by Alex Kirko
Blake stepped through the opening, followed by Sheong and Mel. Nat brought up the rear, and she grabbed the metal section of the wall they had removed, and set it back into the hole. As she blocked it, the room fell into darkness, except for the pulsing patterns of their coolant systems giving them just enough light to see using their sensors.
“Use some of that spray,” Nat said. “Hide the cut.”
Blake pulled out a dispenser of transparent adhesive tape, sealed the hole with it, and sprayed it with the black paint.
Sheong walked up to the door and leaned against it, listening for anyone in the hallway. Blake began hacking the access panel. “Shit, this one was built way before my time. Where is the damn maintenance port? I know there should be one.”
Mel joined him, took one look at the panel, and popped it open with a tap on the bottom. She shrugged. The light switched from blue to green. “I don’t hear anybody,” said Sheong, and the four of them exited into the hallway.
The Central Archives were much more modern than the Old Earth spire. Here, the walls were neutral beige, the floor was metal, and there were no people in sight.
“They should have thought how they would guard a half-empty tower with several hundred floors before they built this place,” said Blake, and the four of them went in the direction of the emergency staircase.
There was a mild crack of speakers turning on, and then sirens blasted from everywhere deafening Blake before the microphones in the suit had time to adjust. He could barely hear an urgent-sounding voice that followed.
“Intruders in the city,” it said. “If you see a squad of assassin mech specialists, transmit your location and avoid them at all costs.”
Mel said, “I fed the cameras their video feed on the loop, but the system resets every three minutes, so it won’t hold.”
The team passed dozens of empty rooms that were ready to accept both viewers and the pieces that would be on exhibit. As they got to a nondescript door, Nat said, “They built this place to house all the art Mortenton, but only thirty floors are full. It takes effort to come up with a style so unique it needs another floor.”
They opened the door to the stairway. It looked older than the structure around them, like the stairs had been created way before someone thought to place the archives here. Metal creaked under their feet, and every footfall launched a small cloud of dust into the air. No one used this place, which was why, Blake supposed, the walls were dull black and covered with graffiti that said things like “Fuck the Council!” and “Feeling lonely? Ask me how to steal a dog.” Most of these were in the same handwriting and half-faded orange paint. Blake shook his head: sometimes it seemed like rebels were everywhere, especially in the places nobody cared about.
It took them a good ten minutes to climb to the floor the chamber was on, leaping three stairs at a time, aware that the pursuers might realize where their target was and cut them off. At the final landing, just as they were about to leave and head to the regeneration chamber, the dead eye of a camera blinked twice and switched on. Something clicked, and a dispassionate ray of light fell on their group. Blake could see the lens focusing on them.
They dashed into the hallway, and Blake handed a canister to Sheong.
He said, “Just spray it along the edge of the door. It will fuse it with the wall and hopefully buy us a little time before they break it down.” He turned to the young hacker. “Mel, you should head toward the elevators. Drop a trojan program into their sub-system and then join us in the regeneration chamber. We might need your skills to unhook it.”
Sheong and Mel shifted in place, looking at Nat. Lights flickered up their leader’s face coolant pipes, and Blake could swear that was an eye roll. She said, “He makes sense for once. The two of us will handle the guards.”
Mel and Sheong split off, and Blake headed for the chamber with Nat. They had memorized the schematics for the Archives, which were blank for most floors, but not for this one. The labyrinthian floor plan was of no use when the infiltrators had a map. The Council liked its propaganda, Blake thought. All the other regeneration chambers were locked up beneath the capital and other city centers, and only here could the public sometimes view untouched Old Earth technology.
Billions of people and thousands of years of history of the mother planet, and all that was left were colonization ship parts and books that survived because they were useless—it hurt to see this.
Blake switched on his stealth systems. Nearby, Nat too turned into a faint blue outline. They moved without a sound, and the colors looked dull even to his enhanced senses.
“Drummond, I can’t see you,” said Nat. “Tell your AI to start transmitting.”
“Aileen, set a weak directed signal, so she can see where we are,” he thought.
“I’ve already done so, Master. Just on the edge of her scanner sensitivity.”
“Boost it fifteen percent.”
Nat said, “Better, but I can still hardly make out your outline. What kind of stealth field is that? At this distance, I should be able to notice something even if you wanted to hide.”
“Not if somebody tried to save a few credits when outfitting your mech with sensors. I’ll go first.”
They got to the turn. After that, there would be a ten-foot hall and the doors to the chamber. Blake peaked around the corner.
The door was guarded by two crimson assault mechs armed with heavy plasma halberds and personal artillery units on their backs. An Ascended supervisor stood nearby, fidgeting. He was a burly guy that looked tiny and frail next to the twelve-foot mechs. The hall widened behind the group, and the door itself was large enough to pick up and throw all the guards through it without them bumping into each other. The Ascended twitched, sniffed the air, and Blake ducked back behind the corner.
“Good news is that they didn’t get around to strengthening the guard,” he said. “Bad news is they didn’t lighten it either, and they wouldn’t put someone incompetent here.”
“There are probably more of them inside the room itself,” said Nat. “We need to get rid of these ones quickly.”
