Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Take it,’ Kenya replied.

  Annette swung out into the aisle, one of her pistols swinging around to line up the shot. And that was when something slammed into her side, throwing her aim off and making a lot of noise, but doing no damage through her suit.

  ‘Run, Ghost!’ Annette’s attacker yelled before twisting through a leaping turn and bolting off across the factory floor.

  Ghost. Annette knew the name from her first abortive attempt at fighting insurgents. That meant that the other one, now fleeing as fast as her cybernetic legs could carry her, was Cheetah. Annette glanced back, but the elusive Ghost had vanished.

  ‘I see him,’ Kenya’s voice said in Annette’s head. ‘Get the other one.’

  It seemed like an unlikely option, but Annette ran after Cheetah, catching a glimpse of her as she jinked right between a pair of machines. The girl definitely had the full SAU Speeder package, including enhanced balance and jumping capability. Annette took a fast turn right and caught sight of her quarry running down the next aisle. Target lock and fire. The cryo round sped after its target even as Annette continued to run after Cheetah, but then the Speeder dodged left and Annette lost sight of her. A command drove the rocket round into the floor as Annette followed Cheetah just in time to see her slam a door open and rush outside.

  Six valuable seconds passed before Annette made it to the door, pushed through, and spotted Cheetah again. She lifted her pistol. Range ninety-one metres, estimated speed twelve point eight metres per second. Fire. Annette watched the first bullet for a fraction of a second and then launched a second. Both smacked into Cheetah’s back and immediately burst, spreading a white fluid from their points of impact. As she turned the corner of the building, Cheetah was already slowing as the cold bit into her.

  ‘Annette!’ The voice in her head was urgent: Kenya was in trouble.

  Ignoring the fleeing Cheetah, Annette ducked back inside and dashed across the machine room in the direction she hoped she would find Kenya. ‘I’m coming. Hold on.’

  There was no reply, but Annette spotted them a second later. Kenya was on the ground, backed against a machine of some kind. Ghost was advancing on her with a large knife in his hand. Annette raised her pistol and fired even before she had taken in the range. The tiny rocket made barely any sound and that was drowned out by the machinery. It caught Ghost in the side and he flinched at the impact. The freezing fluid began to spread, but, to Annette’s eyes, it looked sluggish: his dermal armour, the same as Kenya’s, was slowing the heat transfer. Annette reached back to swap her load to kinetic rounds, but Ghost had, apparently, guessed her next move. He bolted and all Annette could do was run to Kenya and hope she might get a shot before the Infiltrator was too well hidden.

  No such luck, but Annette forgot all about the man as soon as she saw Kenya. There were two deep slashes in her neck and chest, and from the way the blood was pooling behind her, there was a wound in her back too.

  ‘He got… behind me,’ Kenya said as Annette grabbed for the grenade her pack was handing her.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ Annette said. ‘This’ll have you on your feet in no time.’

  ‘St-stabbed me in the back. Knife… knife cut through… through me like–’

  ‘I said shut up, idiot,’ Annette told her as the grenade burst, spreading green dust over both of them.

  ‘You get… get the other?’

  ‘Yes, I got her. Damn it, girl, we normally can’t get you to say more than two words!’

  ‘Okay… okay… Gonna pass out now.’ Kenya’s eyes closed and her body relaxed entirely, slipping onto her side on the concrete floor.

  Annette checked her pulse, weak but there, and then the wound on her back which looked nasty but was already starting to knit together under the ministrations of the tiny medics. ‘Hold on, Kenya,’ Annette whispered and then, because there were still probably bombs in the building, she hoisted Kenya over her shoulder and started for the back door Cheetah had used.

  She activated her radio as she went. ‘Lieutenant, this is Annette Barrington. I’ve got one of ours down and there are explosive devices in here. We’re going to need ordnance disposal.’

  ‘What about the saboteur?’ the lieutenant asked in reply.

  ‘There were two. I think I got one, but the other may have got away.’

  ‘Let’s hope we can mop up this lot and get the bombs cleared then.’

