Ghost Black

by Matthew S. Cox

  Risa’s legs wanted to give out. As much as she didn’t want to―couldn’t―believe what she was hearing, her somatic response system didn’t pick up even the smallest trace of deceit. All the lines, graphs, and fluctuating meters around his head showed truth.

  “W… what about Genevieve? Was that a lie too?”

  Colonel Black shook his head. “The sabotaged device was not targeted at Genevieve personally. They intended indiscriminate disruption of the MLF operations. However, because she was so beloved by everyone down there, the attack which they all believed to have killed her backfired. It cemented resolve and made the Front stronger rather than weakening it… so they did not repeat the process. At least not until you took out that bio weapons facility. Fortunately, Pavo’s a lot better at demolitions than anyone expected. He fixed the unit before planting it on that Cryomil tank.”

  “Dustblow. Garrison wouldn’t have knowingly sent me on a mission with a bad detonator. He… loved me.” He’s down there under all that rock. Two tears raced each other down her cheeks.

  “I suppose it may be possible.” The Colonel reached up and picked a crumb out of the inner corner of his right eye. “The man no doubt took a great deal of pleasure in stealing Serena’s daughter. To take from her what she refused to give him.”

  Risa squeezed fingernails into her palms inside shaking fists. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I still have a few loyal friends in C-Branch.” Colonel Black smiled. “We don’t believe Andriy was killed in the demolition operation. He’s still out there somewhere, and we need you. You can get close to him. He would never expect that I’ve made contact with you. It may be that he even believes his assassins succeeded in killing me. I’ve spoken with General Everett. He’s agreed to give you what you want. A clean slate. New life. Even a pension if you want it. Use your advantage. Get close to Andriy, and take him out.”

  Risa’s brain chewed on the words. As unlikely as it seemed, her soma indicated she should believe this man. She contemplated how angry she might be if she confronted Garrison with this truth, and he admitted it. His sad expression, the same one he’d given her every time she got a new piece of cyberware or hurled insults at him, formed in her thoughts.

  She visualized the look on his face in the infirmary, once the shock had worn off.

  “I can’t.” Risa looked away. “I don’t care.”

  “Sorry?” Colonel Black raised an eyebrow. “Did you say you don’t care?”

  “That’s exactly what I said.” She locked stares. “It doesn’t matter who he is. I know he’s my biological father. Hannah ran the test right in front of us.”

  Colonel Black grasped his chin and rubbed his goatee. “Poor girl. That’s rather underhanded of them. Do you honestly believe Garrison to be your father? Doesn’t that strike you as a little too good to be true?”

  Dozens of moments replayed in her mind of the way Garrison had been throughout the years. If he didn’t know he was her father, he’d sure hoped. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Think about it.” He glanced to his left, tracking the motion of a curvy blonde in a bikini top walking past stores on an elevated terrace one story up. “You had a test run on an electronic device by a medtech who is in the employ of C-Branch. Do you not think they can make it say whatever they want?”

  No… no. She suppressed a tremble. Her eyes tingled from tears fighting to emerge.

  “Your entire life has been defined by your concept of having a father. When you learned General Everett’s version of the truth, your reason for serving the MLF evaporated. You were no longer useful to them. Giving you the father you always wanted was their way to control you.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “I know it’s difficult to accept, but your real father did not die in that apartment sixteen years ago. I’m right here.”

  She lifted her head to make eye contact. Her gut wanted to run to Garrison and cry, but her brain twisted over the logic. The somatic system still showed zero indicators of falsehood. “I… don’t know if I can kill him.”

  Colonel Black let his arm drop to his side. “There is not much of a window of opportunity. He will make contact soon. When he does, you must do what needs to be done. For Mars. For the UCF. For the people.”

  Her gaze dropped. The thought of killing Garrison so close to her readiness to murder Tamashī felt like a cybernetic hand squeezing her heart. So much deception. She looked up again, hoping to find some trace of untruth in his expression. I can’t do this. But what if he’s right? What if Garrison is Andriy? No. It can’t be. You can’t fake something like that. She pictured herself at nine or ten, sitting in Garrison’s lap after he’d wedged himself into the vent and crawled to her sanctuary. Rather than try to drag her out, he’d spent two hours in there reading to her.

