Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  A nearby worker heard the clatter of our boots on the metal and poked his head around the corner to see what was going on.

  “Got a real rust problem up here,” Muck said. “It’s plugging up some of the irrigation nozzles.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the worker said. “When you’re done here, you should head down over to seedlings. They could use some help with the nozzles there too.”

  “Will do,” Muck replied cheerfully, and reached up through the spray to grasp the nozzle.

  What I found wasn’t an infonet, so it took me a minute to figure out how to ride the connections from the spray nozzles back to whatever was controlling them. The connections were primitive, hardwired, one-way circuits that sent a binary impulse: water on or water off. The nozzles themselves were completely dumb, lacking any nanotech and unable to cycle feedback to the controlling system. It was a little bit like trying to swim upstream.

  In a hurricane.

  The security measures in this facility had been so inventive and sneaky, I admit I was feeling skittish. But I fought my way upstream until I encountered the control unit.

  It was incredibly primitive, reminiscent of human processors before the Vmog had provided advanced nanotech and communications packages. There was a simplistic language based entirely on binary code, and orderly storage slots for a shockingly small amount of data. The entire setup was so antique, I don’t think it could have functioned on a modern infonet, even if one had been present in this room. I felt more stupid with every second I was in contact with it. I also couldn’t imagine why anyone would have chosen it to automate their sprinklers. Even that task stretched the processing power of the system. It was almost as if the sprinklers were an afterthought . . . or a cover-up.

  I turned my attention to the storage space and those orderly packets of data. I started to rifle through them, checking dates of last access, peeking inside to see what was what. The first four seemed like either gibberish, or some kind of encryption that shouldn’t have existed on such an antique system. When I opened the fifth one, that’s when the security protocol struck.

  Multiple hostile lines of code suddenly appeared in all directions, closing in on me from the binary processing language of the system. This wasn’t just attempting to shred me or overwhelm my syntaxes . . .this was an attempt to change me, rewrite my programming in its own ancient language of finite ones and zeroes.

  I grabbed up the four packets I’d opened and fled back along the connection. The virus chased me.

  It was fast. Faster than I was in this tarry, slow-as-molasses system. Fast and hungry. I had been somewhat ready for an attack, so I was pretty quick off the mark to start my retreat, but this ancient virus worked down along the primitive lines of the sprinkler command network faster than I could. I felt it start to morph some of my trailing lines of code, the ones I’d woven as last-minute, last-ditch defenses before reaching the actual programming that made me, me.

  I slammed back into Muck’s body so hard that he flinched, making him slip and lose his footing on the steel table.

  We came down hard, landing badly on our right ankle and knee and banging our skull on the next table over. Someone somewhere let out a shout, and we heard running feet as they came to investigate.

  “Up,” I whispered in Muck’s head. “Please, please get up. We need to get out of here! Don’t touch anything!”

  Muck groaned, rolled over onto his good side to try and struggle to his feet.

  Hands appeared from nowhere and grabbed us under the shoulders, trying to help us up. Somewhere high above, a light started to flash, and the wavering wail of a klaxon began.

  “Are you all right, buddy?” the worker asked.

  “Just slipped,” Muck said. “Stupid me. I shoulda gotten a ladder instead of climbing the table.”

  “Yeah, well, better get back to your reporting station,” the worker said, jabbing a thumb overhead at the flashing lights. “There’s a general alert. Don’t be caught out, even for a legitimate reason.”

  “Yeah,” Muck said. “Good call. Thanks for the help.”

  “Be more careful,” the worker admonished, and then turned to leave. With one hand pressed to our head, Muck followed him toward the door we’d entered.

  “Not that way,” I said, trying to pull myself together. “Off to the left, there’s an exterior door. The alarm is already sounding. If anyone notices . . .well . . . maybe janitorial services meet outside during . . . whatever this is?”

  Muck sent a pulse of silent laughter my way and rubbed at our aching skull. But he turned left.

  Ten more steps, and we exited the humid murk of the greenhouse and stepped back into the blasting desert heat.

  * * *

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy.

  The minute we stepped out of the building, someone shouted at us to stop and identify ourselves. Muck looked up to see a uniformed security guard bearing down on us with an officious look and hefting a baton.

  “Stop right there! This is a general alert. Where are you going?”

  “Uh . . . I’m new. First day. Janitorial staff,” Muck said, spreading his hands wide and giving a shrug. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”

  The guard, whose face and bald head were flushed red and shiny with sweat, was having none of it. He stomped up to us, waving his baton threateningly, creating a crackle of displaced air as sparks played around the head of the thing.

  “Give me your badge,” the guard demanded.

  “Yeah, just a second,” Muck said, he started to pat his chest, as if he were trying to find it in a pocket somewhere. I felt him start to tense prior to movement, and I began dumping adrenaline into his system in response.

  “Stunstick!” I said. “Watch the end of it.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” I could feel cold irony in his mental response, but little else. He was in the zone.

  “I’ll be able to short it if he tags you with it, but it’ll still stun you.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” he repeated, waiting for the guard to attack. The guard pulled his arm back, preparing a swing, and we struck.

