heavy paint rounds chewing up the paper wood door.
As nearly as she could tell, the sniper had a clear field of fire. Unless he suddenly got stupid, his next shot would get her. But if she was close enough to throw herself across the threshold . . .
She leaped.
Her shoulder crunched through the bullet-shattered panel. Flinders exploded away from her as she twisted in the air, bringing her carbine to bear on the human shape half visible in the low light. A distant portion of her mind registered the end game signal hooting through the ruined city streets and she held her fire.
Jazz hit the floor, landing on her back as the note died away, her carbine still bearing on the defender standing over her. She felt a moment of inverted deja vu.
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