The Prometheus Trap (The New Prometheus Book 3)

by Andrew Dobell

  She could look back at those months now, and although she could make more of a difference as part of the A.C.T., part of her did miss helping out some of these individuals: making a real, palpable difference to someone's life, saving them from suicide or a long slow death from illness.

  These exiles were fighting back now. They were standing up and challenging the Corporations, and that only made her smile. Some of them took it too far, but most just wanted to retake power from the Corporations. The government and the Director of the A.C.T. all recognised this and had said to her, on more than one occasion, that unless completely unavoidable, the exiles were not to be arrested as they were, in fact, helping the A.C.T. in their fight.

  ‘We’re on final approach. We’ll be landing on the building next to the support building. There’s a covered walkway between the two, which should lead you to the area that gunfire had been heard,’ Dion said.

  ‘It’s the usual mission?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘That’s right, the director's orders are to free the exiles and fend off the C-SWAT. Lethal force has been authorised,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent,’ she answered, noticing Gibson looking at her again. She looked away. She didn’t want to get into that conversation.

  ‘Ready up; we’re touching down in ten,’ Dion said.

  Frankie unbuckled herself from the chair and stood up, grabbing a loop of flat-weave webbing above to steady herself as the flyer wobbled about. Moments later, it bumped down while the rear door levered open.

  ‘Hey, look, Frankie, I just want to make sure we’re…’ Gibson started to say as he stood next to her.

  ‘We’re fine, Gibson, and I really don’t want to talk about this right now,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, that’s fine. I understand,’ he said.

  She saw him nod and back off a touch as he spoke. She really did not want to get into any deep and meaningful conversations moments before a mission.

  Frankie moved down the rear ramp and onto the rooftop, her rifle up as she scanned around, waiting for her team to clear the aircraft.

  ‘Ready,’ several of them intoned once they were out of the aircraft.

  ‘Moving out,’ she said and headed towards a small boxy structure on the roof that had a sign next to it depicting a man walking down some stairs.

  ‘Breach the door,’ she said, and watched her team work like clockwork, setting up outside the door before opening it and moving inside, ready for any opposition they might find. She went with them, checking her corners as they moved down the stairwell to the floor below. Finding another door, the team followed the same pattern, with Gibson to one side of the door and Veronica on the other while Cole and herself stood back, covering them and watching their rear. Gibson tested the handle. The door was unlocked, similar to the previous one.

  ‘Three, two, one,’ he said, before he barged through the door, his gun up, with Veronica on his heels. Frankie followed close behind with Cole bringing up the rear.

  ‘Clear,’ she heard her team members call out once they were sure no one was there. They found themselves in a poorly lit corridor with peeling paint on the walls, light fixtures hanging loosely from ceilings that were missing half of their panels and carpet that had seen better days. She could hear a few distant sounds of inhabitation from below, but up here, everything seemed quiet. She wasn’t surprised, depending on where you were and which gang territory you were in, some of the buildings were only partially filled, while others were packed in tightly. The buildings were often at least partially gang controlled, and some of them had strict rules on who they let into which building. If you couldn’t pay them, and most exiles couldn’t, you didn’t get to partake of their hospitality.

  Frankie quickly orientated herself in the building and directed her team to move towards the covered walkway that linked this building with the support building next door.

  With her gun tucked into her shoulder and pointing in the direction she was walking, she moved quickly down the corridor, her team close by, following in a tactical formation with their rifles also up and ready.

  They walked through the corridors, turning right and then left before spotting the walkway up ahead. Moving up, with two of them on each side of the hallway, they reached the bridge and were able to look through its grime covered windows to the street below. They were about eight floors up from the neon-lit street where a few people moved around, walking the streets and going about their business. It was actually day time, but down here, with the mid-levels above them, hardly any light filtered through, giving the Undercity the feeling that it was always either dusk or night time.

  The doors on this side of the walkway were off their hinges and lying on the floor, broken and smashed, but the ones on the far side, leading into the support building, were intact and closed.

  Frankie looked up, her eyes following the sides of the support building up to the underside of the mid-levels that it held in place. This walkway connected with the support building nearly half way up the side of it.

  ‘Ready?’ Cole asked, standing behind her and apparently getting impatient.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ Frankie moved out and crossed the walkway, her team moving with her. They soon reached the double doors on the far side, and the team went through the same breaching routine they had used a hundred times by now. They knew it by heart, and any of them could take any role in the action and know what they were doing.

  The doors opened up without trouble, and Frankie once again took the lead, moving up a corridor towards what looked like some kind of large open space; an atrium maybe. The hallway was nearly thirty meters long with branches leading off deeper into the building, which they were careful to check before crossing.

  They soon reached the end of the corridor to find themselves in a two story high atrium with balconies and steps leading up to them. Closed or boarded up shops and businesses lined the walls, but the place had clearly not been looked after for years. Most of it was empty space, and in the centre of that area, five people were standing with their hands on their heads as C-SWAT operators aimed guns at them.

