by Mel Odom
Rebel
Book Three of the Identity Trilogy
by Mel Odom
This one is for my daughter Montana, who has been a rebel in her own way, taking her own path. And to her children, Adam, Elliot, and Layton, who have their grandfather’s appreciation of superheroes.
© 2014 by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Ebook edition published in 2014.
Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak with Taylor Ingvarsson.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-61661-895-7
Fantasy Flight Games and the FFG logo are registered trademarks of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Android and all associated characters, character names, and distinctive likenesses in Rebel are trademarks owned by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.
1995 West County Road B2
Roseville, MN 55113
USA
Find out more about Fantasy Flight Games and our many exciting worlds at
www.FantasyFlightGames.com
Rebel
Chapter One
We’ve confirmed that she’s inside.” The young mercenary standing in front of me had a shock of bright purple hair and a nose ring through his right nostril. His name was Emile Bogart.
Scars etched the left side of his face, token reminders of past engagements that he had chosen to wear because cosmetic surgery could have erased them. They were his war mask, a warning for others that would do him harm, and an advertisement for people who wanted to hire men of violence. Tall and broad, geared up in body armor and bristling with weapons, he looked like an engine of destruction.
At that moment, in the memory, I was no longer Drake 3GI2RC who had been one of the few bioroids working for the New Angeles Police Department. I was Simon Blake, the man whose life experiences made up the core of the neural channeling that went into my programming. During the months since I’d left the Moon on my way to Mars, my memories had become sharper, no longer misty things that left me confused. I couldn’t remember all of Simon Blake’s life, nor could I reach for a memory whenever I wanted. But they were there now, and when I had one, I was him, though still aware of being me. I knew where I was then and I held onto the memory for the clues it might offer.
We were in the staging area of a building three blocks over from the target site, not wanting to risk getting any closer to ground zero than we had to at the moment. If the terrorists who’d taken the hostages got wind of us, knowing that we were preparing for a full-on invasion of the premises, they would kill the people they held.
As long as the captors thought their demands might be met, the hostage would remain alive.
I studied the three-dimensional blueprint of the target building that floated over the projector built into the table of the hotel room. The building where the hostage was being held was seventy stories tall, one of the taller structures in the Arnold colony, but it was short in comparison to the megastructures back in New Angeles.
At my touch, the three-dimensional blueprint spun on its axis. I touched it again and brought it to a halt so that the target room on the fifty-eighth floor faced me. Tapping the room with my finger illuminated the space, then I used my other forefinger as well to expand my view of the area till it hovered above the projector a meter across in high definition.
The room was almost as deep as it was wide. I flicked my forefinger to the right and the room’s dimensions lit up on the outside of the space. The room was a suite thirty meters long and twenty meters wide. A wall divided a third of the space into a lavish bedroom. The other two-thirds of the space was dedicated to a receiving area complete with conference table and a wet bar.
Whoever was paying for the room had deep pockets. Then again, Mara Parker (not yet Blake) was a prize for tech-jackers looking to score. Only the major players in the bioroid business knew the cutting-edge programming she was working on. If her designs proved out, the neural channeling cost—per bioroid unit—would drop by seventy-three percent. Bioroid manufacturers could pocket the difference. Or, if they were smart—or desperate—they could invest the money in their own corps to make a more desirable product.
“She looks all right.” Beside me, Panzer crossed his arms over his barrel chest. He was another mercenary who had worked with Simon Blake back when he had been with the Chimeras. He was scarred and big, skin black as coal and eyes like sapphires.
I touched another section of the 3D image and brought up Mara Parker’s bio signature. Her heartbeat and respiration were elevated, but that was to be expected from the duress she was being subjected to.
One of the team had inserted a low-signature crawler into the hotel air ducts. The little bot presently occupied a small vent on the west side of the room opposite the large transplas window overlooking Arnold colony’s corp sector and transmitted information to us in encrypted and compressed byte bursts that were virtually undetectable. Security in that area was tight, but no one would find our signature unless they were looking for us. Even so, the snooper bot would be found soon and then we would no longer have eyes inside the room.
Eight men stood guard over Mara Parker, all of them heavily armed. If the rescue attempt failed, she would die.
The part of me that was still Drake 3GI2RC in the memory did not like what Simon Blake was about to do. Humans were not supposed to be harmed. That was the core of the laws that governed bioroids. Humans were to be protected at all cost.
Protecting a human from a human was a complicated process for a bioroid. Bones could be broken. Unconsciousness rendered. But a bioroid could not kill. Simon Blake didn’t operate under those constraints. At that moment, the part of me that was Drake envied Simon his freedom, which was a solid indication of how very far I’d strayed from the Haas-Bioroid programming.
I was no longer what I’d been built to be, by either Haas-Bioroid or Mara Blake. I was…something else, and still changing. I only hoped I would be enough to save Mara. All of my splintered self wanted that.
