by John Ringo
When Farris arrived, if he didn't leave with Scout—Bowie's target—he was going nowhere. They could regroup and take him at night. Bowie would give advance warning, then use the timing to make verification of their target's presence at home quick and unobtrusive.
Luke Landrum had armed the Reardon girl with no reservations. The driver needed to be armed, and it didn't matter a damn that she was thirteen. She was an O'Neal. Tramp and Kerry had gotten used to her age. They'd seen on the first op that she was one hell of a combat driver—a natural. With a wheel in her hands, she had the agility and cunning of the fox that made the dogs cry. They tried hard not to patronize her. It didn't seem healthy.
Right along after quitting time for second shift at the plant, here came Mutt and Jeff's car. True to plan, as soon as they'd buckleyed in the update to Fairbairn, Reardon gave the targets about a minute's head start and pulled out of the DQ to get them to point B.
That was peachy until up ahead they saw hazard flashers through the heavy snow at a green traffic light.
"Turn off, turn off," Landrum ordered.
"Where?" Reardon asked.
The windows on the car were all frosted up, protecting them further from view. Thank God for small mercies. It wasn't enough to stop him swearing, but Bowie's team lead at least swore silently. That he was still swearing could probably be seen from the steam pouring out of his ears.
Then the light turned red. Jenny Reardon came to a careful stop on the icy road.
Sensing help had arrived, the targets walked over to the driver's side window and Mutt, their driver, knocked on it.
"Boy, am I glad to see you!" Jeff said as Jenny rolled down the window.
"Ditto," Jenny said with a smile. Two rounds into each body had them on the ground and twitching. She had to sit up in her seat to put one round into each head. They entered under the chin and more or less took off the top.
"Blood on the door," she said as the traffic light turned to green. "And it's freezing. That's gonna to take some clean-up."
"That was not the plan," Landrum said angrily.
"What were we going to do?" Jenny asked. "Give them a lift to their place and then cap them? Like our DNA wouldn't have gotten on the bodies? Cap them in the car and then deal with the bodies? Plan was blown."
"Luke," Tramp said. "She's right. You're just bitching because she aced us out of a kill on those scum. I'm pissed, too. But it was quick thinking and it was clear. Now let her get us out of here."
"We are so going to talk," Landrum snarled.
About three miles down the road, as she negotiated a nasty turn with a smoothness that really amazed him, he sighed.
"How you doing? First kill."
"Me?" Jenny asked with a thoughtful frown. It cleared quickly. "I can't wait to tell the kids at school! 'I got to cap a bad guy! I got to cap a bad guy!' They're going to be green."
"I hate O'Neals," Kerry muttered.
The Sub-Urb door was one of the originals. Normally, GalTech stuff didn't break. It wasn't designed to resist people breaking it deliberately. But this one still worked, which made things easy. It was supposed to make a programmed sound on opening to cue the resident to entry. Trivial work for even an incompetent cyber—which was probably why people tended to break and replace their doors. Candy hadn't.
The door slid open soundlessly, and a man known to the community as "Sevin" slapped a husher on the wall inside. He used his off hand, of course. His strong hand remained on his pistol as he and his buddy split the room.
"Clear."
"Clear."
The other two men on Team Ka-Bar were moving almost before the second all clear came. For this mission, it didn't much matter that they were all DAGgers, not Bane Sidhe. It was a textbook op of how to take out a personality. Capture not necessary or desired. The op was so simple it would have been insulting if it weren't for one key detail: this bitch was one of the motherfuckers who did the Maise massacre.
Charlie Maise was a fellow DAGger. The whole unit wanted Candy Leighton dead with a passion beyond words. It was DAG's right to take vengeance, and their own privilege to be on the team that got to do so. They'd all fantasized for long hours on creative ways to off the bitch, but in the end they'd kill her like the professionals they were. Get in, accomplish the objective, get out.