  Annette cut the connection and continued moving as fast as she could toward the door. ‘Damn, girl, you are heavier than you look,’ she muttered. ‘Of course, if I’d had to do this with Cran…’

  She finally made it to the door, pushed through it, turned, and came to a sudden stop. Her left arm, the free one, came up automatically and she prepared to fire, zooming in to identify her targets. There was a heat source with little in the way of visible body, and that had to be Ghost, but there was a second figure, a far more visible one. As Annette caught sight of Ghost’s companion, her finger froze on the trigger. A tall woman with long auburn hair and dusky skin. Brown eyes, angular features Annette had not seen in years.

  ‘Mom?’ Annette said, knowing she would not be heard.

  Patricia Barrington smiled sadly at her daughter, apparently confident that the expression would be seen, and then she raised her hand. Annette saw the small box in it and worked out what was about to happen just before Patricia pressed the firing button. Behind Annette, the building shook as the bombs Ghost had planted detonated. The door blew out, tossing Annette to the ground, desperately trying to avoid dropping Kenya on her head.

  By the time Annette got herself together and looked around, there was no sign of either Ghost or her mother.

  ~~~

  They had found Cheetah not far around the corner of the building while servitor robots set about the process of putting out fires in the Nutopium plant and disposing of the bodies of the Zeroes. To Annette’s annoyance, the Speeder was dead. The cold had gone too far and her heart had stopped, and Annette had kicked herself for using two rounds when one would probably have done.

  Kenya had been more or less fine by the time the paramedics got to checking her, but the team had insisted that she go to hospital. Annette had suggested that Kenya’s cybernetics might need checking out, which was what had finally pushed the Infiltrator into going along with it, and Cranfield had gone along in the ambulance with her, leaving Annette and Baltry to take care of the final parts of the operation at the plant.

  And then Annette had gone home to lie in a hot bath and contemplate the niggling something which had been gnawing away at her since she had seen Kenya lying there in a pool of blood.

  Routinely, Annette recorded everything that happened on their operations and she lay in the steaming water replaying everything from shooting at Cheetah through to picking up Kenya. She had been through the entire sequence five times before she noticed the panel on the machine Kenya had been leaning against. She had passed it on the way to check her friend’s wounds and ignored it completely. Her implants had, however, recorded it and now she could check it out at her leisure. Stepping through the frames, she found the best image of it and the thing which had caught her attention and then wafted away when she had seen Kenya properly.

  The panel seemed to be a flow-control display. Three feeds were being fed into the machine where what Annette assumed were ingredients for Nutopium were mixed. One of those ingredients was labelled ‘Aries-07B.’

  Aries has you. Aries was a component of Nutopium.

  On the off-chance, Annette opened a window and ran a search query for ‘aries.’ She got back a lot of entries for an archaic form of fortune telling known as ‘astrology.’ Then there was the constellation of Aries in astronomy, Aries the Ram. Which was interesting and led her to look up ‘sheep.’ The taxonomic binomial name for sheep was Ovis aries. Another sheep reference then, but what did the stuff do?

  Annette ran the recorded sensory data through, pausing on the image of her mother holding the detonator. S
he looked sad, regretful, but there she was blowing up a drinks factory. It came to Annette that this was who ‘Angel’ was. Back at the beginning when she had found Ghost, Cheetah, and Angel discussing getting into some facility or other, they had been talking about the Nutopium plant, and Annette had been listening to her mother planning an act of terrorism. It had been her mother who had stopped Ghost from killing her that night!

  Climbing out of the bath, her head buzzing, Annette reached for a towel. She would go to bed and try to get some sleep. Sleep was probably the best thing for her right now.

  3/12/83.

  Annette lay in bed, wondering what had made her wake up. It was four in the morning, or just after, and her systems were detecting no rejection problems or other alerts which might have woken her. Something had. A sound? A feeling?

  Then she knew. Heat source. Arm. Holding– She rolled sideways just in time for the knife to slam into her mattress, tumbling to the floor in a flurry of duvet. She managed to struggle to her feet just in time to see Ghost yanking his blade free.

  ‘I can see you,’ Annette said. ‘There’s no point in the camouflage.’ He knew what he was doing: his skin was not entirely black, but patterned with blotches of dark grey to break up the lines. That did nothing for his body heat or his visibility in ultraviolet light.

  ‘You killed Cheetah,’ Ghost said.

  Annette backed up against the dresser behind her, the one with the brushed aluminium case on it. ‘That wasn’t my intention.’ Keep him talking. ‘I wanted to take her alive.’

  ‘I bet you think that’s better.’ He moved forward, onto the bed, his weight leaving obvious depressions in the mattress and his skin showing up quite obviously against the pale fabric.

  ‘Alive is better than dead.’ Annette eased the case open behind her, hoping he would not hear it.

  ‘Not when they get you into the re-education programme. You’ve seen them, some of them, down Below. Those are the failures.’ He raised his knife. Annette saw the sudden burst of heat as his muscles tensed to spring. ‘It doesn’t matter. Time to die, sheep.’

  Annette swept one of her pistols around from behind her back. ‘So not a sheep.’ She pulled the trigger and held it down until the magazine ran dry. High-density penetrators punched through Ghost’s synthetic skin and into the organs beneath. He fell back, the knife slipping from his fingers, but, by some form of miracle, he was still alive. Annette grabbed her second pistol and aimed it at his head. ‘Stay down,’ she said. ‘Just… stay where you are.’

  ‘Some… chance.’ Ghost, his skin fading into a normal flesh tone, reached out for his knife again.

  ‘Don’t,’ Annette said. ‘You don’t have to die.’

  ‘You… you or me, bitch.’

  Annette fired. Two three-round bursts punched into Ghost’s head, blasting bone fragments and grey matter over the bed. He stopped moving and Annette lowered her arm. There was blood everywhere, blood and the remains of something which had once been a living human.

  The lights suddenly going on came as something of a surprise even though her eyes adjusted seamlessly. Annette looked up to see her father standing in the bedroom door, a robe flapping around him over his pyjamas. He looked shocked, maybe more than she did.

  ‘He was an insurgent,’ Annette said, her voice sounding hollow. ‘His name was Ghost. I killed his friend this evening.’

  ‘Annette…’

  ‘Never mind, Poppa. Would you call the UDF? I…’ There was blood soaking into her mattress, darkening the sheet to a deep, wine colour. ‘I’m going to need to sleep somewhere else.’