Blake nodded. He said, “The moment we move, everyone will know where we are and why we are here. I doubt the two of us can destroy the transmitters instantly as we did with the patrol guards.”
“We could wait for Sheong and Mel.”
“Four of us wouldn’t be enough either.”
They stood at a t-intersection. Blake slunk across the opening and stood on the other side of the hallway leading to their target. He got a glimpse of the engraving that took up most of the regeneration chamber door. An image of Old Earth in the center, the Americas facing the viewer, with hundreds of specks shooting out of it and toward smaller globes set all around the giant mother planet.
“The first wave of colonization, huh,” he said. “I’ll go on three. Nat, you follow half a second later.”
Blake bent his knees and rerouted most of the power toward his legs and arms and took out his two plasma daggers. He counted and on three pushed off the ground, coiled in the air, landed on the wall that faced the hallway, and sprung off it and toward the guards. Aileen muffled most of the sound, but he saw the Ascended officer widen his eyes and unclip a long, curved sword from his belt. Blake shot past him.
He took the mech on the right, flying into its face and thrusting his blade at the guard’s neck. The dagger whirred as the orange-white plasma shot from the exhaust. The mech’s shields flickered, and Blake struck with the second dagger, setting it to another frequency. A violet stream of fire sprung to life, and the shield cracked and died. He saw the gun on the back of the assault mech shift over the man’s shoulder, about to gain a bead on him. Trying to use long range weapons at this distance was never a good idea. The man must be panicking, he thought as he stuck his right blade into the crimson armor above the left clavicle. The enemy’s plating hissed and evaporated, and he could smell burnt flesh. He tried to go for the head with his left blade, but the guard dodged to
the right, avoiding the strike completely.
Nat flew into battle behind him. The Ascended officer got a swipe at her with his sword, but the blade glanced off her shields, the fraction of a second not enough to break through the protective cerulean bubble.
The guard Blake had been fighting didn’t stand a chance without his shields. Nat whirled in the air, her collapsible spear struck forward, piercing the bulky helmet and flash-cooking the brain inside. The armored behemoth began falling, and the two assassins stepped away from him, standing back to back and facing the Ascended and the other mech who was smart enough not to go for his gun. Instead, he activated his polearm and started spinning it in a complicated pattern, creating a death zone of sizzling red and gold.
“Drummond, you are not getting close to that one, not with your one-foot daggers,” said Nat. “Let me take him, you kill the officer.”
“Got it,” he said and dashed toward the Ascended.
The enemy was faster than Blake had anticipated. The Ascended dropped into a crouch, coiled his body into a spring, and thrust forward with the sword in his right hand. The attack looked straightforward, and Blake was going to move a little to the right, slide parallel to the blade, and bury both his daggers in his attacker’s chest. Mid-move, his opponent grasped the hilt in a two-handed grip, put his weight on the front leg, and spun in place, turning the thrust into a slash. Blake’s shields flickered, a warning chimed, and the barrier around him died.
He sprung back as the tip of the blade seared through the armor of his right arm. The plating was burned clean through, and he could see emergency alloys pouring into the cut, the nanomachines already getting to work on sealing it.
The officer didn’t move, competent enough to know that time was on his side. In five minutes, the place would be crawling with Republic soldiers, and the dark-haired man with sickly blue eyes only had to hold out until then.
But Blake had seen the boundaries of the man’s shielding system and enough of his style to guess what might work. He went into a low stance, tuning out the sounds of Nat’s battle. His opponent’s style relied on predicting Blake’s movements and using the tight shielding the Ascended had. Well, Blake would give him something new to see.
He melded his mind fully with Aileen to speed up his reflexes and engaged the repulsors to dash forward. Just before he was about to get run through by the enemy’s blade, he thrust out with his left elbow and blasted the repulsor at one hundred percent. A flash of brilliant blue pushed him to the right and out of the way of the officer’s attack, although the sword did glance over his recovering shields. Good thing Blake had four spare capacitors inside his suit that cycled as they became depleted.
He stabbed with his left, putting all his power behind the thrust, but only managing to disable the shield and cut a glowing red swath into the hallway wall. His other dagger, however, found its mark, piercing the officer’s shoulder.
This was taking too long.
There was a hard thump behind his back, and then Nat appeared to his left, stabbing with her spear and locking it with his opponent’s sword. Before the Ascended’s shields could recover more than ten percent, he ducked under Nat’s spear and slashed at the stomach. When the man looked down at his innards leaving his body, Blake flicked his other wrist, and the officer’s head rolled off his shoulders and toward the chamber door. The face looked bewildered.
“Fancy moves, Drummond,” said Nat. “You might want a bigger stick though. The reach on those toothpicks of yours is shit.”
He grumbled in response and fished out the equipment he had developed with the Freefolk: two black balls, about the size of a ripe plum each. “Dropped my sword in Seind. Didn’t have the time to retrain with a new weapon,” he said. “Four minutes. Let’s go.”
He kicked the doors open with a burst of blue from the repulsor on his right calf, slamming them into two guards who had been waiting in ambush for him and Nat. Both were Ascended women with a crimson eagle insignia over the left breast. Blades the enemy had prepared sizzled and died after going through five inches of heat-resistant door.
