Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘That’s… sensible,’ Louise replied and turned to walk back into the building.

  As she did so, her computer popped up a message window indicating the arrival of a text message. It simply said, You’re welcome. A.

  Louise did her best not to smirk as she closed the shutters, though it did beg the question: how had Alison known what was going on?

  7/5/2117.

  Louise was pulled out of a fitful sleep, this time leaning over her own desk, by her remote threat assessment software and, at first, she could not work out what the problem was. The camera feeds which had triggered the alert were clear. There was no sign of anything which would constitute a hazard of any kind. She was about to run a diagnostic check on the system to uncover the reason for the error when she realised what she was not seeing: there were no cops visible outside the building.

  Accessing the video feed, Louise pulled up the last five minutes from the buffer and ran it through until she saw the two cops who had been on duty being attacked. They had gone down quietly, hit from behind, and their attackers had not shown up on video. Louise turned back to the live feed from the camera monitoring the shutter and switched it over to infrared. There were two figures crouched in front of the shutter’s external locking mechanism, invisible to the unaided eye. One was a lookout while the other worked on bypassing the code lock.

  Louise frowned. She had never seen any of the Cyber-Kings sporting camouflage systems, but it was possible that some of the ones from Manhattan had obtained the technology from the UDF. Possible, but not especially likely. The Infiltrator technology was fairly tightly controlled; only the SAU was supposed to have that level of cybernetic tech, though Louise obviously knew that the Insurgency had it, if only from defecting SAU personnel. And that was the thing: it seemed way more plausible that Louise was watching SAU operatives trying to break into her workshop.

  She got to her feet and Mickey lifted his head. ‘Stay here, Mickey,’ Louise said. ‘I have some business to take care of upstairs.’

  ~~~

  There was the clunk of latches unhooking and one of the Infiltrators, the lookout, glanced back at her colleague with a grin. ‘Nice work,’ she said over the radio.

  ‘I didn’t–’ The denial was terminated as something trailing white smoke zipped into the space between them from under the rising shutter and exploded. There was white light and suddenly neither of the two could see.

  Louise moved forward from the rear of the darkened interior, her pistols at the ready. The two UDF operatives were quite visible now. One man, one woman, both naked so that their camouflage system worked properly. Two Infiltrators… It was possible that they had been sent as an assassination team, but…

  Lightning streamed through the air, missing Louise and striking the concrete wall at the rear of the room. Her targeting system identified the two new threats as they emerged from cover on the opposite side of the street. A Tank and a Gunner, the latter using the former as a shield as he moved out onto the roadway, preparing a second shot. Louise fired first and three rounds arced out through the space between them. Louise saw the Gunner’s eyes widen just before he was hit in the head by three bullets which punched through his skull and then turned his brain into pulp. Three rounds had been total overkill, but Louise was not worried about conserving ammo.

  The Tank let out a roar of anger and reached for the assault weapon slung across his back. The roar had been one of anger, but it also seemed to serve another purpose. From behind the big cyborg, a dozen more appeared, though they were significantly less threatening than the SAU man. Cyber-Kings, all of them armed, and Louise went into all-out attack mode as her system locked its targets. Smoking bullets streamed from her guns and the Cyber-Kings fell. Even the Tank was staggered by the impact, but the penetrator could not punch through his dermal armour and reinforced skull. He raised his weapon and opened fire.

  There was not as much pain as Louise had expected. Somehow, she had expected that being shot would cause a lot of pain, but what she felt was a weird numbness, as though someone had just cut all the nerves to her abdomen at once. There were numerous alarms going off in her head, messages indicating that her body had taken a massive amount of damage in the abdominal cavity. So much for the armoured corset. She staggered backward, into the cover of the stairwell down to the workshop, reaching back as she did so.

  More bullets slammed into the concrete walls, but now she was behind one of them. The Tank was not the sharpest of combatants: he was wasting a lot of ammo hitting nothing but wall. However, he was very hard to hurt. He had weak points, but they were basically just his eyes and those were hard targets to hit, even if you were not bleeding all over the place. Louise dropped a triage grenade at her feet and waited for a gap in the firing.

  By the time it came, Louise was already feeling the effects of the enhanced nanomachines from the grenade, which meant her wound was closing, but she was starting to sweat. She ducked her head out to see the Tank swapping the magazine in his carbine, standing right in the doorway of the shopfront. Of course, Tanks had one other minor weak point which most people were not really equipped to exploit; Louise tossed a stun grenade out into the room and then ducked back behind the wall.

  When she stepped back out into the room, the Tank was on the floor where he had fallen as his cybernetics had shut down. That was the thing about Tanks, and the main reason she had built the stun grenade devices: they were incredibly tough, but if you disabled all the mechanical enhancements, they were basically quadriplegics with thick skin. Louise looked down at him as he struggled to move with what little organic muscle the technicians and surgeons had left for him. Her pistol rose to aim at his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ Louise said, and then she pulled the trigger.

