Promethean Files 1: The New Prometheus

by Andrew Dobell

  1.15

  Frankie followed Gibson into the Armoury, it wasn’t a huge room, but they could all fit in easily to browse the shelves and cabinets that filled it. There were way more weapons, armoured vests and things in here than they would ever need today, but it did mean they had the luxury of choice.

  Frankie walked along one of the shelves, looking over the boxes of Ammunition, cases of grenades, all kinds of tactical gear, and more. Her subroutines scanned and tagged each item she saw, recognising it and posting up an item tag in her registry and matching complimentary items as she saw them.

  She broke the locks on several of the cabinets, revealing racks of rifles, assault weapons, shotguns and pistols all ready to use with plenty of spare magazines.

  She already had a handgun on her with enough spare ammunition, so she picked out one of the assault rifles, a relatively compact one that would work for CQC.

  She raised her eyebrows at that thought. A few days ago she wouldn’t have had any clue that CQC stood for Close Quarters Combat, now the knowledge just came naturally to her. The degree to which she had changed continued to astound her.

  With just a glance into the cabinet in front of her, she could name every single gun in there, what its calibre was, what its rate of fire was, which ammunition it took and what accessories would be best for whichever situation she found herself in.

  As she focused on the weapon in her hands, her vision scanned it, and an illuminated outline flashed up around the gun, and a list of its attributes started scrolling up the side of her field of vision.

  She instinctively knew how to hold it, load it, cock it and she knew that she could sit at a table with it and with her eyes closed, strip the weapon down to its individual parts.

  She shook her head in astonishment and ran through a series of checks on the gun, making sure it was in good working order. Once she was satisfied, she walked over to the appropriate boxes of ammo and filled four extra magazines worth, hopefully way more than she would need, and attached them to her tactical webbing.

  She looked round and saw the Doctor looking a bit bemused and lost, and walked over.

  ‘Are you okay? Did you find what you need?’

  ‘I have no idea, I have this rifle from Gibson’s car, and this pistol, do I need anything else?’

  Frankie looked at his weapons. He had more than enough, anything else would just confuse him. He also had a good amount of spare magazines. He would be okay. She looked up at him and smiled.

  ‘You’re good,’ she reassured him. ‘Now, I don’t mean to be rude,’ she continued, her expression changing to a more questioning one, ‘but how come you’re so clueless about weapons?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m a Doctor, not a soldier.’

  ‘Yes, but you programmed me, and I seem to have more knowledge on this than I would ever need.’

  ‘Aaah, okay, I see. That’s because the various subroutines in your Cyberbrain were created and programmed by experts in those fields. I stole those programs from Psytech.’

  ‘Stole them? So I have illegal memories in here?’ she said, tapping the side of her head.

  ‘At the end of my time at Psytech, I was creating the most sophisticated and advanced Cyborg Soldiers in the world and giving them all the skills they would need to be the ultimate weapons. I liberated that data and gave it to you.’

  ‘So, you're saying you made me the ultimate weapon?’

  He smiled. ‘I made you as good as I could make you. I gave you everything you might need to survive in a world where the powers that be would hunt you down and want you destroyed. But you’re so much more than that to me. Those soldiers I created for Psytech, they were ugly brutes with built-in weapons systems and more. They were good, but the military has budgets, and Psytech wanted them to come back, to want more and better. They were designed to fail, to have a lifespan, like so much out there, they were not built to last.’

  ‘But I was? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘That, and more. When I designed you…’

  ‘My body you mean,’ she corrected him.

  ‘When I designed your body, I did it right. I didn’t cut corners, I wanted you to last, I wanted you to be beautiful, a work of art inside and out. I didn’t want any of those crude weapons systems inside of you. They only serve to accelerate your bodies decay, too many moving parts and super-heated elements that cause problems with the other systems. That was always the issue. As soon as you turn these bodies into walking weapons systems, you introduce weakness. Those complicated arms with the pop out guns, if you hit them just right, they break. Jesus I hated them.’

  Frankie took a step closer to him and lowered her voice. ‘Take that hate and use it, today, when we go down there. Now is your chance to let that rage lose. Don’t be an idiot, don’t get yourself killed, but you can harness that emotion and allow it to give you strength.’

  The Doctor nodded his head, agreeing with her apparently.

  ‘Look, you’re good to go, you don’t need anything else,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he answered her, looking relieved that he didn’t need to look through these racks of guns anymore.

  Frankie smiled at him and turned away. Every time she connected with him and found more common ground, she felt more and more conflicted about him. His intentions towards her did seem honourable now, but she wasn’t sure they were when he first Cyberized her. His action then suggested the opposite.

  Well, now wasn’t the time to be worrying about that. She had other things to be dealing with right now.

  She looked up and saw Gibson stood at a rack of shelves that didn’t have any weapons on it. He was picking out loops of rope and harnesses.

  Frowning, she walked over to him, ‘What are you up too?’

  ‘Preparing our method of entry into the eighteenth floor,’ he said.

  ‘With those?’

  ‘They’ll never expect it, it’s perfect.’