In operational mode, they were all instantly aware of little details like the target's revolting slobbiness, all the more glaring to military men, accustomed to strict neatness. The men's clothes scattered across the floor told them what they'd find in the single bedroom. One of the initial entry pair gathered up the clothes as his buddy, their team lead, covered him.
One of the second pair glanced in the bathroom in the short hallway on the way past. "Clear."
They were through the bedroom door, the man on the jam side emplacing another husher as they entered. He demonstrated why DAGgers practiced shooting one-handed, putting a bullet cleanly between the eyes of the woman in the bed. Her fuck for the night had his head between her legs, and was out of the way.
He held his fire for the follow-up shot, since there was no telling what the guy might do. He and his partner had their guns trained firmly on the guy.
This room was a mess, too. It smelled like a men's locker room.
"Be very, very still. Did you piss or shit?" the shooter asked.
The gray-faced, naked man shook his head.
"Good," he said.
The back-up shot the guy with a Hiberzine dart.
"Make sure there's not a trace of him," the team lead said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Indianapolis Sub-Urb West owed its present condition to the enlightened benevolence of the Indiana legislature. Indiana was not Illinois. Indiana had far less money to waste on dry wells like social programs for Sub-Urb residents.
Sub-Urbs were simply not economically sustainable communities. Indiana's post-war economy was much like its pre-war economy. Manufacturing and farming, the former spread through a network of smaller cities, with the latter obviously distributed out as well.
The problem with Sub-Urbs was they concentrated people in places where there weren't enough jobs to employ them all. People in Sub-Urbs generally weren't too good about going onto the surface to look for jobs. Manufacturing jobs still tended to concentrate in the hands of union members, anyway, meaning multigeneration hoosiers. Sub-Urbs became slums of multigenerational losers, who were a drain on resources. The hydroponics systems in the basement that had once fed them had become, if not exactly broken, fouled to the point of same by mishandling. In the multigeneration brain drain that followed the end of the Postie War, competent hydroponics techs had found better paying work elsewhere, as had the other competent people who had kept the systems working as a captive audience at slave wages.
The Indiana legislature had decided it was better to pay a bit more for Sub-Urbanites once and get rid of them than it was to keep paying, and paying, and paying. They had a vigorous program of job training for careers that, coincidentally enough, would take the graduates someplace other than Indiana. A condition of training being vacating the Sub-Urb upon graduation, Indiana was slowly emptying the behemoths with a view to eventually shutting them down.
Indianapolis West Urb, home to one Gordy Pace, was about half empty. Gordy's own hall was even emptier than that. The man lived alone in three-bedroom quarters intended for a family. He'd had one, until he came home one day to find his wife had taken the kids and skipped off with a freshly trained bounty farmer wannabe. He supposed he could've smacked her less when he was drunk, but the woman had been damned irritating sometimes, and the kids loud. He didn't miss her at all, even though the place seemed kinda empty and he cooked worse than his ten-year-old daughter. He ate the crappy food in the crappy mess hall and tried to ignore his crappy life. Except that was all changing now.
Gordy was smart with his money. He had a brand new car, a union spot for the steel mills up north, and money to buy himself someplace to live that h
e could afford. Someplace out of this crappy hole in the ground. Only reason he wasn't gone yet was because he had had to get it all set up, and it wouldn't have been any fun without partying around a bit in front of friends, acquaintances, the sanctimonious bastards who got him kicked off the force, and the two bit whores who had been too good for him until he got himself his ticket out. And not to no shitty bounty farm.
He sure as hell wasn't putting off the trip out of any love for this goddamned rat hole. Hell, he was still tripping over the kids' discarded toys and crap.
Tonight, he was taking a break from crowing it up to have a quiet evening watching the latest blockbuster holo and downing a six pack or two of beer. Same as he'd done last night. Tomorrow he was really going to have to start packing up his shit. He stretched and noticed his T-shirt was tight. Good thing he was buying new clothes. There was a downside to being able to afford more beer.
