Molehunt

by Paul Collins

  The reply was unexpected. His expression changed, becoming unreadable. ‘Yes, sir. It’s my day off, sir. But – yes, sir. I understand. I’ll need a few minutes, sir.’

  He broke the connection, scowling. Looking down into the arena he realised he had missed something. Damn. But orders were orders. He got out his e-pad and finished the report he should have sent off the day before. It only took a few minutes, and when it was done he sent it in, then checked that other sections of his e-pad database were still securely encrypted.

  When he looked down at the duel again it was almost over. Both combatants were covered in blood from shallow wounds. The umpire had called the final bout.

  Anneke and the champion selected guns and backed off twenty metres. The umpire’s pistol popped again.

  The combatants levelled their weapons and fired. Both were struck and spun by the impact of the projectiles. Except that somehow an exploding slug had found its way into the champion’s weapon.

  Anneke, wounded only, started to sit up when the projectile exploded into a thousand spinning needles, ripping apart her torso and spraying the field with blood, organs and twitching limbs.

  Maximus grinned.

  ANNEKE finished recording her challenge to the mole then sold the cube to a pawnshop in the Draco Quarter. She let it be known that it had once belonged to a mere named Kilroy. The gutter telegraph would have Kilroy there within the hour.

  He made it in sixty-five minutes.

  She did not bother tailing him. He would expect that. Not tailing him would really yank his chain, since it was harder to detect an absence than a presence. Paranoid assassins were much easier to handle than confident assassins. It was said that battles are won or lost before either side even reached the battlefield.

  Anneke spent the next two days outside the city in an ancient monastery that hired itself out to stressed executives to retreat from life for a few days. Being on holy ground gave her an added measure of protection. Three hundred years earlier, the Mercator Equations had supposedly proved the existence of a spiritual afterlife, so even psychopathic assassins would think twice before committing murder on sacred soil.

  On the evening of the second day she walked down the hill from the monastery to the nearest village. Here she used a public netcom and saw that the mole had taken up her challenge. A duel was scheduled for the day after tomorrow.

  This was good; it was all going according to plan. In her heart she knew that what she was doing was foolish. The duel was too public, too constricted by the boundaries of space and time. She would actually have to be there. Never wise, being there.

  Naturally, she assumed the mole would cheat, and she did not even expect him to show up in person. But then, that wasn’t the point. Her challenge was a sharp stick poked under the tail of a sleeping pit bull terrier; it had been laden with all the cues and voice control she could muster. She wanted to hit some deep unhealed wound. Angry people made mistakes.

  That night she cried for the first time and could not stop. Deep sobs wracked her body, and in the midst of that pain she realised she didn’t grieve for Uncle Viktus alone, or for her parents.

  She grieved for herself, utterly alone in the universe, for that little girl who had again lost everything.

  She woke the next day to find that it was drizzling. That was good; she always seemed to get lucky when it rained. She rose, and took her time to bathe, eat a tiny breakfast, and catch a shuttle to the city. Here her ‘second’ was waiting, the person who would cover her back in the duel. Hopefully.

  That’s when she heard the first rumours. That she had killed her uncle in revenge for molesting her when she was a child. Her stunned reaction quickly became anger, but she managed to get herself back under control. The mole was at work, knowing that anger would impair her competence, and give him an edge on the duelling field.

  Not unexpectedly, given the rumours, she received a summons from RIM to appear before an investigating panel.

  She and her second, wearing the traditional purple robe and hood, made their way to the Neo-Coliseum, entering by the duellists’ gate. Here opponents were shepherded into different secure sections. Nobody wanted the duellists killing each other before the public could vicariously participate in the grisly death.

  Custom also required that each duellist have their own secluded apartment and total privacy. Anneke did not speak to her second. She had other things on her mind. Presently she rested, eyes closed.

  It was several hours later when the bell rang. It was an ancient and ominous signal that tolled the death of someone. She jerked awake, amazed that she had been able to sleep at all. Now she felt remarkably refreshed, even buoyant.