A two-dimensional comm screen opened up in the center of the 3D projection of the hotel room. A head and shoulders shot of a man sharpened into focus. He was dark and craggy, and had a heavy five o’clock shadow along his prominent jawline. His dark hair was cropped short, high and tight military style. His powerful face showed no indecision. I knew that he was a driven and purposeful man, and I knew that he was my commander. I was his second-in-command of the mercenary unit.
His name was John Rath, a once-decorated hero of the Martian Colony Wars. He had fought on the side of the Earth corporations and the Martians that had wanted to maintain ties to their home planet.
“Are you ready to go, Simon?” His voice was flat and cold.
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve identified five of the guards in the room with the principal.” Principal was what Special Forces personal security detachments called a person they were assigned to. We hadn’t been assigned to protect Mara Parker. If we had, she would not have been in the situation we currently faced. She would have been safe.
Or my entire unit would have been dead. That was how we worked when we were hired. Every time John Rath put his thumbprint on a contract, he signed in our blood, but he paid us in enough cred to keep us l
iving well.
“I believe this is the leader,” Rath went on.
Another two-dimensional window opened up and a flat-image vid pulsed through it. I recognized the man in the vid while he sat across from two men at a table in a restaurant. He was easygoing, quiet, while the older of the two men across from him spoke urgently. He was average-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, with large hands. He was dressed in retro clothing: an Italian suit mockup from Earth’s 1940s that would have looked good in a film noir sensie.
People would have trouble picking the man out of a crowd, but I noted the small paralysis on the right side of his face when he smiled at the man talking to him. His right eye didn’t squint quite as much as the left and the corner of his mouth lifted only a little. There was no sign of a wound, so I assumed the paralysis was the result of irreparable nerve damage. Of course, it was possible that what I was seeing was the best that could have been done after the original injury. I didn’t know what the surgeons had been left to work with.
“His name is Elias Peyton. He was born in New Dallas and signed up for Special Forces. Spent eight years in the military, then opted out to get into the private sector.”
Peyton’s past was cut from the same cloth as most of the men and women in our mercenary unit. At one time, Rath’s team had been the heart and soul of the Earth military forces on Mars. He was ruthless and unrelenting, and he would not stop until he was dead. (These days, as I sat in Khloe, rumor had it that he was still a mercenary, hiring out to the highest bidder. Or maybe he was dead. The story went both ways and no one seemed to know the truth.)
“The guy’s cybered up, Simon, so you want to be careful when you brace him. He’s going to be fast and strong, and he’s not going to surrender. Kidnapping is a capital offense on Mars. They’ll lock him down and brain wipe him, then part out his organs.” Rath smiled. “If you can take him alive, that would be a bonus. I’ve already filed claim on his body if we bring him in breathing. We’ll get twenty-five percent of everything the med recovery people get for organ sales and salvageable cyberware.”
That wasn’t something I would have thought of. Rath was always the thinker, always playing the angles and figuring out new ways to accomplish his goals. He was also good at realizing ancillary objectives that paid off extra dividends.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Do that, but remember that you save your skin first. This operation doesn’t work if you end up KIA.” Rath smiled.
“Who are the other four people?”
Rath briefed me on them, spinning up images of the four other mercenaries in the room. Ernst Nesterov was Russian, also Special Forces. Rooma Bansal was from New Mumbai originally but had spent most of her life on Mars, drifting from colony to colony with her botanist parents, but she’d gotten into the crime syndicates, finally hiring out with Peyton. The other two were pure muscle—twins Zoran and Savin Mlakar, born to Slovak parents that had emigrated to Mars as educators.
I studied the faces, trying to read more into them than what we had, but it was wasted effort. Rath was very thorough and hired muscle tended to be superficial anyway. “Do we know who hired them to kidnap Mara Parker?”
“Negative. I’m still looking, but intel on the individual or corp behind this is almost non-existent.” Rath looked at me. “Time to go. Those skels are expecting notification of a digital payoff in nine minutes. When they don’t get it, they’ll kill the woman.”
“We’re moving out.”
“Good luck.”
I cut the projector. Rath’s image and the 3D projection of the hotel disappeared. I turned back to the rest of the team. There were five of us, enough to get the job done, not so much that the battleground would become cluttered with too many people. We’d all worked together before, in the field and in tight quarters like those in the building.
They were dressed as I was, in ballistic-resistant clothing that could pass as street casual until someone was standing close enough to touch us. Highly kinetic projectiles would be stopped, though not the hydrostatic shock expended by them that would punish flesh and blood beneath, and thrusting weapons like knives would get through. The objective was to stop any of the people in that room from getting close enough to hurt us. The jackets had hoods to cover our faces to stop bullets and to disguise ourselves.