  ~~~

  Louise watched the body bags being loaded into a van outside her workshop and sighed. Two of the bags contained the bodies of LIPD officers.

  ‘Is there any indication of how they found out where this place is?’ Louise asked.

  The senior officer on the scene, Louise had never got his name, gave a shrug. ‘If there is, no one’s told me. We’re increasing the LIPD presence in the area. They’ll have heavy weapons available in two hours.’

  Louise nodded. ‘Make sure they have infrared goggles or something similar available. The Infiltrator cybernetics don’t work well in the infrared. Body heat still shows up. Though, to be honest, I don’t think they’ll try again.’ She lifted a couple of plastic vials and peered at the red liquid within them. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have an analysis to run.’ She turned toward the shuttered front of the building.

  ‘Uh, sure. What’ve you got there?’

  ‘Blood from the Infiltrators. Utopia City citizens are immune to the plague. If I’m lucky, I can find out why.’

  ‘You think you can inoculate people against it?’

  ‘It’s been done before. I just hope I can reverse engineer it. If I can…’

  ‘Huh. If you can, someone might give you a medal.’

  Louise looked down at her corset, which now had a hole in it she was going to have to repair. ‘Where are they going to pin it?’

  8/5/2117.

  The call had come through from Mitre early in the afternoon and by the time Louise had got the latest batch of cures sorted out and rushed to the hospital, Sarah was unconscious. The symptoms had started up: nausea, pain, and photosensitivity in one rapidly developing rush of discomfort. They had sedated her and Louise had watched as Mitre personally administered the injection before retreating to let it work. Louise had not retreated.

  Sarah opened her eyes, blinked a couple of times in the dim light, and then resolved the shape sitting at the side of her bed. ‘Louise?’ There was a soft ‘ruff!’ from below bed level. ‘And Mickey? How did you get Mickey in here?’

  Louise grinned, lines of worry washing away in the relief of seeing Sarah awake and, apparently, no longer in pain. ‘Doctor Mitre snuck him in the back way. He said that Mickey was actually
safer to have in the building than most of the humans. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I feel… a little weak, but the pain’s gone. And the light doesn’t hurt my eyes.’ Sarah pushed herself into a more upright position and grinned. ‘And I don’t feel like throwing up any more. They gave me your cure?’

  ‘Hand delivered and personally stuck in your arm by the good doctor. He’ll want to know you’re awake.’ Leaning forward, Louise pressed the call button beside Sarah’s bed. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘How many have died?’

  ‘I haven’t seen any official figures. I doubt they’ll know for sure until they get the immunisation programme going and clear the decks of the current victims.’

  ‘Immunisation programme?’

  The answer was delayed because the door opened at that point and Doctor Mitre walked in, not in a hazard suit, and smiled. ‘Awake, I see, and officially clear of the virus.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Sarah said, smiling.

  ‘Thank Miss Barrington. She’s the one who came up with the cure.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll be doing that every morning for the next month. I wanted to thank you now.’

