Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  The other reason for her change of pastime had been her shifting body. She had been something of a late developer, always pretty, but slow to get going, and then she had shot up, developing long legs and a respectable bust. The combination had thrown her balance off in ways she had found discouraging at the time. Combined with her desire to read physics books, gymnastics had taken the hit. She was still fit, still pretty. Some had said she was beautiful though she thought her jawline and nose were too long, her features too angular. She also considered her hair uninteresting. It was long and a slightly red shade of brown. She generally kept it pulled back into a ponytail, out of her way. She had had brown eyes with a rather exotic tilt to them, but no one looked at the angles of her eyes as exotic now. She had not had a date in six months.

  Sinking her drink in one go, Annette got to her feet and started for the exit. Her path took her around the dance floor and past some tables hidden away under the mezzanine and in perpetual semi-darkness. Her eyes turned the gloom into little more than an inconvenience, even through her shades, and it was as she walked past one of the tables that she heard someone talking.

  ‘…crazy sheep logos all over. I’m telling you, the Insurgency is all over the old docks in Tacoma.’

  Annette kept walking, but she filed the comment away. A silent command brought up a map display of Utopia City and she was examining it when she heard another voice, louder, and apparently calling out in her direction. ‘Hey, babe, you going so soon? Why don’t you stay and have a dr–’ The suggestion cut off in a strangling sound as Annette turned on her heel, pulled off her glasses, and fixed the clubber with a blank stare. He opened his mouth, readying some dumb excuse or other.

  ‘Just… don’t. Don’t say whatever fatuous thing is floating into your head or I swear I will shoot you in the face.’ Annette turned, pushing her glasses back on and stalking away from the recoiling, more or less terrified man. Could this night get any better?

  25/10/83.

  Pain seared through Annette’s skull like a burning railroad spike. She fumbled blindly for the injector on her nightstand, found it, and jabbed it into her shoulder. Then she lay there and whimpered until she could no longer feel anything. The drug killed the pain, but it had the slight disadvantage of effectively shutting down her sense of touch along with her pain receptors.

  She was on an array of drugs for the attacks. That was the emergency one, for when it came on at night. During the day, she could take a pill which increased her tolerance to pain, and that turned the agony into something bearable if it came while she was awake, and then there was another pill she could take to drown it further, but those tended to make her drowsy pretty much all the time and she did not like taking them. Then again, being unable to feel anything was hardly much better…

  With her vision stabilised enough for her to make out her computer displays, she called up a diagnostic. Protein build-up around the optic nerve to her right eye. Her body, it seemed, did not like synthetic implants. She had a good immune system. Too good. Part of her cybernetics package was a nanomachine colony in her blood which had been designed to manage her healing process, accelerating it some. Her body could repair itself at least twice as fast as a typical human, but the colony was spending far too much of its time locating and dissolving her immune system’s attempts to neutralise the foreign material in her body.

  A thought brought up the public instant messaging system and, sure enough, Mariel was awake and online. At three in the morning, Mariel was awake and using the net, but then Mariel often was. Annette selected her friend from the list and thought at the messaging app.

  ‘Hey, Mar. Burning it at both ends?’

  Mariel: Aren’t I always? Another headache?

  ‘Another headache, yeah. They’re not going to go away until I get this rejection problem sorted out.’

  Mariel: Did you check out those papers I found on neutral coatings?

  ‘I checked them. I need to look into getting the nanites to resurface my implants. What are you up to?’

  Mariel: Cruising the net, seeing what’s out there.

  Mariel was a consummate mistress of computers and networking. She had helped Annette with the software for her system. In fact, Mariel had written the entire AI behind the user interface. She claimed the publicly available ones were just not up to the task. Being stuck in a wheelchair with nothing to keep her occupied apart from the net, what she got up to sometimes worried Annette quite a lot.

  ‘You’re not looking in places you shouldn’t, are you? The UDF is–’

  Mariel: There’s plenty to look at in public servers without digging around private ones. That’s where I found those articles on cybernetic rejection for you. I know what I’m doing, Annette.

  ‘Okay. I should try to get back to sleep while the painkiller is still working.’

  Mariel: Night, Net.

  Annette giggled at the nickname; Mariel loved that particular shortening of Annette’s name and she was the only person Annette allowed to shorten her name at all. ‘Goodnight, Mar.’

  Closing all the windows in her vision field, Annette turned onto her side and closed her eyes.

  ~~~

  Mariel Edmonton closed the chat window to Annette and turned to another open one. She typed: Another headache. Her implants are amazing, but they’re going to kill her if she doesn’t find a solution.

  The person on the other end of the second window was not an entirely known entity, but she had expressed interest in Annette’s status.

  FallenAngel: She’s resourceful and you’ve helped. I’m sure she’ll be okay. You’re sure you’re willing to continue the project?

  They always referred to it as ‘the project’ on IM. You never knew who might be monitoring. Or, to be more precise, you had a damn good idea who and that they almost certainly were. Yes. I’ll start tomorrow.

  FallenAngel: Be careful.

  Mariel smiled. I’m always careful.

  ~~~

  26/10/83.

