Abaddonian Dream

by M. K. Woollard

  The order was superfluous. The process had already begun.

  But the lockdown was standard procedure and Asha Ishi knew all the standard procedures, Hammell realised with a growing sense of excitement. She knew exactly how she would be taken into custody - the route she would take down to the cells, the number of guards at each stage, where the cameras were, the types of locks on the doors, where the exits were. With information like that, a person with foresight – and for all her faults, Asha Ishi had never struck him as the unprepared type – might find the weaknesses in the system and learn how to exploit them.

  Fighting the urge to smile, Hammell glanced up at Yun, hoping that he would continue doing everything by the book. The Commissioner stared right back at him, and Hammell had the distinct impression that their minds were following exactly the same path.

  An android in a corner of the room called out that it had found her, throwing up a camera feed onto the giant office display. Asha Ishi was out on the street, running down the steps in front of the building, heading off into a light mist. I.T.F. Agents and androids appeared on the cameras in the lobby, dashing for the doors, but the heavy shutters had dropped the moment the building had gone into lockdown, blocking their way.

  “Get them open!” someone shouted, but though the shutters were fast to close, they were painfully slow to open. Asha’s pursuers were delayed a few precious seconds - enough time for her to duck into a nearby building and lose the satellite and surveillor tracking.

  “Providence!” Yun called out. “Number one priority: Track and apprehend former Interpol Agent Asha Ishi. Find her!”

  The megaAI took over the huge display, bringing up hundreds of feeds from different sensors. Providence was on the case now, scanning every data source it had access to for any trace of the diminutive fugitive, but Hammell had no doubt that Asha Ishi knew every surveillor block, face tracker and eye scanner around the station for miles, and where the blind spots were.

  “Get every available android out on the streets,” Yun called out, as if reading his thoughts. “Fan out. Scan every person - man, woman or child, whatever they look like. Full identity checks.”

  Within seconds the building Asha Ishi had entered was surrounded by androids and I.T.F. Agents. They ventured inside, but after ten minutes they'd checked every room and still hadn't found her. All the power of Providence, plus the I.T.F. Agents, right in the middle of their stronghold, and Asha Ishi was getting away.

  Commissioner Yun barged past his shadow and charged through the doors, coming down the stairs with surprising speed for a man his size. He marched right up to Hammell and stood in front of him, ignoring all social norms about personal space. “Where does she park her nat?” Yun growled, his bulbous eyes threatening to pop right out of his head.

  “I don’t know,” Hammell replied, perfectly honestly. “She uses a different spot every day. She’s nuts - I’ve been telling you for years.”

  Yun stared him down, but there was nothing he could do. He turned back to address the room. “She’ll travel by private nat. She’ll fly rather than drive. It's a Telo model by Yakata, dark green - but don’t depend on that.”

  Reference images of Asha Ishi’s nat were already on display, as well as its registration number and beacon response. The focus switched to scanning the skies and doubt began to creep into Hammell’s mind. I.T.F. had its carriers out already, in numbers. Providence knew what it was doing. He willed Asha Ishi to remain unpredictable. They had lost her; she just had to keep her head down and get out on foot.

  But she didn’t. Hammell cursed under his breath as a bright pink Telo sprang up on Providence.

  “The licence plate and beacon do not match,” one of the androids said.

  “It’s her,” Yun said. “Force it down.”

  The carriers set off in pursuit and Hammell watched anxiously as they converged on the tiny pink bubble. His eyes flicked back and forth, trying to gauge distances and speeds - it was going to be close. Asha Ishi was heading full throttle for the thick cloud blanket, ascending almost vertically as the carriers closed in, androids standing ready to shoot grappling hooks from the open holds. The first carrier arrived, swooping past right as the Telo plunged into the cloud. Cables were launched, but blindly – and they missed.

  “The beacon signal has been unacquired,” an android said and nobody seemed surprised.