  ‘Looks like more of the same crap they’ve been doing elsewhere,’ Frankie said over the team’s neural link.

  ‘Seems that way,’ Gibson answered.

  As they watched, three more operators led two more people, presumably exiles, into the atrium at gunpoint, herding them into the group of five that were already there. They were a mix of men and women, most of them wearing clothes that had seen better days. A few of them had some obvious cybernetic augmentations, but they were in no position to try and fight back.

  One of the operators started to tell the captives to get on their knees, which, after a moment of indecision and followed by more shouting by the lead operator, they started to do. Frankie knew what would be coming next, as did the exiles, and she could see their terrified faces grappling with the reality that they were likely about to be killed.

  ‘This is it, we take them now. Gibson, Veronica, go left, Cole, go right, let’s stop this farce before people start to die,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Copy that,’ they all intoned over the link.

  ‘Ready, go,’ Frankie said, and moved out from the shadowy hallway, her gun aimed at the operators. She glanced around, looking for anyone else that she had not spotted, perhaps up on a balcony, but saw no one.

  ‘Operators, drop your weapons and stand down, or we will use lethal force,’ she shouted, pitching her voice lower and deeper to give it some power and authority.

  The operators were caught unawares and looked up in surprise at Frankie and her team. The exiles also looked over, but with expressions of hope after the initial surprise.

  The lead operator looked over to her, taking his time to turn his head before a smile grew over his face. He didn’t say anything. Instead, he just waited.

  Frankie narrowed her eyes, feeling a touch confused and uneasy about his reaction. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she called out.
<
br />   ‘Oh, yeah. I heard you,’ he said, still smiling.

  ‘I ain’t going to ask you agi…’ she called out, only to be interrupted by a huge explosion from back down the corridor. Frankie ducked slightly, raising her shoulders and lowering her head as the force of the blast hit her, followed by a wave of smoke and dust billowing out from the corridor they had just walked out of.

  Gunfire suddenly erupted from all around and above her, people were shouting and screaming as they ran for cover. Frankie instinctively backed off from where the operators had been, back towards one side of the corridor they had entered. She raced over and dropped into cover as soon as she could behind a pillar as bullets struck the ground around her.

  ‘Cole, Gibson, Veronica, are you there? Are you okay?’ she sent through their link.

  ‘Gibson here, I’m with Veronica. We’re in cover but taking fire… aaagh, shit. Are you hurt?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine. Cole, are you there?’

  ‘I’m here, had to run for cover. I’m going to have to move; they’re closing in on me,’ he said, sounding slightly desperate.

  Movement to her left suddenly caught her attention. Frankie dropped into a crouch and spun, bringing her rifle up and firing off a three round burst at the dark figure. She guessed it was another operator before seeing him properly and fortunately guessed right. He fired back before dropping to the floor, but his shots merely smashed into the pillar above her.

  ‘What exploded?’ Gibson asked.

  ‘I think it was the bridge over here. One moment,’ she said, peering through the fog of smoke that filled the room. She could see the corridor a short distance away.

  With her gun ready, she checked all around her and moved over towards the dark recess of the hallway. The gunfire and fighting continued around her with bullets flying everywhere. A couple more explosions further into the atrium sounded distinctly like grenades.

  Bullets zipped past her suddenly with a “thwip” sound, striking the wall behind her. Frankie twisted and fired back, dropping another operator she could just make out through the hazy smoke.

  She waited a beat, in case he was still alive, but quickly decided he wasn’t going to be any further trouble and moved the last few steps over to the hallway.

  She stood with her back to the wall, to one side of the hallway entrance, before turning quickly into the corridor, her gun ready. An operator was there waiting for her and grabbed the end of her rifle, lifting it to point harmlessly at the ceiling as she pulled the trigger. The operator followed that up with a swift punch to her face, which did little other than anger her. Frankie shoved her gun forward, throwing the man backwards a few steps before following it with a kick to his sternum that sent him flying a couple of meters back, where he landed prone on the dirty magenta carpet.

  By the time the man had looked up at her, she’d adjusted her aim and fired three rounds at him. He jerked once from the impact of the shots and fell still. Frankie checked all around her again before moving along the corridor a few paces, finding a spot where the smoke thinned out and she could see the walkway. Except that the walkway was no longer there. Instead, a mass of twisted metal marked where the walkway had once been.

  ‘Crap,’ Frankie muttered to herself. They wouldn’t be leaving that way. ‘Guys, the walkway’s gone,’ she said through the link, when suddenly red warning icons flashed up in her vision.

  -Warning: malware detected.-

  -Net connection compromised, shutting down network links.-

  -Warning: neural links limited to short range direct communication.-

  3.05

  She cancelled the warnings and noticed the icon that showed her the status of her net connection had a red cross through it. She’d been shut out of the internet because of some powerful malware.