  ‘Just pick out two, I’ll go another route and distract the forces down there, I think you’ll need it,’ she said, giving the rappelling equipment a sceptical look. ‘What about the windows? They’re armoured. I broke through because I was travelling at speed and I’m a hell of a lot heavier than you are. You’ll never break through quick enough with just the guns.’

  ‘I have some sticky bombs, they’re designed exactly for this purpose, they’ll take them out.’

  ‘Have you told the Doc about this plan?’

  ‘What plan?’ Xenox said from nearby.

  ‘You best talk to Gibson about that,’ Frankie said. ‘I’m going to check on something.’

  Frankie walked away as the Doctor walked up to Gibson asking what his plan was. It wasn’t a bad one. Rappelling or abseiling down the side of the building would be an unexpected way for them to breach the floor, but if they were not careful, they could easily end up as sitting ducks. So Frankie concentrated on her hack and hunted for the schematics for the building. She soon found and brought up a floor plan for the eighteenth floor and found the main open plan work area where the hostages were being held. She smiled as she glanced over them. As she hoped, the lift shafts opened out right into that work area. The boys would need a distraction, something to take the focus of the guards away from the windows long enough for them to break through and give them a fighting chance.

  After a moment’s consideration, she thought she had a plan that might work and approached a nearby shelf with some remotely detonated grenades on it before she looked back up at the boys. The Doctor did not look happy but was now carrying a loop of rope and a harness.

  He looked over at her through the racks of weapons. ‘I don’t know what you’re smiling about,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I didn’t sign up for this shit,’ he grumbled.

  ‘How else do you expect to get down there without being killed?’ Gibson asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m a scientist, not a soldier,’ he snapped.r />
  ‘Exactly, so trust me,’ Gibson said.

  Frankie smiled to herself as the Doctor turned away from Gibson, resigned to his fate but quietly grumbling about it.

  Gibson followed him around and walked up to Frankie. ‘So, what’s your plan?’

  You two rappel down there, watch the lifts on the eighteenth, I’ll give you a distraction so you can blow the windows and get inside.’

  ‘How will I know what the distraction is? What will I be looking for?’

  Frankie held up a remote grenade and wobbled it in front of him. ‘Oh, you’ll know,’ she said. ‘Just wait for my signal.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Gibson said, and walked past her, ‘Come on Doc, we got to sort ourselves out.’

  ‘You’re not coming with us, Frankie?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘I’m taking a different route. You go with Gibson, you’ll be safer,’ she said and followed the pair out of the armoury and back to the broken window they had come through. She helped them set up their equipment, and a few minutes later they were backing themselves out of the window, the Doctor looking terrified as he did it.

  With them on their way, Frankie checked their rope lines were secure once more and walked around to the elevators, hacking into their control systems as she went.

  By the time she reached them, she was in control of the whole system and pulled all the elevators up to a selection of levels, all of them above floor eighteen, but only one of them to her floor.

  With a ping, the doors opened to reveal the empty interior of the lift car.

  Frankie placed the grenades into the elevator and turned them on, making sure they were wirelessly connected to the controller in her hand.

  Satisfied with this, she contacted Gibson’s Neural Net.

  ‘How you boys doing?’ she asked.

  ‘One moment…’ Gibson said.

  She waited, and a little under a minute later, her Cyberbrain picked up a return signal.

  ‘Okay, we're in position. I can see into the floor, there’s quite a few corporation personnell in here,’ Gibson said over their link, his voice slightly digitally distorted in her head through their Net link.

  ‘Understood, I’m sending the distraction down, get ready,’ she said and sent the command into the buildings Net.

  At once, all the elevators started to move and drop to the eighteenth floor. Once her own elevator with the grenades inside it had left her floor, Frankie stepped forward and used her fingers to prise apart the doors and then used a chair that had been close by to jam them open.

  She placed a foot on the chair and leant into the lift shaft, looking down. She watched as the elevator car dropped the seven floors between her and the hostages. With a clunk of metallic brakes, the car stopped, just as she had planned.

  ‘Elevators in place, wait one,’ Frankie sent to her companions.

  ‘Waiting,’ Gibson answered.

  She waited a couple of seconds, watching the eighteenth floor from the security cams she had hooked into. The movements of the elevators had drawn attention, and now everyone was looking at them, and with their guns raised, the Corporation forces were cautiously approaching them.

  She watched, mentally urging the men to get closer to the doors of the lift, feeling her new body’s approximation of nervous anticipation as the seconds ticked by. They were close and probably wouldn’t get much closer. It was now or never.

  ‘Detonating… now,’ she said over their comms, and pressed the button on her remote.

  A fraction of a second later, the building was rocked by a huge explosion from the lift car below. She watched the thing blow on her security camera feed and looked down the lift shaft. The Elevator car was still there, seven floors below her.

  ‘Wait where you are boys.’

  ‘Waiting,’ Gibson said.

  Frankie held her rifle close and stepped out into the void. She moved carefully, doing a half twist as she fell so that she faced the doors, aiming for the weakest spot in the elevator cars roof and, a second later, smashed through it. She landed on the blasted smoking floor of the lift car, steadying herself by putting a hand down and breaking the fall by bending her knees.