  ~~~

  Sleep was not something which came easily. The UDF were gone by five thirty, but then Annette changed the sheets in the spare room, her brother’s old room, before climbing into bed. She could hear the apartment’s servitor robot at work cleaning up the mess in her own room, and she lay, staring up into the darkness, thinking.

  Ghost had implied that the wild, strikingly insane Zeroes they had encountered deep in the Below were some sort of failure of the re-education programme. There was not much known, outside of administrative circles, about what they did to turn aberrant citizens into normal ones. Now Annette thought about it, normal was not quite the right term for the one and only person she had ever met who had undergone the process. A student at the university with some… unusual views had vanished for about a month. When they returned, they had been a different person, fiercely loyal to Doctor White and the city, but somehow… empty. Their grades had fallen and, a couple of months later, they had left to join the SAU.

  Insurgents, it seemed, would rather die than be re-educated. Well, given their beliefs, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable reaction. They might be insane… Might be. They might be insane, but there was a rational core to their insanity. She could see it, see how they would come to believe it. They believed Doctor White was some sort of monster, a tyrant. They believed that Utopia City was no kind of utopia and everyone in it was under the control of a cynical, malign administration. And there it was, the media control, the constant stream of… Annette decided that if she was going to get into Ghost’s mind, she should imagine the world from his point of view. In which case, all the posters and advids, even the portrayal of Doctor White and his administration in the history books, all that was propaganda.