The money had come in exchange for a really nasty piece of work, but if he had it to do over again he'd do the same. It was a ticket out of here. Life was unfair, and when bad things happened, it was better if they didn't happen to him.
Team Jacob specialized in the trickiest short-term cover assignments. Each of them was a seasoned operator, slabbed over ten years ago. They all looked perfectly ordinary, yet different enough to not be attention-getting identicals. Medical had carefully balanced their DNA changes to pass cursory examination of the commonly typed DNA factors as ninety-nine plus percent certainly a single, individual. Charlie Smith had a well-constructed record as a jobless, alcoholic laborer in Minneapolis, a sad victim of homelessness. The females typed as first degree relatives of the males.
They were the best team for a Sub-Urb hit, and frequently performed same. Old jeans, old sneakers, and a faded, dark blue T-shirt were as invisible as they themselves. Team Jacob had the lowest cover and costuming overhead in the whole organization.
For this job, they used a standard four-man entry team, their two female field operatives playing lookout. Since they couldn't and shouldn't be strikingly attractive, team members were scintillatingly charming and witty—but only at will. Charisma from someone who wasn't too good looking was effective on both sexes, depending on how they played it. The women stood lookout, invisible until and unless they needed to divert someone away from the action.
If there was any trace DNA at all, the "crime" would have been committed by one man, acting alone. Ex-cops always had enemies.
The entry team took the subtle approach on Pace's wooden replacement door—they kicked it in, not even bothering with hushers. The hall was half vacant, and the crime rate in the Urb tended to cause residents to conspicuously mind their own business. Sub-Urb quarters had no front windows to peek through. Noise would keep the other residents in their quarters better than silence.
Sometimes building clearing went quicker than others. This time was as quick as you could get. The bastard was in his easy chair in front of the HV. Cap him beyond repair, and get the hell out.
"Done," the team lead dropped the single word to his PDA, its only transmission, getting the instant receipt codes that told him the message got to both lookouts unjammed.
Getting into a Sub-Urb for a mission, even undetected, was easy. Out . . . not so much. The watching opposition would find it easy as hell to shut down the elevators and exit.
Agent Kacey Grannis retreated to the nearest public lounge and grabbed a table. She typed a single word into the virtual keyboard of her AID and her tiny foot in the door to the Sub-Urb's system expanded to complete control. She had to have the AID. The opposition sure as hell would have one, if they were any good. Parity made this a matter of skill. The mission hung on the bet that Kacey would be better and luckier than the competition.
Unfortunately, measures, countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures were a neverending arms race. She had to stay at her post until the rest of Jacob was all the way out, then hope her final run of hacks held long enough to get out herself. She had prepared herself mentally and physically in case she wasn't good enough or lucky enough. This time. Many a cyber had learned that you didn't tell a Bane Sidhe AID to purge beyond possibility of retrieval unless you really meant it. Virtually indestructible, it did the person capturing it little good to have a machine scrubbed all the way down to the hard-coded OS and blank personality. Unless the first guy to get his hands on it happened to want his own AID.
Her own preparations would, sadly, almost certainly cause collateral damage. High enough heat guaranteed full destruction of DNA. Kacey was wired to hell, and it wasn't with caffeine.
Her counterpart took point on the way out. Stephanie Lyle had wired up for a different reason. Far enough ahead of the others, her destruction would be a diversion, if necessary, in a last-ditch effort to get the rest of the team out.
The boys in the rear had preparation, but less complete. While partial destruction would reveal the fake genome in the event of a thorough search, with the entire team burned, the genome became expendable. The hitters had made a trade-off between risks if Pace's quarters contained too many surprises. No need to set one of them off by accident and kill them all.