  Thick, acrid smoke filled the air. A couple of fires burnt just outside the elevator as Frankie heard people cough and yell in pain. Quickly, she rose to her feet with her gun up and walked forward. She knew roughly where the Psytech forces were from the CCTV feed she had hacked into, and moved towards their approximate position, quickly encountering one on his knees crawling away. She put a bullet into him and moved on through the smoke. She found a couple more, killing each of them before they even had time to see her and before the smoke started to thin out.

  Her gunfire had attracted attention, though, and as she came to the edge of the smoke, she could see a group of corporation troops moving on her position.

  ‘Gibson, now!’ she messaged through her Neural link.

  Suddenly three loud explosions sounded at the far side of the working space, followed by the distinct sound of shattering glass shards hitting the ground.

  She saw the phalanx of Corporation troops flinch and move towards cover, expecting an attack from behind them. Frankie stepped forward, out of the smoke as the shockwave from the boy's grenades blew the smoke back towards the elevator.

  In the panic caused by the explosion, Frankie set her rifle to the single shot setting and placed bullet after bullet neatly into the heads of the Corporation men she could see. She quickly moved forward into cover when gunfire sounded from nearby. She ducked down as bullets peppered the ground around her without finding their mark.

  Frankie readied herself to pop out during a break in the gunfire only to hear more pops and bangs from another part of the room. She quickly leant out to see that the man who had been firing upon her now lay dead on the floor.

  ‘Got him for ya,’ Gibson said over her comms.

  ‘You two in?’

  ‘We’re in,’ he said, as more gunfire erupted from the chaos.

  ‘I’m moving, don’t get pinned down,’ she sent back and rose from her position moving away from the elevators. In front of her, the large room held ranks of desks with Computers, papers, data pads and other stationery on top of them. Large square pillars dotted the room as well as free standing dividers about chest high here and there. Offices and conference rooms surrounded the space, their interiors visible through the glass partitions. Frankie moved down a walkway slightly to her left between partitions on either side, approaching an intersection. A few meters out from it, three men in black tactical gear rounded the corner with their guns up and ready. Frankie ran forward and fired, putting a few rounds into the man at the back of the group. She reached the first man just as he brought his gun to bear, catching it with her off hand and pushing it up and away from her as she jabbed her gun barrel into his sternum and fired.

  The rifle bucked and jumped in her hand as the man went limp, but she held onto him and manoeuvred him between herself and the final man as the last Corp Mercenary shot at her, his bullets hitting his dead teammate.

  Frankie threw the corpse at the last man. Her target ducked sideways just as Frankie hoped he would. She fired and put two rounds in him as he dodged. Frankie could hear plenty of gunfire from the other side of the room now and knew that Gibson and the Doc were doing their part. She wanted to move around to them and offer any help they might need. Walking briskly along the row, she peeked around a corner and along another row that led to a more open space.

  It looked clear, so she stepped out and began to move forward, cautiously, her gun up to her eye.

  She suddenly had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right and just as the thought passed through her mind, someone leant out of a cubicle further up and fired on her.

  Ducking back into a cubicle to her right, the gun shots went wide.

  As she took cover, Frankie frowned to herself. This attacker looked different to the others. She didn’t have on the black corporation tactical gear and d
idn’t look the part at all. Within her field of vision, Frankie flicked through the feeds from the security cameras to find one that showed her location. It wasn’t the best angle, but her row was in view enough to be usable. She watched as three figures emerged from a couple of cubicles and started to advance on her position, led by this civilian looking woman.

  On a hunch, Frankie opened up the best view she had seen of the hostages during her hack and cross-referenced the face of the woman she had just seen with the hostages.

  Her Cyberbrain found a match in moments. She had been a hostage when all this had started, so why was she helping them now?

  The sound of footsteps approaching her cubicle snapped her back into reality as she moved into a more ready stance, watching the feed from the security camera. The civilian was not being terribly cautious, showing her inexperience by getting too close to Frankie’s position, which suited her just fine. When the moment was just right, Frankie moved from cover at speed, keeping low and kicking out with her leg as she spun around, sweeping the feet of the civilian out from beneath her.

  The woman went down hard as Frankie brought her gun to bear on the first soldier she saw and fired two rounds at him. She didn’t wait to see the result. Instead, she was already aiming at the second man as he tried to match her speed and get his gun pointed at her before she shot him.

  Frankie was quicker, though and fired off two more rounds at the second man moments before he levelled his own weapon at her.

  She lowered her gun and took in the scene, both men were down and unmoving, but the woman on the floor before her howled in pain before scrambling to get two hands on the assault rifle at her side and aim it at Frankie.

  Frankie rose up from her kneeling position and kicked the gun from the woman’s hands, sending it clattering down the walkway between the cubicles. But the woman didn’t seem like she was going to give up as she moved to get to her feet, a look of anger and hatred on her face as he looked at Frankie. Frankie felt a little bemused by the woman’s actions but didn’t feel like fighting off a rabid civilian, so she stepped forward. She let go of her own gun, letting it swing under her arm on its strap and grabbed the woman by her clothes at the base of her neck with her left hand and punched her once in the face with her right.