Looks like I’m going to have to go the rest of the way on foot. I would blast the shit out the entrance but until I get a visual on the nuke I can’t take that risk. I let my starfighter hover a few feet above the ground in autopilot. I’m still mentally linked to it, though I have no idea if that link will hold once I’m inside the building. I will probably need to find the source of the jamming and get rid of it. I redirect power to my ship’s transmitter to boost the signal. Hopefully that will allow me control while I’m only a few hundred yards away from it.
The trap under the cockpit opens and I don’t wait for the dampening field to smoothly carry me down, so the moment it’s open I jump through it. Tanya takes control of the drones and sends the liquid metal appendages from the cargo hold to rejoin me. They interlock with my own armor, merging at key points like shoulders, elbows, knees, ankles, belt and the last one fuses on the back of my neck. That one will allow me to bring up a helmet if I need to.
I’ve only used the nano-appendages in simulated combat against drone soldiers. They are the latest and newest out of the R&D, and they’re an incredibly versatile and powerful augment, one that doesn’t even need to be installed inside my own body. Each one is basically a liquid metal nano-plasm that reacts to my thought and creates whatever matter I can think of. I can make weapons, armor and anything else out of it. Anything I think up the nano-plasm will create in the physical world at incredible materialization speeds.
We’ve had some quirks while testing it and sometimes the nano-plasm doesn’t keep molecular cohesion as expected. Actually, I’ve been wounded a couple of times. So using it is definitely a gamble, but seeing how bad things went today, and perhaps even in a previous timeline, I’m willing to take a little risk to reach mission success.
My HUD flicks and Vassiliki’s face appears once more, her eyes alight with disapproval.
I keep telling myself that it’s just Ahmed screwing with me, but I feel shivers travel down my spine nonetheless.
“You’re lost, my love. You need to open your eyes, to see the world for what it really is. A prison.”
“Tanya, tell me you’re seeing and hearing her?”
“Is it happening now, Cole? Nope, I don’t detect anything. Are you sure she is not stress-induced?”
Yeah, I’ve had stress before, loads of it in fact. This isn’t it.
“Look beyond what your senses tell you, Cole,” says Vassiliki.
I wish I knew what the feck she wants with me, be it real or me losing my mind. I know this world is not perfect. In fact it’s pretty fecked up; on that we can agree. And there are no signs of it getting better over time; but then again what am I supposed to do about it? I’m just the guy you call when someone does something horrible and I’m here to make sure it doesn’t happen again, thanks to the short-time travel jumps. If this version of Vassiliki thinks I’m anything else, she’ll be sorely disappointed.
That’s when I realize I’m arguing with myself, actually trying to justify my actions, my way of life, or simply having a field day talking with my subconscious fears. Do I really know which is the case? No. Does it affect me? Hell yes it does. I have a mission to fulfill with too many lives hanging in the balance. Right now that’s all that has to matter. I’ll have plenty of time to reflect on all of this tomorrow.
“Tanya, give whatever cocktail of drugs you think is necessary to reduce my stress and anxiety levels. Don’t turn me into a vegetable please. I need my reflexes keen and my mind functioning at peak capacity, but I need to stop thinking about what’s good or bad right now. Fecking Ahmed. He’s finally found a way to screw with me properly with visions of my dead wife.”
“I do not detect any wireless transmission directed towards us, but with the strong jamming field nearby perhaps my own sensors are affected. As requested I’m dosing you with drugs.”
It doesn’t take long for me to feel my emotions fade away in the back of my mind. They’re not fully gone, but they’re more like an echo now, a shadow of what I was feeling most of the day up until now. I need to focus on the mission and only the mission now.
I go by the main entrance in stealth mode, deploy nano-moldable C-4 and install it on the smart-plexi as easily as Plasticine. I then retreat to the right side of the entrance and apply plexi-eating acid on another slab of the smart-plexi. I make a door shape with the acid. If there is a welcoming committee in the main hall of the building, which I have no doubt about, I’ll need a little distraction.