  Maybe it was not the best plan she had ever formulated, but it was a plan and she was going to go through with it. There were not actually that many buildings in the old docks, but there were a lot of containers, all stacked in rows where they had been left when the plagues had taken out so much of the world’s population. Doctor White had saved as many as he could from the war of diseases and the wars of guns which had come after; Annette could not understand why the Insurgency wanted to bring down a man like that, but there it was.

  She had already found three of the ‘sheep’ graffiti. She had never seen a sheep in person, but she was fairly certain that the artist had been going for a stylised representation. That or he had never even seen a picture of a sheep. Whatever, each had come with a different slogan. The most obvious of those had been ‘Down with White!’ There had also been ‘Wake up, Sheep!’ and, more perplexingly, ‘Aries Has You!’ Annette was not sure what that last one was referring to and she was out of range of any of the city’s wireless networks to run a query. She seemed to be in the right place, however.

  Reaching back, Annette felt her pistols slapped into her palms by her arming pod and ran diagnostic checks. Everything came back green. Time for some action. She started deeper into the container park.

  The thought had occurred that she maybe should have dressed more appropriately. She had gone for basic black, a bodysuit she had bought for a costume party in university, and sneakers. Body armour might have been an idea. She had defences, but if it came down to close combat, she was going to be dodging. Still, if it came down to close combat, she had done something wrong. Her aim was to take down anyone she met before they could fight back. Her pistols were loaded with cryogenic rounds since she wanted them down, but not dead. The cryo rounds could kill someone – they were just less likely to than kinetic penetrators. Annette was rather proud of the chemistry behind the cryo warheads.

  Infrared was, sadly, of little use. The big containers would block body heat and they were at ambient te
mperature. There was no moon. Thankfully, Annette’s eyes worked well at very low light levels. She worked her way through the rows of containers slowly, being careful to make as little noise as possible. That was how she made out the voices on the other side of one of the stacks.

  ‘Neither of you were followed?’ A woman’s voice which Annette had the weirdest feeling she knew, though it sounded as though it was muffled by something.

  ‘No one follows me.’ A young man, brash and overconfident.

  ‘You’re not invisible.’

  ‘I wasn’t followed, Angel. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I don’t believe anyone was following me either.’ Another woman, this one younger than the one called Angel.

  ‘Good,’ Angel said. ‘Reports?’

  ‘Reconnaissance is going pretty well,’ the male said. ‘It’s going to take a few more trips to be sure of the way in, but… I’m confident.’

  ‘I am less confident,’ the female said. ‘We have yet to find a way through the main security barriers that will not raise alarms across the entire facility.’

  Well, they certainly sounded like they were Insurgency operatives. They were talking about some sort of attack on a secure facility. Annette almost giggled at the thought. Why did they even bother to try? Not one of their attacks had succeeded since Annette had started paying attention to the news. After a decade or more, you would think they would give up…

  ‘We’ll get in,’ the male said, his confidence showing. ‘We got into the power plant in May, didn’t we?’

  ‘Not that anyone was told about it,’ the female replied. ‘It’s discouraging, Angel. Their media management is too good.’

  ‘Don’t give up, Cheetah,’ Angel said. ‘This strike is important. If we can eliminate their supplies for just a week, we can turn thousands.’

  So, the younger woman was Cheetah, and Annette had heard enough. These three needed to go down. There was a gap in the containers about ten metres ahead of her, so she headed for that. It was a little narrower than she might have liked, but she slipped through and emerged on the other side, checking down the row to be sure her targets were still there.

  Two things hit her at the same time and neither seemed especially good. The trio had gone quiet. In fact, now she thought about it, she had not heard their voices for the last several seconds but had assumed that the distance was cutting out the sound. Then there was the fact that she could only see two of the three. The two women were there, but not the man. Well, two was better than none. Annette stepped clear of the containers and raised her pistols.

  Something very solid and fairly heavy slammed into the back of Annette’s head. She saw stars and the ground rushing toward her face, but all she could think was that this was not a great way to demonstrate how she could fight the Insurgency.

  ‘You want me to slit her throat?’ The male’s voice. It sounded really far away.

  ‘No, Ghost.’ That was Angel. ‘Not this one.’

  ‘She’s SAU! She’ll–’

  ‘Does she really look like SAU to you? Have you ever seen an SAU operative work alone? No. We’ll put her out and take her somewhere she’ll be found. If you would stop tagging things in our meeting areas, we wouldn’t have problems like this.’ Something cold was pressed against Annette’s neck and there was a sharp hiss. ‘Now, I’ll take care of…’