  Annette’s mother had come to believe that. Why? How? Patricia had been a doctor. She had saved lives. Then, after her son had vanished into the UDF, she had turned from her work and her family…

  It all seemed to come back to Nate. Big, strong Nate who had always been there for his little sister. Right up until the last few weeks before he left. In those last few weeks, he had been a little strange, distant, and then he had gone without so much as a farewell. Annette’s father had explained that he was fighting for Doctor White beyond the walls. Patricia had said nothing and then become more and more distant herself. She had argued with Charles. Annette had heard them when she was supposed to be asleep in bed, though never quite heard what the arguments were about, but now she suspected they were about Nate.

  Annette turned onto her side and closed her eyes. She needed to sleep. She needed it all to go away and, eventually, for a while, it did.

  ~~~

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Charles said over dinner.

  Annette flashed him what was probably a weak grin. ‘I’m getting that a lot today.’ Kenya had been out of hospital and the team had met up at White Tower, but they had been told to take a day after the damage Kenya had taken and the attack on Annette. Everyone had been worried about her, but there was nothing much they could do.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  It had to be the dumbest question her father had ever asked, but Annette tried to keep her thoughts out of her voice. ‘Well, no, not really. Kenya was almost killed yesterday and then I killed the man who attacked her when he attacked me.’

  ‘You did a good thing, Annette. Men like that, foreign insurgents, they need to be put down.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The attack on the Nutopium plant had, unsurprisingly, never appeared on any news service, but Annette had made the news. Not by name, but ‘an unnamed for security reasons’ SAU agent had eliminated an insurgent who had infiltrated her home. The insurgent had been equipped with advanced cybernetics and the official line was that he had been sent in from outside the walls, a foreign agent working with the Insurgency to undermine the city’s administration. The public were urged to report any behaviour which seemed out of place from anyone they knew or met.

  With her new-found ability to view both sides, Annette could see the possibility that this was a rather cynical attempt to make people afraid of foreign spies infiltrating the city. She figured that opportunity would have been ignored if it had not been for the rather public nature of Ghost’s attack. It would have taken just one person getting a picture of the body bag leaving the building to blow a cover-up out of the water. Better to admit to some of it and make use of it. Giv
en Ghost’s cybernetics, and Cheetah’s, it was clear to Annette that they had both been ex-SAU, not foreign spies. It was getting hard to view things from the official side, from her father’s side.

  ‘Any plans for tonight?’ Charles asked, his voice soothing.

  ‘Uh… not really.’ As she said it, her computer flagged a new message, an anonymous one. She opened it.

  He was working alone. Go to the Birdy Tree.

  ‘Perhaps we could just stay in, watch a vid,’ Charles said, smiling.

  Annette smiled back. ‘I’m not very good company, Poppa. I think… I think maybe a walk will help clear my head. Some fresh air and time to think, you know?’

  Charles nodded. ‘Whatever helps, honey.’

  ~~~

  Whatever else came of it, the new message had confirmed that Annette’s mysterious correspondent was her mother. The Birdy Tree was an oak, getting old and gnarled now, in a botanical garden maybe a kilometre from the apartment. When Annette had been much younger, Patricia had walked there with her daughter, first in a stroller and later on foot, because Annette had loved watching the birds flitting between the tree’s branches. Annette had actually called it the ‘Bir’y Tree’ until she was four, but between the two of them, ever since, it had been the Birdy Tree.

  In the dark, at this time of year, the birds were not evident. Nor was anyone else. Annette sat against the trunk and waited, lost in her thoughts. Time passed and no one came, but the cold played into her miserable state and she stayed until almost an hour had passed. Then she checked the message again. Go to the Birdy Tree. ‘Go to,’ not ‘meet me at.’ That seemed significant.

  Getting to her feet, Annette walked around the thick bole, looking for anything out of the ordinary. She found it, of course, on the opposite side, pushed into a gap formed by a raised root: a plastic container which rattled when she shook it. Inside was a memory stick.

  Well, given what had been happening recently, Annette had come out with her arming pod strapped around her waist and that had a number of useful features, including a data port which could handle the stick. She plugged it in, ran every security program she had on it, and then examined the contents. A text file, which contained only a set of geographical coordinates, and a video file. Annette ran the file and watched, bemused, as it began to play.