I use my holo-ghost and send it to stand where I’m about to blow a hole with C-4. I mentally detonate the charge when the acid is done doing its silent job on my side of things.
“Good luck, Cole,” says Tanya.
“To the both of us. We can’t feck this up.”
“No, we can’t.”
The explosion is loud, the ground under my feet trembles and chunks of melting smart-plexi are thrown into the air towards the holo-ghost. Alarms start wailing and even before I’m ready to enter the building’s hall I see a volley of blaster fire and rockets flying past the truck-size hole I just created. My ghost is on autopilot, fainting to take cover and returning fire, providing me with the distraction I need to enter undetected and flank the welcoming committee.
I scan the inside to check if the jamming field has been compromised by my stunt. Not so much. I do get some data overlapping on my HUD but it’s mostly garbled.
“Tanya, your mission when we’re inside is to pinpoint the location of that jamming field. It’s our first target. Without it we’re blind.”
“Agreed and acknowledged.”
I take a deep breath; now the shit hits the fan. I kick the door-size shape I made with acid on the window and I enter the fold. To say that it is chaos inside the hall would be an understatement. Clearly, Ahmed doesn’t want me past this location. There are at least twenty foot soldiers, a large combat mech and two latest generation Wraith Sentries. These will be the toughest ones; their armor and AI matrix make them the trickiest of enemies. Under normal circumstances I would go for them first, but I need to thin the herd first. I take both my rifle blasters, and set the firing mode to concussive blasts. I will reveal my position fast this way, but I need to get rid of as many soldiers as I can in the shortest amount of time.
“Tanya, please provide a barrage of fire on my mark from the drones and my fighter outside.”
“Roger that, Cole. Ready when you are.”
I need to be careful of the mech, though right now he seems more interested in my ghost decoy. I’m invisible at the moment but as soon as I start shooting, things won’t be that simple. I take a second or two to acquire my first targets. I see a cluster of four soldiers advancing towards the entrance as they fire; they’ll be easy pickings so I decide to target them first. Then I will have to deal with the three soldiers that are nearest to me. I move so I’m in the right position to deal with their reactions to what happens next.
I fire both my rifles set in concussive ammo rounds and open up on the cluster of soldiers. They get hit and don’t have time to react. It’s a blood bath, the multiple successive explosive ammo rips their limbs apart and it takes only a second for what’s left of their four bodies to pile up on the white marble floor. It’s now stained with sprays and thick puddles of blood.
The three soldiers nearest to me turn around. I switch my right rifle to wide spread ammo similar to shotgun ammo as I run towards the nearest of them. He is looking at me but he’s not fast enough. I put the canon of my rifle only inches away from his head and blow his brains out.
The other two frantically fire in my direction, but none of them precisely as I roll on the ground to avoid their fire. When I end my roll, I line up my next shot and set the weapon into precise blaster. I burn a hole in between another soldier’s eyes. A look of shock is locked onto his face as he collapses dead onto the floor. The third and last soldier in my immediate vicinity panics and throws a grenade nearby. I barely have time to kick the grenade back towards him. When it bl
ows I use both my arms to protect my head. The blast sends me crashing and skidding on the marble floor. The impact with my shields reveals my position and I’m getting hammered by the third soldier.
I jump out of the way and find cover behind a wooden desk. It gets pounded and the wood splinters. He shouts something in Arabic.
“The infidel is here!”
That’s it for the element of surprise. I lurch out of cover and spray him with blaster fire. His armor takes most of it but one shot blows his ear off and another penetrates his neck. He drops his blaster rifle and holds his hand to the wound as he tries to escape and take cover. I have no intention of letting him go, so I grab a throwing blade from my thigh and throw it at his head. It enters his skull from the side and he falls to the ground, his entire body jerking up.