“Just our luck,” said Nat. “Fucking Connelly thralls.”
Behind the Ascended, Blake saw the central platform with a ten-foot silver capsule standing on top. Next to it stood a technician punching something into the interface and looking over his shoulder every two seconds.
Blake didn’t wait for the Council warriors to recover. He took one of the black spheres he had on his belt and tossed in an underhanded throw at the technician. The ball whirred in the air and plasma jets fired from eight exhausts in it. He followed up with the other ball. This one he threw over their heads.
These guards were something else, though. Despite being staggered, one managed to strike the top sphere in the air with her falchion, and the other fell onto the other ball, containing it with her shields and body. This did create an opening, though, and Nat used it to toss her spear at the technician.
Blake didn’t even see the flicker of a shield as the spear took the poor bloke’s head off. The body slumped to its knees and then landed on the floor.
He was about to throw his left dagger to Nat, but she had already unclipped a combat knife from her right boot and launched at the guard that was still on the ground. Blake moved to distract the other one.
After nicking the woman in the forearm and getting a nasty burn on his shoulder he realized they were about equally matched. Nat had been able to deal some damage to her opponent, but that was only because the guard had been lying on the floor after losing most of her shields to his grenade.
It could have been a fair fight, but Sheong and Mel ran into the room.
Connelly thralls were as agile as winged snakes. They stood back to back and deflected and counterattacked even as they were assaulted by four professional soldiers. They couldn’t defy the laws of battle long, however. One of the women fell when Sheong cut off her left foot.
Mel took the opportunity to run up to the capsule.
“I’ll need time to disengage the lockdown,” she said. “Guard my back.”
Even without her, they soon managed to put the other guard off balance and slice her right hand off. It fell, still clutching her blade. The girl looked dumbfounded for a moment, as if she didn’t know what they were doing in the room or how they got there. Blake used that moment of hesitation to slide around her, grab her in a headlock, and cut off the straps of the shield generator on her right hip.
“What will we do with them?” asked Sheong. “Can’t just leave them.”
“Can’t knock out an Ascended either,” said Blake.
“Blake, I could use your help here,” said Mel from near the capsule.
Nat said. “No need to personally piss off the Chancellor. Stab each of them in the heart, only once. We have two minutes.”
Sheong moved to hold down the woman who had lost a foot, and Blake released the headlock, shoved at her away from him, and thrust a dagger under her left shoulder blade, forward and up. She gasped and slid to the floor. Blake was about to turn away when he saw that the girl was somehow still breathing, albeit in shallow breaths, and the flow of air stuttered every few seconds. Nearby, Sheong and Nat were done with their prisoner, and she too wasn’t dead.
“How are they still alive?” asked Blake.
“They are Ascended,” said Nat. “I’ve seen it before. The nanites can move just enough blood around to keep them alive while their hearts regenerate. Go to Mel, Drummond.”
He took a moment to glance around and sprinted to the young hacker. There were few rooms like this on Terra Nox. The regeneration chamber had been a part of one of the three colonization ships that had landed on the planet almost two thousand years ago, and the founders of the Archives had transferred not only capsule but also the room itself. Old Earth fashion of that period had bounced back to baroque, and it showed. Dark steel beams went up the rounded walls in cardinal directions supporting a domed ceiling fifty feet above them. The same design
was engraved upon it as the one they had seen on the door: giant Old Earth in the center and specks of colonization ships flying off to spread the human civilization and search for brothers and sisters among the stars. Turned out there was nothing here except for more rock, plants, and animals.
“There are two more locks,” said Mel. “I’ve injected a spike into the connection the left lock has with the central server that’s somewhere in the building. I’ve almost managed to break in a couple times, but the damn thing changes its encryption every ten seconds.”
“I’ll take the right lock,” said Blake. “Link up with Aileen, she has processing power to spare.”
“One minute,” said Nat.
Blake stepped closer to the capsule and outside of Mel’s view. He took a security spike and jammed it into the cable that connected the lock with the server. Quantum computers had brought wires back more than a thousand years ago. There was nothing easier to hack than a wireless security network, because a hacker could do it from another room. Needing physical access complicated things.
He touched the spike with his right hand and checked for the backdoor where it was supposed to be. It took him a few seconds to locate, because the chamber wasn’t from the era he’d been thinking of. He sent a seemingly random string of numbers to the hardware responsible for the chamber’s communication with the colonization ship’s life support system. This part of the machine was supposed to be inert, but both his and Mel’s latches clicked open.
“I don’t understand,” said the other hacker. “I’m sure I didn’t get the right code.”
“Guess we got lucky,” said Blake. “Nat, Sheong, get your asses over here.”
He turned to the doors they had entered through to see Nat and Sheong finish sealing them shut with thermopaste. Just as the hole between the two sides of the door was closed, he heard a heavy thump on the other side, but the metal didn’t budge.
“Fuck, I thought we’d have more time,” said Nat. “This place is a deathtrap.”
Blake said, “No, there are weak spots. Sheong, cover my back. Nat, Mel, grab the capsule. We are leaving.”