  She stared up at blurry overhead lights; closing eyelids forced out a waterfall of sorrow.

  Risa, said the voice of Raziel. The man before you lies.

  Rage exploded in her chest. Time slammed to a stop. Before Colonel Black could twitch, Risa swiped a handful of Nano claws through his throat. The stroke of her arm happened as a reflex, faster than conscious thought. A noticeable hesitation in the cut struck her as strange. The spine’s too hard. For two seconds to her perception, no noticeable sign of injury appeared, then milk-white fluid seeped out of four slices. One second later, it sprayed like a fountain from the stump of a neck. His head tumbled in slow motion; Colonel Black had been fast. He’d managed to look frightened before she’d taken his head off. If he’d expected an attack, he may have even been boosted enough to duck.

  The body fell to its knees, wobbled a second, and collapsed backward.

  Risa glared at the twitching body and the pool of white artificial blood expanding out behind him. Glowing rectangles shined on the surface, a reflection from lights overhead.

  A fucking synthetic… Who would bother making an artificial version of Andriy? Her throat tightened. Or was Andriy a synth all along? Before her thoughts could fall down that particular bottomless pit, a bright dot settled on her chest.

  She whirled to the right and jumped back. Six thin luminous lines converged on her out of a sea of oblivious shoppers and sightseers, infrared targeting systems invisible to the naked eye, but detected by her electronics. From between an elderly couple, a man in a dark coat advanced out of the crowd. He knocked the old man down with an elbow shove and pointed a rifle in her direction. Risa flung herself into the air, a sideways flying tackle that took Genevieve over the bench. The redhead’s mouth hung open in her normal time state, the first breath of a scream at the decapitation of the synthetic.

  They hit the ground amid a cluster of bushes. Bullets slid by in the air overhead, followed by a quartet of orange laser pulses, which melted a channel into the bench where Genevieve had been under a second ago.

  Risa pulled one of her pistols while dragging her ‘sister’ up against the base of a wide metal planter box holding a tree. Demonic wails and growls rose from every direction, the effect of accelerated perception on terrified tourists only now reacting to the gunfire.

  While half of her brain focused on aiming her laser pistol, the other half hunted for targets. She peeked around the edge of the box and spotted a man in civilian-normal clothes stationary against the tide of fleeing people.

  She pushed her speedware to the limit, and popped up in a world suspended in time. A bullet as big around as her index finger crawled past her arm. She raised her pistol and lined up the virtual crosshair with the man’s heart. The targeting computer in her head estimated overpenetration, and drew a line out from the man’s back, which entered the face of a little boy being carried by his mother. Risa changed angles, putting a laser blast into the man’s right shin, two inches below the knee; the beam continued into the floor behind him.

  Wirepaths in her muscles heated, but she kept the speedware pegged and turned sideways to allow another bullet to spiral past her breasts. The man she shot reacted at long last to the hit
and crumpled forward and to the side. Risa moved her aim point over his head; the nanosecond empty spaces between the tangle of shoppers behind him lined up to give her a clear shot, she fired.

  A streak of emerald light connected the clear tip of her Hotaru-6’s barrel to the man’s cheek, a finger’s width below the eye, and traced over the head of a tween girl a few paces behind him, who had been dragged off her feet by a man trying to pull her out of the path of bullets. The child hung suspended in midair, half-wrapped her protector’s arm. The laser continued between the astride legs of a sprinting woman, threaded the needle through the crook of the arm of a teenage boy, who had twisted around to watch the show, and fizzled into the wall of a consumer electronics store.

  The beam winked out, its quarter-second pulse glowing for almost three to her. Steaming blood shot out of two small holes in the man’s head. Risa flung herself to the ground fast enough to change a crippling shot from a laser to a grazing pass on the crown of her hip.

