by P. R. Adams
Rimes whispered into his headgear’s microphone.
Seconds passed. Finally, his words came back to him, spoken by each of the recorded voices. A few more selections to identify the best sample and tweak the audio, and Rimes was satisfied.
He repeated the process until he had a string of messages from each person sequenced to play over the terrorists’ communications network. There were appropriate delays built in to reflect confusion. The entire effort took him less than ten minutes.
An eternity. It better be worth it.
He queued the communications burst and brought up the interfaces to the Cytek 701s. They were typical civilian models—lightweight, translucent, slow. The frames were built with stealth in mind, the rotor blades whisper-silent. Beyond the necessarily limited optics package, the drones offered minimal functionality.
Rimes flicked through what options the drones did offer, settling on an emergency maneuvering command that would make just enough noise to give away each drone’s presence but not its location. He queued the command and opened the battlefield view in a private workspace.
The impatience within the teams was like an electric current, leaping from person to person, carrying with it agitation. But Commando missions often stretched on for days with nothing more than waiting, watching, listening. Ten minutes standing in a canal was a cakewalk.
With quick finger waves, Rimes split the estate grounds into two objectives: the mansion, and the surrounding buildings, gardens, and lawn.
Pasqual’s team received the mansion objective, Meyers’s team the rest. Rimes prompted the BAS software for optimal routes based on the objectives and known hostiles locations, then modified the routes based on his own assessment.
A finger flick and the objectives workspace was uploaded to Meyers and Pasqual to manage as they saw fit. Meyers modified Rimes’s proposed route slightly and designated targets to his team members. Pasqual stuck with the proposed route but modified the sequence of objective priorities. Rimes approved both and kicked off a counter in everyone’s BAS overlays.
The counter decremented to thirty seconds. They buddied up to hoist each other out of the canal.
Rimes cupped his hands and nodded at Meyers. At ten seconds, Meyers planted his boot in the cradle of Rimes’s hands. At four seconds, Rimes’s prepackaged soft-bot—a communications burst—hit the terrorist network, warning them of movement in the eastern woods.
The assault had begun.
3
19 January, 2167. Harper Estate, Atlanta, Georgia.
* * *
THE HARPER ESTATE stretched over several hundred acres, much of it broad, open lawn. Away from the central housing area, most of the estate was unlit. In addition to the canal that bisected it, it contained the multi-storied Harper House, several smaller houses, three pools, Eads Lake, the Harper Botanical Gardens, and three wooded areas collectively known as Harper Woods.
The Commandos' target was Harper House.
The last surviving hostages and our target, our proof the genies are involved.
They were thirty meters out from the pool house when the firing began. Rimes instinctively twisted at the sound without slowing. One of Meyers’s men went down, then another. A second later, the wounded men’s vitals flashed on Rimes’s display, one dropping dangerously low, the other—Kershaw—quickly stabilizing.
Rimes sprinted the final stretch to the pool house a second ahead of the rest of the team. He triggered the drone emergency maneuvers routine as he ran. Despite the gunfire, he hoped the noise would be enough to distract the shooters—even just for a second.
A glance back toward Meyers’s position revealed nothing. Oaks and sycamores sprawled lazily in the expanse between them. The familiar sound of CAWS-5s filled the air now. Meyers’s team had found their targets and were returning fire.
After nearly three years training in assorted leadership positions that had kept him away from combat action, Rimes almost found the sound of gunfire comforting.
Pasqual stood at the pool house corner, peering at the mansion’s north wall. They were nearly fifty meters from the kitchen door. Pasqual traced a green circle around the door on everyone’s overlay.
The path was clear.
Rimes flicked another of his prepackaged soft-bots into action, killing power to the mansion.
Pasqual charged, first running low and parallel to the pool, then angling hard to the right and sprinting for the door. His team followed close behind, instinctively maintaining their spacing. Rimes pulled up the rear, eyes flashing across the mansion’s entire northern façade.
Forms moved on the third floor, then disappeared.