  ‘My pleasure. Really, my pleasure. I never thought I’d be seeing most of the victims of the Damnation Plague surviving it. And as for being able to protect people against it…’

  ‘You think you can reproduce the inoculation then?’ Louise asked.

  Mitre nodded. ‘Something of an unusual discovery, but it should be possible to use a simple retroviral treatment to get the body to produce it. We’ll have it ready to go into production in… less than a week. And we can manufacture it in large quantities using our own medical synthesisers.’

  ‘What was the discovery?’ Sarah asked, looking perplexed. ‘You needed your super-high-tech fabricator things for the cure, right?’

  Louise nodded. ‘Active hunter-killer nanomachines are a little outside the capabilities of the fabricators the enclave has in general use, but the immunity doesn’t use that kind of technology. There’s a protein in the blood of Utopia City people which binds onto a site on the virus shell. It’s one of the few invariant structures on the viral wall and it’s that that my system uses to detect the viral particles, but it’s a little strange. It acts like a kill switch. When the protein slots in, it activates an immediate shutdown of the virus particle. There’s no way it’s an accident. Someone engineered the virus with that feature so that it could be immunised against.’

  ‘And your Doctor White discovered that and created an inoculation for Utopia City?’

  ‘That’s what I hope happened,’ Louise replied, frowning. ‘The man’s a genius. He makes me look stupid. He could’ve analysed the plague virus, discovered the termination mechanism was built-in, and made a retroviral treatment to cause his people to produce the protein molecule.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or… He already knew about the kill switch system in the virus because he was involved in creating it.’

  ‘You’re suggesting that the man who created the North-West Enclave and Utopia City also created the Damnation Plague?’ Mitre asked. There was not quite enough disbelief in his tone for Louise to think the idea was a shock.

  ‘Some of the structures in the virus could’ve come right out of the textbooks for the organic nanomachine courses I took in university. That morphogenic quality to the protein shell? I’ve seen techniques like that used in bio-fabric designs in Utopia City. And you have far more complete data on the virus here than I ever saw there. How could he have worked out that trick when there’s no record of plague virus research in any of the databases? It’s not proof. It just really stinks. Add in the SAU attacking my workshop… I think Doctor White created the original plague, and he just tried to use it again to wipe out the Long Island Enclave.’

  11/5/2117.

  ‘I agree that the evidence is both circumstantial and fairly damning,’ Alison’s voice said into Louise’s head, ‘but I’m doing an information management job to suppress the idea becoming more public knowledge.’

  Louise nodded, her eyes on the hospital’s main doors. ‘Reasoning?’ she asked, because she wanted to know whether Alison was on the same page as her.

  ‘If it becomes public knowledge that Utopia City mounted a biological attack on the enclave, there will be calls for some form of retaliation. This enclave is not ready for that. It may never be. All we would be doing was giving White an excuse to mount a full-scale war on us.’

  ‘That was my thought. Doctor Mitre isn’t saying anything about his suspicions to anyone, but he’s concerned.’

  ‘As he should be. Between the two of you, you’ve created a programme to make the Damnation Plague obsolete as a weapon, but White could engineer something else. I’ve pushed a few buttons at my end. Doctor Mitre is likely to discover that he’s the recipient of several grants to produce more effective emergency response plans and research anti-nanomachine technologies. He may come to you looking for assistance.’

  Louise allowed her lips to curl a little. ‘Is that an assignment?’

  ‘A… side project. Keep me informed of any hours you spend on it and I’ll at least make sure your expenses are reimbursed.’

  ‘I think I can live with that.’ Louise spotted a blonde figure being wheeled toward the doors by an orderly who looked like he could stop bullets with his chest. ‘I have to go, Alison. I’ve an ex-patient to take care of.’

  ‘My regards to Miss Donaldson,’ Alison said, and the call disconnected before Louise could respond.

  Anyway, Louise had to brace herself to stop Mickey, who was actually on his leash for once, from pulling her over as the dog barked happily and tried to rush ahead. ‘Calm down, stupid dog,’ Louise said. ‘She’s coming home. You can get all the cuddles you want when she’s back in the apartment.’