  She landed on her back next to Genevieve. Gritting her teeth, Risa picked at a narrow strip of exposed skin where the laser had melted her ballistic suit. She stifled a scream. Shit that burns. Her speedware throttled back to protect her nerves from damage. A brief mental command activated a tactical map, displaying the estimated position of six more hostiles in an approximate horseshoe around her.

  “Did you just seriously cut that guy’s head off?” Genevieve went to sit up, but Risa pulled her down. “Why am I on the ground?”

  “Ambush,” yelled Risa over the sound of a panicking crowd.

  More bullets and laser blasts kicked dirt out of the two-foot-tall planter. She head-dialed Pavo. The electronic ring dragged down to a noise like giant kettle cauldrons bouncing down stairs. The combat analysis computer ramped up her speedware as the hostile contact on the far-right tip of the horseshoe came sprinting around.

  She looked to her left and up; a skinny platinum blonde in a white bikini top and wraparound skirt ran across the elevated platform past small tables of abandoned food. The woman’s rifle had a clear plug for a barrel tip. Oversized octagonal sunglasses glimmered with orange light, a combat visor disguised as tourist wear. The too-beautiful woman aimed to the side as she sprinted, training her laser rifle on Risa. At the sight of it, the stinging wound on her hip flared.

  Bitch.

  No innocent targets posed a risk behind the woman on the second story. The upward angle would send any misses into the rock ceiling. She rolled away from Genevieve as another bright orange beam connected the woman’s rifle to the ground behind her. Risa raised both pistols and put two shots into the woman’s chest. Emerald streaks flickered in the air, hanging for a hundredth of a second drawn out to feel like two. The assassin’s run became a fall, and she crashed into four tables, landing out of sight on the floor of the upper patio. An explosion of milky white liquid spattered the storefront behind her.

  More Synths? What’s going on? Her mind raced with panic. The ACC feared synths, and as far as she knew, wouldn’t use them. C-Branch? Míngtiān?

  Another hostile contact on the opposite side advanced a second behind the downed female synthetic. Already, three bullets cruised toward Genevieve. Risa rolled to her right and covered her ‘sister,’ putting herself in the path of all three slugs while raising her pistol out over her head. A floating targeting reticle did not require sighting over the weapon; she traced laser blasts into his chest, neck, and nose. The man spun into a death whirl, spraying boiling blood in a wide arc.

  Three wads of lead crushed into the material of her ballistic suit.

  One struck her left shoulder, another skidded down her back and slapped to a halt along the upper curve of her ass with the force of a heavy punch, and the third slug Charlie-horsed her in the back of the right thigh. A gelatinous layer sandwiched inside her suit hardened in microseconds, preventing penetration.

  For a second and three-quarters, small areas became tougher than steel.

  「I’m almost there,」 said Pavo, sounding far too calm.

  She screamed in pain, both over the head comm as well as aloud.

  「Shit! What’s going on?」 yelled Pavo.

  「I’m pinned down,」 wheezed Risa. 「Four unknown hostiles.」

  Genevieve helped herself to Risa’s second Hotaru, pulling it out of the harness. “Who’s shooting at us?” In the ‘idle’ phase of Risa’s speedware, her voice sounded two octaves low.

  Ngh. Ow. She winced, unable to decide if she wanted to grab her shoulder or brace her backside. She yelled again when Genevieve plucked the bullet off the small of her back. That’s a bruise.

  「I don’t like those noises. How bad are you hurt?」 asked Pavo.

  「Left shoulder might be cracked. Bunch of bruises. Small laser burn on my hip. I think the suit’s melted to my skin.」

  The not-too-distant sound of squealing tires made her smile, despite the fusillade of bullets slapping into the ground and gouging the plastisteel on both sides. A constant pelting of planting soil, splinters, and leaf bits rained on her.

  They’re not trying to hit me; they’re trying to keep me still.

  Expecting a hand grenade, or something equally excessive, Risa pushed Genevieve down, maximized her speedware boost, and sprang upright.