Rimes threw his back against the wall to the left of the kitchen door and marked the moving forms for the team to see. He traced them down a stairwell that would deposit them one room east of the kitchen.
Pasqual motioned, and his point man opened the kitchen door with a slap-charge, a small, controlled explosive strip that burst barely louder than the ongoing firefight. A moment later, two flash-bangs skidded across the kitchen floor, detonating at the room’s eastern and southern ends. Three Commandos low-jogged into position, covering the room’s entries. Pasqual and the rest took up positions at the entries.
A second later, Rimes entered.
A shotgun blast roared from the eastern entryway. Pasqual staggered backwards momentarily. One of his men returned fire. Pasqual regained his balance and added the sound of his own weapon.
A scream, and the gunfire went silent.
Pasqual signaled two down.
Rimes confirmed Pasqual’s vitals were solid, then traced a route through the eastern room to the stairs the gunmen had come down. From there, he traced a path up to the second floor. The team moved swiftly to the stairs.
They reached the second floor without trouble. As Rimes dropped to his knees, the BAS came alive with a new signal. Fourteen new red forms, half as many gray, and a single green one now showed on the display.
The mole had made his presence known.
Rimes circled a set of four red forms on the second floor of the overlay. Pasqual sent two men after them. Rimes took the lead and moved toward the third floor, where most of the remaining forms were clustered in a large bedroom.
He stopped at the top of the stairs and dropped low. His suit’s audio receptors picked up sobbing, hushed cursing, and whispered orders. Six red forms detached themselves from the rest and moved straight toward the stairs.
They aren’t operating completely blind.
Rimes pulled a flash-bang and watched his display. The stairs ended at a junction, a small, open area maybe three meters across with hallways running east, south, and west. The bedroom with the hostages was approximately fifteen meters down the east hallway. The display indicated the rest of the floor was empty.
He would need a bit of luck to bank the grenade optimally.
When the gunmen reached the ideal spot, he pulled the pin, counted, and tossed the grenade.
It was an imperfect throw, but it was good enough to cause the gunmen to give ground. Rimes jumped up and ran into the south hallway, trusting to the BAS display and the mansion’s blueprints. Pasqual followed, taking up position against the eastern wall. Another Commando squatted next to Pasqual, the rest settled at the head of the stairs.
“We’ll kill them! We’ll kill them all!”
Female. One of the terrorists in the hall.
Rimes looked at the blueprint overlay and tried to find the easiest means of getting behind the terrorists. There were still three red forms in the master bedroom with the hostages, too many for the mole to deal with alone.
“Back off or we’ll kill them now,” the woman shouted.
Rimes searched again, tracing his sights from doors opening into the north-south hallway outside the master bedroom. Finally, he found one that led into a bedroom that shared a bathroom with a bedroom just south of him. He quickly laid out his route on the shared display, then moved. Gunfire from the second fl
oor covered his movement.
“You better answer, assholes!”
Rimes hustled through the bedroom, trying not to be distracted by its immensity and opulence. He guessed it was merely a guest room, but it was nearly half as large as the apartment he and Molly shared with their sons. The furniture—real wood, hand-crafted, immaculately maintained—would have cost more than he made in a year.
He blinked to focus, shutting out the gunfire from the second floor. He tentatively tested the bathroom door.
Locked.
He checked the blueprints again. Beyond the bathroom, a room mirroring the one he was in. Three meters through the bathroom, eight meters across the bedroom, another four up the hallway to the master bedroom.
Assuming the bathroom door on the other side isn’t locked and there are no booby traps, it’s going to take just short of forever to cover that distance.
“Pasqual,” Rimes whispered. “I need some noise.”
Pasqual snorted. “Anything to shut that bitch up.”
“On three,” Rimes said. “One…two…three…“
Gunfire.
Rimes applied a slap charge to the bathroom doorknob and pressed the timer. What seemed like a deafening pop sounded, and the door shivered in its frame. Rimes threw his shoulder into it and sprinted across the room, taking in the shining porcelain, the gold fixtures, the gold-framed mirror, the walk-in shower, the plush cotton bathrobes.