  “Switch to satellite imagery,” Yun said and Providence projected the feed onto the large display, but all the satellite revealed was the top of the cloud blanket, dotted here and there with huge carrier planes moving through the upper flight lanes. “Show me IR, mixed wavelengths,” Yun continued and Providence did so, cycling through a multitude of various wavelengths, without revealing anything.

  “There’s too much noise,” an agent in the room said.

  “Ok, we’re off pursuit,” someone said over the speakers. “Switching to acquisition.”

  Asha Ishi had escaped - for now. Hammell released his breath, unaware he’d even been holding it.

  “Someone tell me the range of that model,” Yun said. “Spread out the carriers. She can’t get far.”

  Yun was right. Even if it was fully charged, a nat with an engine that small would be lucky to make it much past the edge of the city. Providence drew out the expected boundary and the carriers began to spread around the edges of the circle, above and below the cloud blanket. Everything stopped as they moved into position. Every eye in the office was glued to the various displays, scanning for any sign. Hammell had to concentrate to breathe.

  “I have her!” an I.T.F. Agent called out, but it was the megaAI that had located the nat. Hammell could already see that Asha had somehow managed to make it beyond Providence’s perimeter. She was already deep inside the Reserves, much further away than her nat should have been able to carry her, especially in such a short period of time. Hammell actually clapped with excitement as he realised her Telo must have been heavily modified, and without any kind of external sign. Asha was coasting towards the ground at a relatively leisurely pace, heading for thick, concealing woodland, and there wasn’t a carrier near her. She's going to make it, Hammell thought.

  Then the missile hit, blowing away the back quarter of the nat, sending it into a spin.

  “Who fired that?” Yun demanded, his face making its way through the colour spectrum, landing eventually on purple. Providence heard the question too. It tracked the missile’s path back to a checkpoint on the Reservation Line.

  “I did,” a voice over the radio came back and Hammell recognised the pompous, arrogant, self-important tone.

  You motherfucker, Hammell thought to himself.

  “No more missiles,” Yun said, his face threatening to find a new colour.

  “Check your job title,” Captain Nieder said. “I answer to Intergov.”

  “That’s my I.A. up there!”

  “Not anymore.”

  “If you kill her,” Yun fumed, “I promise you, I’ll find a way to make you swing for it,” and Hammell felt a surge of pride in his boss for only the second time ever.

  “Don’t worry,” the Captain said, “I don’t waste ordnance.”

  The nat was coming down hard. Hammell looked on impotently, watching for a sign that Asha Ishi had regained control, but she was fast approaching the ground and the nat was still accelerating. If she doesn’t do it now… The nat clipped the treetops - and its engine suddenly fired, its angle of descent shallowing. Whatever else he thought of Asha Ishi, Hammell had to admit she really had balls. The pink bubble-like nat smashed into the trees, but there was no fireball as it impacted the ground and it stayed mostly in one piece as it came to a rest, lying smoking on the ground in a clearing of its own making.

  There were few camera options in the Reserves, and practically none in the forests. Providence was forced to focus on images supplied by the still-distant incoming carriers. Hammell stared at the few pixels that represented the nat door, holding his breath, waiting for them to mo
ve. Seconds passed… a minute, and his hopes began to fade. The first carrier arrived above the crash site, and finally the door swung open. Too late, Hammell thought.

  “No missiles!” Yun shouted.

  “Get this over with,” Nieder grunted. “Bring her in. Alive, if it’s feasible.”

  The carrier was low enough to begin dropping androids, though it was not yet safe enough for people. The first wave of armed kickas moved in, speeding through the forest as Asha Ishi fought her way clear of the wreckage, a large black object of some kind in her hand. The androids were on her the moment she was out, but she was ready for this too. Crouching on the ground, Asha pulled the trigger and the weapon in her hands went off like a firework display. Every single android on the ground dropped, their power units destroyed. Hammell shook his head, marvelling. Asha Ishi had found a way to obtain expensive, illegal-to-the-public, high impact smart bullets, and had figured out a way to direct them at multiple targets without the aid of an iEye.