  The voices drifted away into oblivion along with Annette’s conscious mind.

  ~~~

  Her father, of course, went ballistic. ‘What were you thinking of, Annette?! These people are killers! Murderers! You’ve no training. No idea what–’

  ‘So you do agree I should join the SAU,’ Annette interjected. ‘I thought it would take way more persuasion.’

  ‘I did not say that. I don’t want you out there. You could have been killed!’

  ‘But I wasn’t.’

  ‘You could have been.’

  ‘Then let me join the SAU so I’ll have training and backup.’

  Charles frowned at his daughter, sitting there on an emergency room gurney with an ice pack pressed to the back of her skull. ‘You get this side of your personality from your mother,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m determined. It’s not a bad trait.’

  ‘It can be… Very well, I’ll speak to Latham and see when the next induction course is happening.’

  Annette grinned. ‘Thank you. I’m going to make myself some armour. I do learn from my mistakes.’

  ‘And that is something you do not get from your mother.’

  27/10/83.

  Annette had a headache in the morning, but it was the result of getting hit in the head, not anything to do with her implants. That made her unaccountably happy as she swallowed a pill, which would not make her drowsy or numb, and got on with the tasks of the day.

  This included checking her mail and there was a surprise waiting in her mailbox. The message had no originating address and the backtrace of relays looked suspiciously false. That kind of thing was supposed to be impossible, but there it was. She ran a virus checker on it and got back a report indicating that it was plain text, no attachments, no danger. She opened it and found a single line of text.

  Are you sure about the people you are fighting for?

  Frowning, Annette read the line twice and then deleted the message. Yes, she was sure. Quite sure. Except…

  Pulling up a search window, Annette ran a query for issues with the power grid in May. The top line gave her what she wanted. There had been a coolant issue with one of the fusion reactors in Tacoma in May. Three engineers had been commended for their quick thinking by Doctor White himself. Their actions had prevented a potentially dangerous incident, though there had been problems with supply in the region for a week.

  But the conversation she had overheard implied that the Insurgency was responsible. They had no reason to lie. They had not known anyone else was listening. Annette shrugged: insurgents were deluded at the best of times.

  Annette trashed the query results and pulled up a design app she had used before. She would get the basic design down and then consider materials. The bodysuit was a good basic idea, but maybe if she could make it up with a monocrystalline sublayer…

  2/11/83.

  There were Inquisitors lining the entrance hall of the White Tower complex, but Annette had expected that. Perhaps not so many of them, but she had expected them. They watched everyone entering the building, paying particular attention to the ones heading toward the large sign which proclaimed that UDFSAU induction was to be found beyond it. Inquisitors were generally more feared than any other type of cyborg, but so long as you did nothing wrong, you had nothing to fear from them.

  Still, Annette kept her head down and walked through to the reception desk to present her ID card. The reception officer raised an eyebrow when he saw the result of the ID check, which made Annette wonder what he was seeing.

  ‘You’re Charles Barrington’s daughter?’ the man asked.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Annette replied. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Not at all. You’re flagged for immediate progression to basic training. Down the corridor, last door on the right.’

  Annette took her ID back and set off in the direction he had indicated. She scanned around the others in the room as she went and realised that there were no obvious cyborgs among them. These were citizens coming in to volunteer for the SAU. If accepted, they would progress on to evaluation and then surgery for whatever role the UDF felt suited them. Annette had skipped that phase by putting in the cyborg parts herself.

  There were already people in the room she had been sent to. Six people, all cyborgs of one form or another. There were four standard SAU builds, though Annette figured they might add a fifth if her own system worked well in combat. In the room, there were examples of each: two strength-enhanced Tanks, two weapon-equipped Gunners, a Speeder with his strangely designed digitigrade legs, and an Infiltrator. The last was a slim girl, diff
icult to tell from a normal human, though Annette’s enhanced vision showed her synthetic eyes by the variation in temperature.

  Several of them looked at Annette as she walked in, probably wondering what an Infiltrator was doing in body armour and carrying a pair of pistols. Annette slipped her shades off and the looks of mild confusion continued. She figured she was going to get a lot of that, but the induction officer arrived right behind her so no one got a chance to ask her anything.

  ‘Right, settle down,’ the officer said, and Annette quickly took a seat behind everyone else. The room was far larger than it needed to be for the group. ‘I’m Sergeant Hobbs and I have the unfortunate duty of briefing you on the UDF’s Special Actions Unit, which you are joining, and making sure you’ve filled in all the appropriate forms.’ He dropped a bundle of papers on one of the desks. ‘Hand them out. Make sure everyone gets a copy. There should be a pen on everyone’s desk. Don’t leave with it.’

  Annette leaned across to the next desk and picked up the pen from there. That was at least one person who had not listened.

  ‘While you’re filling in the forms,’ Hobbs went on, ‘I’ll be telling you what’s going to happen to you next. With one exception, you’ve all been through preselection and cybernetic enhancement. The exception is at the back there. She had the work done herself. Once we have all the pertinent details on those forms and you’ve had your basic briefing, you’ll be driven out to Camp Brinnon. That’s the main UDF training centre on the edge of the beautiful and panoramic Olympic range. There you will enjoy the fresh air, the fantastic vistas, the ten-mile runs, and the sound of live ammunition being fired at your head.’

  The man sitting in front of Annette and, thankfully, to her right chuckled at the ‘joke.’ She was thankful he was not right in front of her because he was well over two metres tall and she doubted that she could have wrapped her arms around his chest. And that was before they had grafted on fully cybernetic limbs and a reinforced skeleton. The chuckle sounded as though it had begun somewhere five miles below him and rumbled its way up to the surface.