He grabbed the doorknob, twisted.
Unlocked.
Rimes bolted into the room, barely sensing a tripwire catching his right shin. He barely registered the thought he wouldn’t make the bedroom door. He barely managed to wonder at the absurdity of getting himself killed.
Then he was at the hallway door, twisting its knob, sprinting down the hallway.
No explosion. The mole.
A red form—a woman—staggered into view from the eastern hallway. She fired a shotgun back down the hallway before somehow sensing Rimes’s presence. Her hair was short. She was in her late 20s, nearly his height, broad-shouldered, hard-looking, and fit.
Rimes recognized the 101st tattoo on her bare arm.
Hooah.
She pivoted and leveled her shotgun at him. Rimes fired first. She blinked in disbelief, fell to the ground, and spat blood.
Rimes was in the room, all momentum and adrenaline and instinct. He was suddenly beyond fear, enjoying the hunt and hating himself for it. Hating Kwon's subtle manipulation and the pleasure he took from the violence.
The closest red form resolved into a man, a skinhead, in his early thirties. He held an old assault carbine Rimes hadn’t seen before, probably some cheap South American knock-off. Tattoos, the same 101st emblem. Why couldn’t it have been mercenaries, people nobody gives a shit about?
The skinhead fired, but he fired where Rimes should have been, not where he was. The bullets tore through the air where a trained soldier or a normal man caught dead to rights would have been, frozen.
Rimes was already beyond that, launching himself, impossibly calm, inhumanly thirsty for the kill.
Bullets passed millimeters over his head, and he rolled, closed, came up beneath the skinhead’s arms. Using all the momentum of his charge, Rimes drove his shoulder into the skinhead’s chest, then buttstroked him with the CAWS-5 as he struggled to regain his balance.
Rimes watched for a millisecond, seeing the gunman’s eyes blank out, then took in the rest of the room. One of the other gunmen was down, his head a bloody ruin. The final gunman had a semi-automatic pistol aimed at an unarmed woman’s bowed head.
The final gunman was green, the woman he was aiming at was red, highlighted in the gray silhouettes of the hostages. Rimes blinked, tried to focus and make sense of the scene. He turned off the BAS overlay with a wave.
He knew the gunman. What the hell is he doing here? Who could possibly trust him for something like this after what he’s done? More crazy decisions.
“Barlowe?”
“R-R-Rimes? Jack Rimes? Shit, is that you?” Barlowe sneaked a peek at Rimes, then refocused on the woman. Barlowe was haggard, bearded, grungy, and leaner than when Rimes had last seen him. Barlowe’s baby face was gone; he wasn’t a kid anymore.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Rimes’s face was flush, his cinnamon skin darker and redder, his eyes dancing rapidly.
He breathed deep, drove out the urge to finish the killing. The gunfire was dying down outside, becoming sporadic. He reactivated the BAS overlay. Only two terrorists remained—the woman Barlowe had a gun on, and one downstairs snuggled between two Commandos.
“I don’t understand, Barlowe. You’re IB? I thought you were in Leavenworth.”
“Long story.” Barlowe laughed nervously. “What matters is you’re looking at the brains of this operation. Say hello to Nicole Dimon, terrorist and murderer.”
Rimes glanced at the display showing the battlefield outside. One of Meyers’s wounded was dead, but the rest were operational. “Meyers, status.”
“We lost Ballantine,” Meyers said after a second. “Kershaw’s okay. Ten Tangos down. We’ve got three pockets around us, maybe another eight all told. We’re flanking.”
Pasqual was right about Meyers; he’d pulled his part of the task off superbly. Credit where due.
Rimes checked out the terrified people huddled on the ground. He recognized staff and one of Harper’s nieces. There was no sign of Harper himself. Did they execute him already? Sneak him out? Why? “I’m sending Pasqual to support. Hostages have been rescued.” Rimes looked the hostages over again, then looked back at Dimon. “We have the head of the operation captive.”
“Good to hear, Lieutenant.”