  “Shots fired!” a voice said over the speakers.

  “Take her out!” Nieder replied and Hammell looked to Yun. The big man’s face was grim. There was nothing he could do; Asha had fired first.

  The second wave was more cautious, hanging back in the trees, and Hammell wondered what they were waiting for. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Asha Ishi dived from her nat just as the second missile hit. The flash overwhelmed the cameras for a second - and as it did, she moved.

  “Did she get out? Did anyone see where she went?” someone asked as the cameras took longer than usual to come back from the flash.

  “She’s gone, she’s gone,” came the despairing reply.

  “Drop the sniffers,” Nieder said, but the dead silence that followed told Hammell that the carriers didn’t have any. Why would they? Nobody had been expecting a chase through the wilds today.

  The cameras on the carriers swept the ground, but all they recorded was the misty forest canopy. Androids and I.T.F. Agents began to spread out through the woods, scanning in infrared, but they found themselves chasing down birds and foxes and even a wild boar; a creature which decided it didn’t much want to be chased and turned around to annihilate its android pursuer, much to the watching Hammell’s amusement.

  “Stand down,” Nieder said eventually, his voice cold and angry. “And someone get me some sniffers out here.”

  Hammell puffed out his cheeks, using his shirt sleeve to dab at the sweat on his face. He turned to the stony-faced Commissioner Yun, fighting and failing to suppress a grin. “Damn,” he said as he banged his fist into his palm.

  Chapter 26

  The Hoola Bar had never been a great drinking establishment, even at night, with a drinking buddy. In the afternoon, alone... Hammell nursed his whisky, staring at a mildly intoxicated woman who was watching something on her iEye as she walked towards a step. He said nothing as she slowly, inevitably met her fate. A man was playing piano and singing an old jazz number, but every song was falling flatter than the draught beer. Hammell found himself daydreaming that Eva would miraculously appear on the stage to inject some life into the place.

  Life, he thought and a small smile crossed his lips.

  The alcohol was making him philosophical, which was rarely a good thing. He found himself questioning what life even was. It seemed to him to be a human categorization with little meaning in nature. Could oxygen be considered alive? No, and yet without it there would be no life. So too the mass of rock beneath his feet. What about viruses? They were organic, but were not considered life by most definitions. What about the man-made programmable bacteria used to cure diseases or clean up nuclear spills – were they alive? The boundary between life and non-life was blurry, and therefore essentially irrelevant. The question, he decided, wasn’t whether andromorphs were alive, but whether that mattered.

  Eva would be long gone by now, if she had any sense; escaped to the eastern megacities or gone XS. There was a warrant out for her arrest. Even if she was still around and he somehow found her, he’d be forced to call it in and she would be sent to a chain gang – and that was the best case scenario. Worst case, I.T.F. would appear out of nowhere and kill her before she got near a prison cell. Neither option was exactly how their next meeting went in his fantasies.

  He drained his drink and signalled for another.

  “Want to know what I found out this morning?” he said to the bartender, who placed a fresh water-stained glass down in front of him. “As of today, I’m officially the last I.A. in this whole damn city. Can you believe that?”

  The bartender was new, young and was something of a cold fish. He no desire to talk or to listen. He was there simply to pour the drinks. He had ignored practically everything Hammell had said to him for the last hour, which was ironically causing Hammell to talk more and more, through less and less of a filter. The barman poured out a precise measure through the bottle’s flow regulator, held out a print scanner for payment, and then went off to serve another patron, all without saying a word. The Hoola Bar is going downhill, if such a thing is even possible.

  As he stared into his whisky, Hammell wondered if this was what Asha Ishi had meant when she talked about people falling off the world. That they just became so detached that they simply... stopped.

  “The last I.A.,” Hammell said to himself. “Fuck I.T.F. Fuck Providence. Fuck Nieder. Fuck Yun. Fuck Roy Brown. Fuck all of them.”