  Maybe today she would get her revenge. Then again, maybe today she would die.

  Ten minutes later, with umpire and cowled seconds watching, Anneke tested her Roman short sword for balance and hefted a small shield. She sized up her adversary, but knew at once that this was not the mole. He was too cocky, too physical, and too old. The deliberately enhanced scars on his body told her that, as did the arrogant sneer on his jut-jawed face. He was also too handsome. None of that fitted the mole’s profile she had worked up from fragments of information. He had narrow eyes, alive with febrile cunning but showing none of the cerebral precision that she expected from the mole.

  And he lacked hatred.

  He grinned at her and gave her a mock bow. ‘I am Grimm. My face will be the last you ever see.’

  ‘I will sing at your funeral,’ Anneke answered.

  Grimm laughed but his face remained impassive.

  The umpire’s gun popped and the two combatants stalked each other, looking for weaknesses, patterns and blind spots.

  He favours his left hand, Anneke noted, incorporating this into her strategy. While she was thinking this, Grimm attacked, nearly ending the contest there and then. Anneke avoided the attack, feinted left, then right, and struck left, slicing open Grimm’s forearm.

  Grimm leapt back, scowling, and used leather thongs on his wrist to tie off the wound. His second rushed forward and sprayed the gash with numbing sealant.

  ‘You were saying?’ said Anneke.

  Grimm shrugged off his second. ‘You’re dead,’ he said.

  Grimm rushed her, patterning her with an onslaught of blows. She lost ground; forced into a series of contacts that he controlled, yet not out of control herself.

  In the next few minutes they nicked and jabbed each other several times, raising much blood but causing little damage. Anneke became impatient. She flicked blood from a cut above her eye; tasted salt-laden perspiration. She spared a moment to spit a globule of blood. This was taking too much time. Under normal circumstances she would have finished him in the first sixty seconds. But these weren’t normal circumstances.

  Grimm smiled at her apparent distress.

  Idiot, she thought. Now to break his rhythm, shock him. Shock the mole, too. He’s up in the stands, no doubt of that.

  She stepped into Grimm’s kill zone, and for a split second was completely vulnerable, but even as he reacted she dropped to the ground, kicked out and swept him off his feet. Grimm went down hard, winded. Anneke was up in a blink and had her sword at his throat. His eyes widened.

  ‘Kill him or duel,’ said the umpire.

  Anneke stepped back. ‘Let’s be sporting about this. Duel.’

  Grimm managed a weak smile though his eyes blazed with shame and humiliation. He snatched the projectile weapon off his second and, muttering, marched off 20 metres. When he turned to face her his expression had changed completely.

  He looks triumphant, Anneke thought. Like he’s already won. The weapons have been tampered with.

  ‘Are you ready?’ asked the umpire, peering at each of them in turn.

  Grimm nodded curtly.

  Anneke said, ‘Shoot.’

  Both raised and fired with the speed of a striking snake. Both gasped with pain as they were struck, jerked with the impact, then fell. Anneke clutched
the wound, but did not seem to be in any pain. Grimm was writhing in agony.

  Anneke started to sit up, then something inside her chest detonated.

  The explosion literally ripped her apart. Bits of bloody flesh, bone and ruptured organs were raining down, and thudding to the ground. The umpire and seconds were splattered with blood, and what was visible of the umpire’s face was white with shock.

  A great gasp went up in the stands. People surged to their feet, booing, shouting, and demanding that something be done.

  An official marched onto the field, his face livid with rage. He ordered that the wounded merc be seized.

  ‘Never in my life,’ he said over and over again. ‘I’ll find out who did this if it’s the last thing I do. You people there. Inside. Return to your apartments. The police will want to take a look at this.’

  Anneke’s second went directly to the secluded apartment, closed the door, then unbuttoned the bloody habit and threw back the cowl to reveal Anneke Longshadow. With the habit removed she was wearing only briefs and an actuator web. She re-activated the web for a moment and winked at the mirror. Out on the field her decapitated head winked seductively, and a young games official very nearly reached the sanitation cart before vomiting messily. She slipped the actuator web off and shoved it into a backpack.