  ‘What the hell?’ she said to herself.

  ‘We’ve lost net connection,’ Gibson said through their link, which was now sounding glitchy. ‘Is this just us?’

  Frankie moved back towards the atrium. ‘No, I’ve lost connection, too. Someone doesn’t want us talking,’ she sent through the degrading link.

  ‘Looks that way,’ Gibson said. ‘Look, I don’t think we can get to you. We’ll have to find you later.’

  ‘No problem. Cole? Did you hear that?’

  ‘…zzzt… some of… psst-zzzt… later…’

  ‘Cole? Shit, I think he’s out of range,’ she said through the team link.

  As if to confirm it, a message appeared in her vision as Cole’s icon greyed itself out.

  -Direct link to Cole Reed disconnected. Out of range. Move closer to re-establish direct link, or reconnect to the net.-

  Looking back into the atrium as the smoke started to fade, Frankie could make out the dead bodies of the exiles on the floor where they had stood moments earlier. Operators moved in the shadows, with the occasional burst of gunfire echoing down the hallway she stood within.

  ‘Aaah crap, we’ve gotta go. We’ll find you later,’ Gibson said.

  ‘You will,’ she answered him. ‘Stay alive.’

  ‘We’ll tr…zzzt…’

  -Direct link to Richard Gibson disconnected. Out of range. Move closer to re-establish direct link, or reconnect to the net.-

  -Direct link to Veronica Macey disconnected. Out of range. Move closer to re-establish direct link, or reconnect to the net.-

  Frankie cancelled the messages, shouldered her rifle, and looked over to the walkway about twenty meters further along the corridor back the way they had come. Frankie moved up, making her way over towards the wreckage of the walkway and looked out through the smoke that was still rising from the small fires that had been started. The entire bridge was gone, blown to bits by who knew what. Had it been rigged with explosives or hit with an RPG? She wasn’t sure. Looking across the street to the top of the neighbouring building, she suddenly noticed that the flyer they had come here in, where Dion had been monitoring their comms, was also smoking and resting at a very strange angle.

  ‘Dion?’ Frankie sent through the link. ‘Dion? Are you there?’ But she heard nothing back. Was he dead? Missing or captured? Things were just going from bad to worse.

  The loud booming noise of flyer rotors washed over her as a black corporate flyer, its spotlights roving, banked around the side of the building. Frankie could make out gun emplacements on the sides of it, and backed away from the hole in the wall. She didn’t much fancy being shot by a minigun.

  She looked around her and could hear the sound of voices: men, operators probably, from the direction of the atrium, and felt trapped. She needed to get out of here and regroup, she thought, as she moved back up the corridor to the first branching hallway to her right and hustled down it, taking her time at corners and junctions to check for any surprises. She could still hear the occasional distant shout and even the odd gunshot and hoped each time that she wasn’t losing teammates.

  She found a stairwell that dropped to a slightly lower level, and moved down it, slowly. Reaching the bottom without issue, she paused there a moment. She needed a second to process this and to think what to do next.

  They had been ambushed, and whoever had orchestrated it was clever and seemed to have a good idea about who Frankie was and how to get her attention.

  Picking on the exiles like that... it made her shake her head to think about it. That was a low blow, but clearly designed to capture her attention. She felt sure the ambush in the atrium had been designed to actually kill them, but obviously, that had failed.

  They were now separated, though, and would probably be easier to pick off if they weren’t careful.

  They needed to regroup, but that was easier said than done when you couldn’t communicate. It seemed like all she could do was to hunt through the building, looking for her teammates or some other opportunity to turn the tables on whoever it was who was overseeing this coordinated attempt on their lives.

  She thought back to the bridge. If it had been rigged to explode, why hadn
’t they blown it when they were crossing it?

  She guessed because it was out in the open, leading to a greater chance of their escaping should they survive the blast. They probably knew she was a cyborg, so there was always the chance that Frankie would live through something like that. If they were contained in the building, they could hunt her down with less chance of being seen and interfered with. Or, at least, that seemed to make sense to her. Doing it down here in the lawless Undercity only led credence to that theory.

  Gibson, Veronica, and Cole could handle themselves to a much greater degree than Dion could, even with his training. She was worried about all of her team, but Dion concerned her the most, not least because she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. She only had the damaged hull of the flyer to base her guesses on.

  All this thinking and going over the events of the last few minutes was all very well, but she needed to figure out her next move. Lives were hanging in the balance here. She needed to do something.

  Her situation was fairly dire. She was contained within a building that as far as she knew, could be swarming with Corporate forces, all of them armed and dangerous and looking for her. She was deep within enemy territory and being hunted. Her first thought was to try and escape, but even as she considered it, she had already started to dismiss it. She would be abandoning her friends, leaving them behind to whatever fate had in store for them. She couldn’t do that, not right now. If things got any worse, then she would reconsider, but right now, she wanted to at least try and find them.