  Nothing was stopping Mickey, however, from pulling on his leash as Sarah was allowed to stand up and walk out through the doors. Louise’s software highlighted the signs of fatigue around Sarah’s face and the slight falter in her stride; the girl was fit enough to leave the hospital and not contagious, but she was not back up to full strength yet, and Louise dug her heels in to hold her dog back until Sarah could close the distance and control the greeting.

  Mostly control the greeting. ‘Thanks, Mickey,’ Sarah sputtered. ‘Lots of kisses, yes. I’m going to need another shower when I get home. Okay. Enough already!’ Mickey graciously decided that he had slobbered over enough of Sarah’s face and backed off.

  ‘I’m not kissing you,’ Louise said. ‘You’re covered in dog spit.’

  Sarah got to her feet, shaking her head. ‘See what you’ve done, Mickey?’ Mickey gave an apologetic whine and Sarah grinned. ‘Let’s get home. I want to be in my own home again so much. If I ever get another plague, just lock me in my bedroom until I get symptoms, okay?’

  ‘If you ever catch anything like this again,’ Louise replied, ‘I’m having you put in a hermetically sealed bubble for the rest of your life.’

  ‘That’s going to severely limit my social life.’

  ‘Uh-huh. So, that’s an incentive not to catch life-threatening diseases.’

  Sarah giggled. She was fairly sure that Louise was joking… ‘You’ll get your name in the papers over this,’ she said to change the subject. ‘You saved–’

  ‘Nuh-huh,’ Louise broke in. ‘No papers. It’s bad enough when “the Gunwitch” gets mentioned in them. I don’t think Utopia City was really aware it was me who made the cure and I’m not giving them an easy target. No newspapers, no internet channels, no publicity. I’ve forced Doctor Mitre to take the credit.’

  ‘Oh. So, um, they’re really calling you that then? The Gunwitch?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Makes you sound like a superhero.’

  ‘Ha! I am not a superhero.’

  Sarah giggled. ‘Well, you are to me. You’re a hero, and you’re super.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’
r />   ‘Can I be your sidekick?’ There was a bark from Mickey at that. ‘Mickey wants in too. Um, we could be… Blunder Girl and Wonder Mutt?’ Bark! ‘Is he complaining about my name or his?’

  Epilogue

  Queens District, the Long Island Enclave, 14/5/2117.

  The two cops walking down Industrial Avenue looked just a little wrong. For starters, Queens did not have the budget to have officers patrolling in pairs unless they were actually expecting trouble. It was a controversial policy, as in the cops did not like it and the enclave refused to implement budget increases, but it was what they had. Second, they were something of a disparate pair. The man was significantly older and more than a little over the recommended weight for his height, and his uniform was far from new. He had the easy stride of a seasoned police officer: energy economy was the primary consideration. The woman walking along beside him was a lot younger, a lot prettier, and her uniform looked like it had been taken off the rack in the shop that morning. You could have cut stone with the creases in her slacks.

  Louise, standing on a corner and watching the world go by, recognised them both, but she doubted that the girl would recognise her. As she watched, she saw the pretty blonde girl spot her, narrow her eyes, and obviously decide that this was not going to do. She pulled herself up to her full height, all one hundred and seventy centimetres of it, and strode forward.

  ‘Excuse me, miss,’ the girl said.

  Louise smiled at her and then turned her gaze toward the older man. ‘Hi, Frank. How’re the kids?’

  Frank, Officer Turner under more formal circumstances, grinned. ‘Oh, you know how kids are.’

  ‘Not really, but I get the idea.’

  ‘This is Tina,’ Frank went on. ‘Officer Clement-Bride, just transferred over from Sky City. I’m showing her the best places to get shot, where the doughnut houses are, you know? The usual.’

  Tina was looking a lot fitter than she had the last time Louise had seen her. Infrared showed up the slightly cooler temperature of the cybernetics in her eye sockets. Louise’s software was registering the slight confusion in the girl’s expression.