Grannis sighed resignedly. Her competition was good. Too good. As fast as her routines created security holes for her, the other guy found and shut them down. No AID had the intuition to keep up with a top cracker like herself—or her opponent. At their level, this was strictly a PvP game. She got the rest of the team out, barely, but she was about out of tricks.
"Joseph, send by voice, then do a complete purge," she told the AID, while backing into a Galplas corner as far away from people as possible, and under a vent. The blast would have somewhere else to go in addition to the lounge itself. For whatever good that did.
"Are you sure?" it asked.
"Asherah," she replied.
"Ready," it answered. As loyal to the Bane Sidhe as she was, the AID still sounded faintly regretful.
"Goodbye, guys," she said simply. Nobody ever said an "I'm fucked" code had to be meaningless.
As a man dropped from the vent onto her head, Kacey Grannis' final words ignited her implosion, joining her with her enemy in what he had never expected to be his final union.
The AID landed fused into what remained of the granite tile flooring, Joseph having already departed for whatever afterlife might be reserved, somewhere, for martyred AIs.
Jacob had scatter-and-go-to-ground engraved by long experience. Dogs, or the technological equivalent, couldn't even follow them. They all smelled the same. A crowded and very large club downtown had gear pre-planted. A club with four convenient exits, all in common use.
The driver ditched the car at the curb, ignoring the complaints of the guy at the door and the line by stuffing a wad of bills into the door dude's hands.
"Rest of the current line, no cover charge, on us," Stephanie said.
There was still grumbling, but as the word passed back it subsided to a few disgruntled murmurs.
The survivors of Team Jacob were into the club before the men following them were half out of their own cars. The tails had not come prepared with wads of cash, which didn't really matter as the same trick wouldn't have worked twice, anyway.
Inside, the five men and one woman dispersed into the crowd, making for restrooms in different parts of the three-story building, themed on heaven, hell, and purgatory. Jacob came prepared. In less than ten minutes, most of those taken up getting through the crowds, the five were in club clothes with very different hair. In less than fifteen, they had met up with their prearranged dates, broken the news to Kacey's date that she wouldn't be coming, after all, and began exfiltrating in pairs mixed in with groups.
The dates, hired from an escort service and told to look like real dates—a not uncommon request—were happy to get paid their full fees for simply delivering each team member to a motorcycle at various locations. Smaller and more agile than a car, bikes could shake anything they could outrun, which in this case was damned near everything.<
br />
A nice game of drunkard's walk later, the cycles went into the back of a semi for later retrieval, and five nondescript people piled into a middle-aged minivan and took off for home. The ride was silent and sober. They'd lost one of the family. That they'd exchanged a seasoned professional for a brainless wife-beater didn't come into it. Every last killer of the Maise family had to die. Any time they went out, all of them knew they might not come back. Kacey had died taking care of business. Sooner or later, each of them expected to do the same. It was an hour before Stephanie finally gave in to the silence and dialed up a song off the current cube. Whether horses drank beer or not, the song felt right. Nobody had whiskey, which was a damned shame. The team stopped at a liquor store just off the interstate and fixed that problem; they hit repeat a lot on the way home.
Shane Gilbert didn't complain about having to be the sober driver in a car full of drunks. It wasn't the night for complaining. He just grunted at the bottle of Bushmills Black they'd put aside for later, five brand new glasses clicking lightly in a brown paper bag. It must have cost a fortune, but who gave a fuck?
Pinky Maise looked down at the claymore mine Lish Mortenson, whom he'd been told to just call Lish, had just planted and restrained a groan. The grass around it was bent every which way and it was sitting right out visible, with a bare handful of grass scattered casually over the top.
"Aren't we supposed to camouflage them?" he asked her.
"Oh, the snow tonight will cover that right up," she said.
"What if it melts?" he asked.
She sighed like an adult faced with a child who was at the age to ask questions about everything. Pinky mentally acknowledged that he was at that age, but that didn't mean the questions weren't sometimes important. Unfortunately, Lish had the brains of a frog.