Rimes passed the status on to Pasqual and turned to the young woman Barlowe had his pistol trained on. She was surprisingly pretty, her features a pleasantly curious mix, with hints of multiple influences. She had coppery skin, brown hair, full lips. “Miss Dimon, if you’ll come with—”
Dimon raised her eyes to look at Rimes. Her sparkling amber eyes.
Genie.
Dimon smiled as if she were in on a joke no one else had quite caught yet. “My part here is done, Captain Rimes.”
Rimes felt his stomach sink. He pulled his headgear off.
“Sheep to the slaughter, so willingly led.”
“Perditori.”
“The same.” Dimon slowly spread her hands wide and bowed with a theatrical flourish.
Barlowe’s forehead creased in confusion; he looked from Dimon to Rimes. Barlowe’s gun shook slightly and he laughed nervously again. “You know her?”
Rimes waved the question away.
Dimon closed her eyes as her smile broadened beatifically. “I knew this meeting would happen, if not the particulars of Mr. Barlowe’s betrayal. Our fates are intertwined.”
The genies’ leader, here now? Why?
Rimes found a part of his mind drifting, dreamily examining Dimon, lingering over the subtle curves hidden beneath crumpled clothes. No. Damn it, Kwon. Rimes shook himself. “I thought you’d fled?”
“Of course we have. And we will one day escape fully. But for now you must be slowed, or things will not go well for us. And so you see the path we are on.”
“Killing all these innocent people was a delaying tactic?”
“No one is innocent, Captain. Not even you. You will one day come to accept that. For now, our conversation is done. Miss Dimon has served me admirably, but cannot be of any further service.”
What? Why tell me this? What’s the point? “Wait—”
Dimon convulsed and gasped for air. Abruptly, the convulsing stopped, and she wheezed as she fell onto her back.
Barlowe gaped, confused. Rimes knelt at her side and dug his fingers into her neck, searching for and finding a weak pulse.
“Stockton, this is Rimes. We need a medevac.”
The Harper girl looked at Rimes from the huddled mass of survivors, disbelief and shock playing across her face. “You’re going to save her? She’s a
monster!”
Rimes scooped up Dimon and jogged for the stairs. This was a diversion, a delay. They have another target. She knows. No, she doesn’t know, but she’s had Perditori’s mind in hers. There’s something lingering, just like when Perditori touched my mind. She may have been a monster, but she was also a puppet.
Just like the rest of us.
They all deserved better.
4
19 January, 2167. Northside Medical Plaza, Atlanta, Georgia.
* * *
RIMES PACED the length of the waiting room, stopping at the glass wall that opened onto the parking lot to stare at the distant city lights battling the darkness. Warm colors and cheerful designs on the walls did nothing to dispel the sense he was trapped and vulnerable. The heating system grumbled in protest as it spewed stale, warm air into the room; Rimes shivered despite it. Hospital smells—alcohol, cleaning agents, death. That’s all it is.
He felt isolated, alone, the solitary voice warning of impending doom. Flashbacks came to him of the attempt to search Kwon's dying mind using the crude man-machine interface in Australia, the way he'd felt so helpless in that nightmare when Perditori had made his presence known.
Perditori was like a god: near-omniscient, overwhelmingly powerful, so much more than human. His mind, the ability to control others, it represented the greatest threat the genies posed.
And if Perditori sensed that Rimes hoped to do the same thing with Dimon's mind that he'd done with Kwon's…
He won't let me.
Rimes's scanned the waiting room again, and when he saw it was safe, his thoughts drifted to his father, Cleo, and his last moments shared over an uncertain video link.
Cleo lay in his bed, propped up by blood-stained pillows. He struggled with each breath, a pale shadow of the man who’d once been so powerful and alive. “It’s time now, son.”
“Cleo—”
“Ain’t gonna see those boys o’ yours.” Cleo’s dark eyes were still intense, still defiant. “You raise them right. Don’t go lettin’ them sour on this world like you. They’s good people out there, they just ain’t got no power. Remember that.”