  Muck brought our left arm up to block the guard’s baton hand at the wrist and struck out with the closed right. Like a viper striking, our fist hammered the guard three times in rapid succession: nose, throat, belly. The guard doubled over coughing as we spun into the baton arm and locked the offending wrist in a hold, peeling the guard’s fingers back far enough to free the stunstick from his suddenly nerveless grip.

  “Sorry about this, buddy,” Muck said to the gasping guard. We tapped him at the base of the skull with the live end of the baton, and the gasping stopped as the guard went limp. He slumped to the ground in a pile. Muck nudged him over with the toe of our boot.

  “He’s alive,” I said, zooming the magnification in on our eyes until we could see the faint flutter of the carotid pulse. “We should go.”

  “Just a second,” Muck muttered. He bent and began digging through the guard’s shirt pockets.

  “What are you doing? There are others coming!” I didn’t know that to be true, but I figured it was, based on the blaring alarms that continued to blast our ears.

  “Just in case . . . aha! Got it!” He pulled another one of those stupid neck lanyards from beneath the guard’s shirt collar. A small card with a metal chip embedded in it hung from the hasp. One yank and the lanyard snapped open at the closure underneath the guard’s head.

  “Like we are ever coming back here!” I said. “Let’s go! Now!”

  Sure enough, we were out of time. We started to run toward the main road just as another trio of uniformed men rounded the corner of the building.

  “Hey! Stop!” one of them shouted, and an instant later, something whizz-cracked through the air not far from our head. We flinched and began running harder. A turn in the road beckoned, along wit
h what looked like a mud-brick wall surrounding a small garden outside a hab. Muck swerved toward this as another projectile snapped through the air near us.

  “Guess they’re not interested in merely stunning us anymore! We really pissed them off!”

  “Yeah, well, it might have something to do with the data packets I lifted,” I said as we rounded the turn.

  “You got something, then?” he asked between breaths.

  “Yeah, but it’s all gibberish to me right now, and it may be incomplete. I won’t know till it’s decrypted, and that’s going to take a long time.”

  Another shot rang out, the projectile exploding a potted plant in a geyser of soil and clay.

  “We’ll check it out when we’re not running for our lives.”

  “Good call.”

  We took a hard right to cut back toward the souk and the Dugran shuttle plinth.

  “It’s nearly noon,” Muck thought at me, saving his breath. The market should be nice and full of milling bodies. If we can get lost in the crowd, maybe we can slip in with the Brethren and get off-world before anyone notices. I don’t think we’re going to find anything else here on Sagran IV. Otherwise . . .”

  “Otherwise we try and get back to Colim’s underground camp without him?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Never thought I’d say this, but I like the Brethren option better . . .” I trailed off. The simple truth was that I didn’t want to go back down to the place where I’d watched an old friend die and done nothing. I just wasn’t ready to deal with that. Maybe I never would be.

  “Me too,” Muck said, and I could tell that he was thinking along similar lines. I didn’t pry, though. Neither did he. Just as well, because we were still trying to evade the guards from the lab.

  The streets weren’t nearly as full as they had been earlier in the morning. We compensated for the lack of traffic cover by winding through the habitation blocks, keeping our general direction headed toward the souk. While Muck ran, I took the opportunity to feel the movements of his body and accustom myself further to its bulk, power, and fuel requirements.

  Our boots crunched on the gravel paths, skidding slightly in the turns due to the dust coating everything. Lactic acid had begun to pool in some of our muscle groups, and I smoothed it away and broke it down with a thought. The noon air beat at us like a hammer, the light painting everything a pain-soaked white. Sweat slid down our skin, into the corner of our eyes, making them burn from the salt.

  We ran until we could hear the dull roar of hundreds of voices engaged in conversation and haggling. We fetched up against another mud-brick wall and stopped to catch our breath for a moment before merging smoothly with the crowd. As before, Muck hunched to disguise his height, and as soon as possible, swiped a woman’s shawl from a display in front of one of the first booths.

  “Larceny now?” I asked.

  “We survive and I’ll pay them back,” he said, swirling the shawl up into a scarf and wrapping it loosely around his shoulders and throat in the style of many of the men in the marketplace. “But I’d rather not be captured just now. Not after they’ve shown they’re willing to shoot us.”

  “I’m with you,” I said. “Also . . . some of your Brethren are just up ahead.”

  “Not my Brethren, not anymore.”

  I magnified our vision again so that he could see the Speaker’s telltale red scarf as she wove her way through the thicker crowd near the center of the souk. We followed, Muck careful not to jostle anyone enough to cause a scene. It was rather impressive.

  “Crowd control is usually about getting into position to effect arrests without pissing everyone off.”

  I sent a nod to him so as not to elicit a verbal response. We were too close to the Speaker and her escort for that to be completely safe.

  “Speaker,” Muck said softly as he came up behind her. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need your help.”

  “Traveler Muck,” she said, turning to him with a slight smile. “Tell me why I’m not surprised.”