  Only now did she make a call.

  ‘Shaker? It’s me. Everything went fine – your web bypassed their blockers. You might want to come and pick up the pieces and staple them back together for the revival vat. I’ll stash the control web in the usual place. Oh, and remember, you salvage anything and the price comes down next time I need my doppelganger, okay? Sure, I owe you. Bye.’

  Anneke dressed in moments, then pulled on a wig, darkened her skin several shades and made her eyes an aqua blue. She raised a large mole on her cheek near the corner of her lips. Some people said it made her look provocative, but she liked the symbolism: a mole for mole hunting.

  She pinned a shield to her top. It showed a picture of the new Anneke and declared that she was a security official in the employ of the Empire Coliseum. Once she was outside she made her way to her hired skimmer, climbed inside, locked the door and polarized the windows.

  She opened the tracker.

  The idea had come from Kilroy’s worm. Kilroy was seriously behind the leading edge, and he was not particularly bright in the first place. The recording cube she had given him was impregnated with i-bots, tiny enough to penetrate human skin. Once inside his body, the i-bots followed their programming and constructed a unique biochip worm, a machine that was both organic and inorganic. It also emitted a signal in an old-fashioned part of the electromagnetic spectrum: FM radio.

  Anneke turned on her tracker and a green pulsing dot appeared on the screen.

  ‘Gotcha,’ she said. ‘Now the hunter becomes the hunted.’

  She put the skimmer into gear and drove slowly. If her plan worked – if the simulacrum that she had been directing from underneath her habit an voicing via the mike succeeded in fooling the mole – then she had a window of opportunity. The mole would believe she was dead. He might let down his guard a little, and then she would kill him. If he did not … at least she would have learned something.

  It made sense that Kilroy and the mole would meet up after the fight in the coliseum. Anneke had no doubt that Kilroy had been watching also, but doubted that he had been seated near the mole. Nobody was that stupid.

  Kilroy’s signal was loud and clear on the tracker. From the signal’s profile, he seemed to be in a moving vehicle. Anneke brought her skimmer into a parallel track with his, one block east and one behind.

  Too easy, she thought, then berated herself. Too easy is always a trick. She had to assume that Kilroy knew he was being followed, and that the mole had seen through her puppet show. I need a fallback plan. The mole wouldn’t be expecting one. He would be too confident, and that was a fact. In her heart she knew the mole had been fooled. She would have been. She wanted the mole dead so badly she could taste it. Bad attitude. Emotional people don’t live long.

  Kilroy’s vehicle stopped. Anneke parked a block away and tracked Kilroy into a warehouse cluster that fronted the industrial section of the port. She closed the distance between them in time to see him meet a robed and hooded figure. They talked briefly and the hooded figure slipped something to Kilroy, who got back in his skimmer and drove away.

  Keeping to cover, Anneke hurried to the back of the warehouse. Nobody with the mole’s profile leaves by the front door. As she moved into the shadow of a container she spotted him jumping down from the loading bay. They were in a roofed lane, long and doorless. The figure was half way along with nowhere to hide. There could be no better time or place.

  She took aim with her zip gun. For a second her crosshairs sat squarely on the figure’s back and her finger to the side of the tab was white with pressure. She wiped sweat from her eyes, but a red haze of hatred blinded her.

  At the last moment as she depressed the tab, she jerked the gun down, and a section of pavement exploded. The figure whirled and stood frozen.

  ‘That was a warning shot,’ Anneke shouted. ‘Make one move and you’re dead.’

  The mole had been taken by surprise, but recovered more rapidly than any human should have.

  ‘Well, well, Ms Longshadow, back from the dead.’ His voice had the odd, unsettling quality of a voice camouflager. ‘I have to hand it to you, you had me completely fooled.’

  ‘That was the idea.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I could have killed you with that shot.’