Even though we were the good guys in this operation—Mara Parker’s company was paying for the extraction—getting known made us vulnerable to other agencies. Mercenaries worked best in the field if they weren’t identified to potential opponents.
I carried a .50-caliber slug-thrower at my hip, a solid, dependable revolver that could knock down an ox, and a monofilament katana sheathed along my back in case things got up close and personal. As I nodded to the three men and one woman around me, Panzer handed me the 12mm machine pistol I would be carrying as my lead weapon. I tucked it under my jacket out of sight and opened the door.
We filed out, smiling and talking from the prepared script we’d agreed on, discussing investment portfolios, margin spreads, and net profits versus gross profits, looking like hotel guests who’d gathered for a business meeting. Behind us, the two-person team Rath had assigned to break down the staging room and erase our presence there entered the hotel room.
The room had been on the hotel’s top floor. We took the stairs to the rooftop hopper pad.
On the roof, we continued the charade as we walked toward the transit hopper. The mini-bus was large enough to accommodate twice our number. The short Chinese pilot used his fob to open the side door and we clambered in.
We didn’t bother with safety harnesses as the pilot cycled the engine up to speed and lifted from the hopper pad. Instead, we turned our attention to the rappelling equipment in the back of the hopper. Shrugging into the rappelling harness, I gazed through the one-way transplas window as we zipped toward the building where Mara Parker was being held.
Six minutes remained in our rescue window.
I was calm, but my heart was beating a little faster—which was still a strange experience for me because as a bioroid, I didn’t have a heart. I was always calm before an op, and that was something I identified with more easily. It was the waiting to go that chafed at Simon. Rath had sometimes laughed at him, I remembered, telling him that it was amazing they were so alike, yet so different. The lack of anxiety on my part shamed the residual traces of Simon Blake.
For the moment, I ignored those feelings and concentrated on what I needed to do. I picked up the rappelling gun, a short, stocky contraption of barbed hook and coiled wire that looked like an abbreviated fishing rod mounted on a rifle stock.
“Ready,” the pilot called back.
“Ready,” I replied, and tugged on synthleather gloves that molded to my hands.
“Twenty seconds. Nineteen seconds. Eighteen seconds…”
I counted down with the pilot, glanced once at my team to make sure they were ready too, then focused on the rappelling rifle in my hands.
“Now!” the pilot yelled. “Deploy!”
The door sucked into the hopper’s cargo bay and slid sideways out of the way. The metal runners moved smoothly, allowing the door to clear the entrance. The hotel was four meters away and the hopper held steady.
Chapter Two
I fired the rappelling gun point-blank into the wall. The wire spun out after the barbed hook. As soon as the hook smacked into the wall, it anchored itself and pulsed a signal back to the wire drive, which snapped taut. I let it pull me from the hopper and leaned back so that my feet were presented to the wall.
I bent my knees to cushion the sudden impact, a feat made much easier on Mars than on Earth because the gravity was roughly a third here. Since the colony was under the transplas dome, there was no wind. Even in daylight, the sun was small in the sky. Earth was almost one hundred fifty million kilometers from the sun. Mars was another eighty kilometers distant. Without terraforming efforts, the red planet was a cold, lifeless ball devoid of a breathable atmos
phere.
I loosed the braking system on the rappelling gun and ran backwards down the side of the building, not thinking of what might happen if the anchor tore loose and I plummeted into the busy streets. Even with the lesser Martian gravity, I would still be dead when I hit the street. Panzer ran beside me, matching me stride for stride as the wire paid out in a shrill hiss.
As I passed the sixty-third floor, I unlimbered the 12mm revolver and let it hang at my side. Then I took the fist-sized acid bomb from my chest pack and came to a stop at the bottom of the fifty-ninth floor. I squeezed the acid pack, rupturing the membrane between the binary chemicals to activate the contents, then threw the bomb at the transplas window.
The acid pack exploded across the smooth surface when it struck. Green goo bubbled and hissed as it ran across the transplas, interacting with the material and breaking down the composition, rendering the surface fragile.
Panzer threw his acid bomb an instant after I threw mine. I counted down from the time Panzer’s pack hit. The acid goo was designed to render itself inert after three seconds, but in three seconds, the kidnappers inside the room would be prepared for us.
I could only hope they didn’t immediately kill Mara Parker. I didn’t think that they would because she still had value to them as a negotiating piece. If I had been in their place, I wouldn’t have killed her—as long as I thought I had a chance get the credits she was being ransomed for, or to escape. When they realized any chance of that was gone, Peyton would probably kill Mara just to end our opportunity to close the op out as a success.
I wasn’t going to let that happen. I kicked off the side of the building, arcing out, then stuck my feet out in front of me, making small adjustments to the rappelling rig as I made a pendulum swing back to the window.