  “There are guards from the DPAPL lab chasing me. They were shooting. I need to disappear.”

  “Just tell them everything, why don’t you?” I said, annoyed that he would supply her with anything at all.

  “Very well,” she said. “Stay with me.”

  She snapped out orders under her breath to the man next to her. I didn’t get our hearing augmented in time to decipher her words. The tall Brother nodded and turned to walk away. Just as the first man disappeared into the crowd, four more of the Brethren filtered out of it. One of them met our eyes, and casually reached under his jacket.

  “Can you use this?” he asked, and withdrew a VT-9, a small but powerful directed-energy weapon. Probably surplus from the war, I guessed. An older model, but one both Muck and I knew well.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Muck said, and took the weapon. The Brother gave him another nod and fell into step with us.

  “These four will see us to the transport, traveler,” the Speaker said. “Stay with them. We will split into several groups, in order to be harder to track. Keep your head down and try to keep up.”

  “Yes, Speaker,” he said.

  I bristled at the woman’s imperious tone. Did she think this our first party?

  “She’s just used to commanding,” Muck thought at me. “Her people trust her. Look how quickly they obey her orders. She’s a good leader, Angel. That’s rare these days.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not her soldier or servant to order around, and neither are you.”

  “No, but she’s doing us a favor. Take it easy, please?”

  I said nothing, certain he could feel my discontent. I didn’t like anything about this situation. Stealth was one thing. Hiding in plain sight another . . . but blending in with a crowd of unconnected civilians? That felt a little too much like using human shields. Never mind that I didn’t particularly like the shields. It just didn’t feel right.

  “If they’re shields, they’re ones with significant offensive capability,” Muck said as we started moving through the growing crowd once again. He turned and looked pointedly at our escort. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it, but Muck was right. Everyone was carrying some kind of weapon. Strangely enough, given their abhorrence of certain technologies, the weapons were advanced beam weapons of one kind or another.

  Muck turned and glanced at someone in the crowd a few meters away.

  It was another Templar, who met Muck’s eyes briefly and then continued scanning the crowd and buildings around him. A moment later I picked out another woman doing the same. I recognized drilled habit from their movements but wondered why they would have experience with such scenarios.

  “They’ve probably had to do this a few times.”

  “What? Do the Brethren have some kind of religious rite called ‘Extract the Pain-in-the-Ass Operative Who Can’t Handle His Own Shit’?”

  “Something like that,” Muck said, his tone soaked in humor at my aggrieved manner. “Preparedness and self-sufficiency are cornerstones of their beliefs. As are teamwork and protecting one another. The Brethren aren’t well received everywhere. They’re probably just adapting preexisting plans for extracting themselves.”

  “What a miserable way to live,” I said.

  “Not miserable, empowering.”

  “What—”

  The whizz-crack of incoming rounds shattered the air.

  Without thinking, I slammed into override and threw our ungainly body into the Speaker’s, toppling her to the ground just as more projectiles pierced the space we’d been occupying. Someone screamed, and the crowd around us started to surge in all directions at once.

  Strong hands gripped our shoulders and hauled us up as I backed out of the override protocols and dumped adrenaline into our system.

 
“Thanks,” Muck said as he came up. With the extra strength I was pouring into him, he bent and lifted the Speaker off the ground, handing her bodily to one of her security detail. “The shots came from the north. Take the Speaker to the plinth. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Our orders are to protect you,” the Brethren said.

  “Then keep up!” Muck demanded and took off into the crowd. This time, no one worried about jostling anyone, but merely shoved through the press of panicked bodies toward the source of the projectile fire.

  “Go high,” I said, highlighting a balcony within reach that would serve to let us climb to the rooftops of habs and souk booths. “Those trajectories were almost level. See if you can get the drop on them. Literally.”

  Muck responded by pounding toward the balcony, which hung about five meters in the air. No problem. I gave him another boost as he jumped.

  Muck sailed through the air, hands gripping the rail and pulling us up and over to land on the dry, dusty wood with a thump.

  As he stood and looked around, I jacked his mental processes so that time would seem to slow. The dilation effect was temporary, could be disorienting to the uninitiated, and cost a great deal on the back end, but Muck picked up on what I was doing right away and went with it.

  “There. To the left of the fountain,” I said, zooming our vision in on one man in a lab guard uniform. “And there, under the striped awning. Four more coming down the western cross street . . . and our shooter is there. The woman with the braid down her back.”

  “Got her,” Muck said, and hopped us up onto the roofline of the building. The surface was slick with more powdery dust, and we slipped once. But we were able to get moving toward the landing plinth, and that was the important thing.

  “Keep an eye on the shooter,” Muck said.

  “I can only see what you can see, but I’ll do my best,” I replied tartly, tracking the sniper using the rest of his senses.

  “Good enough,” he grunted. Then he let out a long, strange whistle: four notes, the first three descending in pitch, the last one jumping back up. As I continued scanning the crowd for the guards’ movements, the heads of several Brethren popped up to look our way.