  ‘Why didn’t you? I would have.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why.’ Why am I doing this? Anneke asked herself. Kill him!

  The mole gave a single bark of laughter. ‘So you’re taking me in?’

  ‘Take off the hood. I want to see your face.’

  The mole stood his ground for a second then slumped slightly. Slowly he reached up and grasped the two edges of his hood. The next moment he was enveloped in a cloud of thick smoke.

  ‘Damn!’

  Anneke opened up with her zip gun, squeezing off a volley of shots. None penetrated her quarry’s garment, which shimmered and passed through a laneway wall, leaving a crumbling outline.

  Bush nanobot cloak, Moravec device.

  She shoved through the hot chalky hole left by the billions of the mole’s articulated disassembler nano–branches, then raced up the lane. A sewer grating lay discarded on the pavement, leaving the hole gaping. She dropped a stun pellet into the opening. It detonated, shaking the ground and punching a wave of stench up into the air.

  The sound of rats squealing came from somewhere below. ‘Which one of you is the mole?’ she muttered to herself as she dropped into the hole and headed for the disturbance.

  The rats were everywhere, and a dead giveaway for both of them.

  ‘You don’t give up, do you, Anneke?’ the mole’s filtered voice echoed eerily through the tunnels.

  ‘You killed my uncle.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t interfered.’

  Was it her fault that Uncle Viktus was dead? Damn that.

  Your curiosity will get you killed one day, Uncle Viktus had once warned, smiling and tousling her hair. He had been wrong. Her curiosity had killed him, but would he have wanted it any other way?

  She forced herself to keep going, wading through water and past plump sewer rats, her vision blurring as she fought back tears from the stench and guilt.

  ‘How many lives you have got left now, Anneke?’ came the mole’s taunting voice again, seeming further away.

  ‘Enough for you,’ she answered.

  Suddenly she stepped out into a wide cavern and stumbled, nearly losing her balance. The stumble saved her life. A chunk of wall to her left burst into a hissing cloud of steam.

  ‘You know what I’ve got here, Anneke? A needler. Maybe you ought to back off for today.’

  A needler. One of the prohibit
ed weapons of the Old Empire. A weapon of nightmare, a tutor had once described it, from a barbarous age. Still, a dead man with a needler was as dead as any other dead man.

  Anneke sent off several return shots, and dodged into another tunnel as more sections of wall burst around her. Tiny shards of stone slashed at her. She felt blood trickle.

  That’s when she saw it, sitting in shallow water. The discharge flash from one of the mole’s shots illuminated it. She lunged, snatched it up, and then dived across into another tunnel. As she had expected, the mole thought she would return to her cover. A blast sizzled past behind her.

  That’s one more lesson learned about you, she thought.

  In the new tunnel she glanced at her prize. It was an e-pad, dropped by the mole when he stumbled into the larger cavern.

  ‘Well, it’s time to say bye-bye now,’ came the mole’s voice. ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

  ‘You dropped something, Mole.’

  ‘I never drop anything.’

  ‘Even your e-pad?’

  A very satisfying cry of dismay echoed through the sewers behind Anneke as she slipped away.

  MAXIMUS limped out of the sewer. Limped. He glanced at the ugly red burn on his leg, scowling. The bitch had winged him with a lucky shot. A shot in the dark. It had to have been lucky.

  The loss of the e-pad hurt him a lot more. Losing both his legs at the hips would have been better than losing his e-pad. Inexcusable! You deserve to die for that sort of carelessness.

  It almost seemed as if the universe itself had turned against him.

  Well, he would show the universe!

  Back at his safe house in the Draco Quarter, he pumped a cocktail of painkillers and neural stimulants into his bloodstream, cleaned up his leg, and then sat down at his console. Three clicks confirmed that the tracking device built into the e-pad had been disabled.

  What to do? Hijack a warhead and nuke the city? Tempting, but if she knew my profile well enough to find me, she would know I might do it. The e-pad could be in orbit, underground, anywhere.