Seven down, thirteen foot soldiers to go. I redirect my ghost to run in the middle of the room in an attempt to divert the Mech and the sentries. I re-engage my cloak and run towards the opposite side of the room, using my ghost’s diversion to pick up another three soldiers during my run with well-placed blaster shots. Ten to go.
As I approach a couple of soldiers from behind, with them shooting at my ghost, they never see me coming. I slit the first solder’s throat with another blade and use his body as a shield when the second one pivots and starts firing. I grab two smart shuriken from my belt, lock my target and throw them towards the soldier. They split in midair and each lands into one of his eyes. To say the scream the soldier unleashes as a result is loud would be an understatement.
But that brings unwanted attention to the area so I shoot his head off with a round of concussive ammo from my heavy-duty blaster rifle. Some of the blood spills on my face. I wipe it off as I pivot around just in time to see a rocket coming straight at me. The mech figured out it had been firing at a ghost hologram, and he’s going for the real thing now.
“Tanya, now!”
Whatever was left standing from the smart-plexi is obliterated as a barrage of laser fire and rockets fly in. I do the splits and the mech’s rocket passes upward, detonating twenty yards behind me, smashing what was once an old-school designed waterfall. Its support structure, made of heavy green stone, is obliterated.
By the time I’m back up to my feet, three soldiers and a sentry are on their way towards me. I feel the itch to activate bullet-time but I know it’s too soon. I have to keep it as a last resort, to make sure that no matter what surprise Ahmed has in store for me, I can get out of it by using it. But, boy, would it make this part a lot simpler if I could activate it!
I remind myself that I thrive under pressure, so I press on. Time to test the new appendage augments. I imagine a very long whip and I do the throwing move at the nearest incoming soldier. The augmented nano-liquid metal reacts to create what I have envisioned. Before the soldier can react the whip latches all around him. With a mental push I ask the whip to be as thin and sharp as a razor. What happens next is nothing short of gory. The soldier is cut in pieces like a shish-kebab. A second approaching soldier manages to hit a couple of blaster shots on my left shoulder. My shields take the hits and hold. I flail the whip towards that new target, thinking how good it would be to just cut him in half. And sure enough the whip gets very strong and sharp upon impact, cutting the soldier in half around the waist.
The next one is coming at me, shouting from the depth of his lungs, his face scorched by blaster fire, no doubt from the outside cover fire Tanya provides me. I retract the whip and use my other arm augments to cast three long claws that extend from my fist. I punch them through the incoming soldier in his stomach, effectively impaling him. I lift him off the ground and, even though he’s still alive, I’m sure that’s not going to be the case for much longer. I can see it in his eyes; he knows the end is near.
That’s when things start to get tougher as the first sentry is nearly upon me. I throw the soon-to-be-dead soldier at it, hoping to make it trip but that’s wishful thinking. It simply swats the body to the side with the super strength its mechanical body provides. The sentries might look human, but they’re entirely artificial, from their body parts to their very advanced AI systems onboard. An AI that is bred for war and combat.
When the sentry is upon me it starts with a combo of right and left jabs. Sentries can and sometimes do use blaster weapons, but they’re so efficient at hand-to-hand combat they are rarely equipped with any additional weapons. I manage to block the sentry’s first combo. It’s really fast so I need to stay focused. Its armor is incredibly solid too so trying to damage it with my bare hands won’t do. Fortunately, this model doesn’t seem to have shields.
I use the appending augments to create a solid shield for my left forearm. I use it to deflect its attacks and retaliate with my right-arm repulsor weapon. I keep it at bay but that’s not enough, and soon I get hit by other targets. My shields are holding but they’re draining fast. I check my power levels. I’m still at one hundred and five percent, and soon I will have consumed the extra charge. On the top right corner of my HUD a clock counts downwards. Only seventy-three minutes left; that is, if Ahmed keeps the same timetable as before, which we can’t be sure he will.