  Headlight glare flashed behind a guy in a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt, pink Bermuda shorts, and sandals over white socks. He stood next to the kind of enormous bag carried by awkward tourists who pack enough gear for a ten-day safari when taking a four-hour walkabout. Except, rather than sandwiches to feed fifty, he’d brought an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher. Two 60mm ‘soda can’ missiles pointed at her, and he wore the kind of placid ‘I win’ smile that made her want to rip off his testicles.

  Pavo’s patrol car slammed into him from behind a half-second before he fired, raising the trajectory of his missile such that it went high, cruising over the planter box instead of hitting the ground right behind it. Risa swayed to the right, cringing out of the way of the snub-nosed rocket spewing acrid fumes and fire. Four seconds later to her perception, it exploded far enough behind her not to be a threat.

  Brilliant orange flashed in every reflective surface around the courtyard.

  Risa righted herself, staring down the length of a smoke trail at the black windshield of an armored maroon car with flashing blue lights. Launched by the impact, the man who’d fired the missile crashed through the tree and bushes, landing face down close enough to kiss Genevieve on the head. Risa raised her pistol, and shot him point blank in the back.

  Five times.

  Pavo’s little floating apparition growled. The patrol car door opened; he dove out and kicked it closed. All the civilians had fled at this point, leaving only three remaining hostiles. He opened fire with an assault laser rifle on the two on the right. Rapid streaks of dark-crimson light flickered, chasing a pair of armed men behind benches.

  A tiny hand waved from inside the dark vehicle.

  “Pavo!” screamed Risa. “What the hell are you doing? Is Kree in that car?”

  “She’s perfectly safe. The thing is armored. Nothing they have can touch it.”

  “They have a missile launcher!” shouted Risa.

  Pavo glanced at her for a second, then resumed firing off to his left. “Which is on the ground in front of you.”

  Risa shrieked as the man on the opposite side of the car from Pavo riddled it with bullets on full automatic. Sparks snapped and danced off the armor plating, shredding the emergency lights, but failed to scratch even the windows. Kree dropped out of sight inside the car. Pavo whirled around and fired a short burst over the roof. A puff of bloody steam spat in two thin trails from either side of the attacker’s arm. The man grabbed the wound and collapsed behind cover.

  Pavo fired at random into the area where the man hid. “Shit. Only winged him.”

  Nine more MDF cars converged at the archway where the western strut of the Tier 2 Mall met the central terrace. They screeched to a halt, doors flew o
pen, and a crimson-clad army sprang out. Seconds later, an intense barrage of laser fire from eighteen Defense Force officers chewed up the silvery plastisteel benches and planter boxes by where the last two had taken cover. The man Pavo clipped risked popping up to take a shot, and went down in a hail of bright-orange and dark-red lasers.

  Pavo’s voice came over a loudspeaker. “This is the Mars Defense Force. You are under arrest. Drop your weapons and step into view with your hands in plain sight. You have four seconds to comply.”

  Two near-simultaneous gunshots launched gore into the air.

  “Clear,” yelled an unknown woman.

  Risa swallowed hard. She glanced down at the pistols she clutched, realizing she’d sat there and watched the last few seconds of the fight play out without doing anything. The odd feeling of being ‘saved’ made her laugh. Motion from laughing burned on her hip.

  “Ri,” wheezed Genevieve. “Is Aura out there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not into that new-age stuff.”

  “Jackass.” Genevieve closed her eyes and cringed, despite chuckling. “If she is, I’m going to tear her armor off right here.”

  “You need medical―”

  Boom. A series of rapid rippling clacks followed the roar of an explosion.

  Risa snapped her head up.

  Pavo sailed backward through the air, smoke peeling from the front of his body. He crashed onto the bare plastisteel floor tiles and skidded for another six meters before halting, motionless.

  Risa let out an unintelligible scream, the product of her brain trying to combine ‘no’ and ‘Pavo’ into one sound. She leapt the planter box into a full fortyish-mile-per-hour dash, covering the distance to where he’d landed in seconds. Other than his face hiding behind an intact helmet, the charred, bloody armor looked too much like what she’d seen in that room when she thought she’d found his body. One-inch square metal bits stuck to where they’d partially melted into his chestplate.