  Pouring the watery ice from his old glass into his new one, he wondered whether he could even say things like that, think thoughts like that, anymore. It felt strange to be questioning whether someone or something was inside his head, watching, listening. Even the suspicion was making him uncomfortable, like he had an itch deep inside his brain that he couldn’t scratch. It was enough to make a person paranoid.

  His mind drifted inevitably back to Asha Ishi. Opening his iPalm, he pulled up her contact details, but he didn’t dare call her. Even if it was just paranoia, they could easily be monitoring his calls; that was almost a given. Instead he selected Toskan, giving him one last roll of the dice, just in case. Surprisingly it rang this time and he felt an unexpected surge of hope as a man’s voice answered, muttering muffled words he couldn’t understand.

  “Toskan?” Hammell asked, but he could already tell it wasn’t. From what he could make out from the auto-translator and from his basic grasp of Chinese, it was an angry man who had been busy sleeping somewhere in Beijing and didn’t much appreciate middle-of-the-night wakeup calls. As the man began cursing at him in Mandarin, Hammell closed his hand to sever the connection. Dave Toskan’s account had been reassigned.

  Like Asha said… As he thought of her, Asha Ishi’s face popped up in his hand and for a second he was confused, before logic fought its way through the alcohol fug. He considered whether to answer, but decided she would know the risks.

  “They’ll be monitoring,” he began.

  “Right, so shut up and listen,” Asha Ishi said, her face even more serious than usual. “I need you to ID someone for me on polnet. I’m sending it over now.”

  Hammell quickly downloaded the message, receiving seven grainy pictures which had apparently been taken on a camera, and not an especially good one. He nearly started singing the praises of the iEye and its image amalgamation tools before he caught himself; now was definitely not the time. Loading one of the photos into his own iEye, he zoomed in on the man standing on the prow of a boat in the dark, his face only half revealed by light from the cabin. The images were blurred to different degrees - the man had been moving and the light had been poor - but there was probably enough for the megaAI to work with.

  “They’ll know you’re at a dock,” Hammell said as he set a task going in the megaAI’s queue.

  “There are a lot of docks,” Asha Ishi replied, “and I’ll be gone by the time they get here.”

  “Got it,” Hammell said as the identity popped up, and he began browsing through the attached rap sheet, an activity which required significan
t scrolling.

  “Who is he?”

  “Ettore del Bisturi,” Hammell said, “aka Scalpel Hector, a high ranking Red Hand and suspected assassin, wanted in connection with multiple deaths and disappearances.” The more he read, the more troubling the information got. “Asha, this guy... you shouldn’t go near him alone.”

  “Are you offering to help or are you going report me?” Asha Ishi asked, in typically blunt fashion.

  Hammell hesitated for a second. “Help.”

  “Then you’re stupid. You should report me.”

  “I said I’ll help, Asha,” Hammell said, though he knew deep down she was right. If they really were watching, they would know he was helping her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Hammell took a sip of whisky and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Are you near a nat?”

  “No.”

  “Then rectify that. Quickly.”

  Hammell climbed down from his stool, struggling to stay on his feet. Gravity appeared to have changed direction - it was pulling him towards the wall to the right of the door as he walked. Why do I keep making major decisions while not in a fit state? he asked himself as he blasted his mouth with alcohol killer spray and threw down a couple of pills.

  “I said quickly!” Asha Ishi growled and Hammell braced himself, leaned to the left and ran, brushing the doorframe but making it through safely. Taking a wrong turn for the nat bay, he found himself in a side street, where he spotted something familiar tucked away in a dark and lonely parking space.

  “There you are!” he exclaimed.

  “Who?”

  “No-one,” Hammell said as he hurried over to his old car, feeling an absurdly strong emotional kick as he ran his hand along it. “I was starting to think I'd never see you again,” he said, and he could feel himself welling up. Putting it down to the whisky, he wiped the tear from his cheek and began rummaging around in his pocket for his keys. Climbing in, he shoved the key into the ignition. It took a few tries, but it got there. “Ok,” he said as he cleared his throat and drove off. “Where am I going?”