“Status on the jamming field?” I ask Tanya as I trade blows with the sentry. I scorch its armor with my repulsor fire but the damage is mostly cosmetic.
“I’m still locating the source of the signal. I should have it within a minute or two.”
There’s no way I’m gonna get rid of the sentry this way, so I change tactic. I grab my nano-blade and activate it. The sentry recognizes the threat and it goes on the defensive instead of attacking me relentlessly like it did before. Their AIs are highly adaptive and they have different tactics for each situation. I’m losing patience and my shields are getting drained by other enemy fire.
Tanya is doing a great job at eradicating the rest of the soldier force with the drones and fighter and soon there’s only a couple of them behind cover. The rest are dead or dying on the hard cold marble of the once beautifully pristine hall of the World Security Center. It’s now a graveyard of broken stones, body parts and blood that is spread everywhere.
When the second sentry starts converging towards my position, I know I’m in trouble. I need to find a way to dispatch them. An explosion nearby sends me flying into the air. The mech mostly occupied with running interference against my drones has finally decided to change its targeting priorities at the worse possible moment for me.
I fire three repulsor blasts towards the ceiling while still in the air, creating a cave-in that sends large concrete debris atop the mech. It stumbles but stays up. When I land I’m greeted with the second sentry’s knee right in the face. That sends me skidding on the marble for yards until a soldier’s dead body ends my course. My head is ringing, and I need to devise a better way to deal with them.
Vassiliki’s image blinks into my HUD.
“Don’t try to fight these sentries like normal soldiers; they look like humanoids but they’re killing machines.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I spit back in anger.
“Use their massive metal mass against them.”
That’s a good idea. I pack a couple of magneton grenades. I’d rather not use both of them so I use my liquid metal augment to create a long fighting stick. I keep them at bay by hitting them with fast, twirling hits that have enough momentum and reach to impact each of them long enough so I can switch between targets in the middle of my stick combos. They no longer manage to score any hits this way. But now I need to end this dance.
My HUD flashes red to indicate a missile lock from the mech. It has locked onto me and is about to release one or more missiles towards my position. I do not want to be here when that happens; with my shields almost gone, this could get really messy. I mentally call one of the drones to make a flyby on my position. For this to work timing must be everything.
I retract the fighting stick and fire all of my repulsors at the sentries. It hits them in the torso and sh
oulder respectively but doesn’t do much damage, though it does make them react and they both sprint towards me. I grab a magneton grenade, activate it and throw it in their path at the last moment. Any sooner and they might identify and dodge it; any later and they could hit me before it detonates. I can feel Tanya’s help on that throw; she’s probably making a minute adjustment to my release-and-throw angle to obtain the absolutely perfect result.
The moment the grenade hits the ground and activates, I see the multiple muzzle flashing of the missile launches from the mech. This is going to be close. When the grenade activates, I use my super speed and my super strength to jump high into the air. The magneton field expands almost instantly and both sentries are quickly engulfed in the initial spherical shockwave bubble of the field. When it starts retracting onto itself, a powerful magnetic field is intensified all around the grenade’s range, and the sentries are sucked into one another.
A fraction of a second later the drone I called is flying by, so I grab onto it for dear life and it gets me away from what is coming next. The three missiles the mech fired earlier arrive at their destination, but rather than finding me, they find the interlocked and magnetically trapped sentries. The explosion sends metal parts flying all around.
“That was quite ingenious,” says Tanya.
I wish I could take credit for it, but if it hadn’t been for Vassiliki’s hint, I might not have thought of it.
“Thanks,” I say, not bothering to acknowledge I might be getting outside help.
Three hits of heavy blaster fire graze my torso and I drop my hold on the drone. It has fulfilled its use for this maneuver anyway. I run behind cover when Tanya delivers the good news.
“Jamming field detected. It’s three floors up.”
Where the nuke should be, but something doesn’t add up.
Rewind 717: The Adventures of Time Traveler Anti-Terrorist Agent Cole Seeker Page 16
