Six years old, and they would’ve executed him.
Of course, shooting three CMO officers in the head in broad daylight had a negative effect on Silvia’s future, but Nicolás called her mama. She seemed okay with the trade.
Javier and Roberto rode in the truck bed, sitting on top of a tarp concealing rifles and ammunition.
Nina held her sidearm low between her knees out of sight to check it. María Isabel and Adriana had concealed their weapons in their backpacks. They risked bringing them along since failure here meant none of their resistance cell would make it to the UCF today. Silvia had tucked her weapon, an MBR-11 chambered in 8mm, down beside her seat. The mass-produced ACC-issue battle rifle might’ve been a fifty-year-old design, but soldiers on both sides considered it one of the more reliable weapons out there.
Silvia stared out at the road with contempt, as if she hoped someone discovered them with firearms. She caught Nina looking at her. “What?”
“Nothing.” Nina tucked her handgun in the holster between her ballistic stealth suit and her flannel shirt. “I hope you’re not going to do anything reckless. You’ve got that look to you, like you don’t care if you make it out of this alive.”
Silvia chuckled, but it sounded more sad than amused. “If it helps them get out of this place, if it helps Nicolás, I don’t care.”
“Keep your head down. I know what I look like, but I’m a lot tougher than you think.”
José laughed. “The pair of you are ninety pounds wet.”
The quiet little town of Estación Salamanca rose from the scrubland ahead, a cluster of drab squares appeared first; behind them, a silvery haze emerged from the blur of distance, which soon became a near-blinding glare, as though a slice of the sun had fallen to earth and lay upon the dirt.
Nina’s eyes compensated for the reflection, filtering out the high-intensity light. Thousands of towers, each bearing six giant octagonal solar panels, formed a veritable forest north of the village. She zoomed in and panned around for a second before her attention settled on two desert-brown armored personnel carriers parked by a small operations bunker.
“There’s your ride.”
“What?” asked José.
“There’s a pair of BTR-99s parked in the solar farm.” Nina swung her gaze left, searching for guard towers, catwalks around the panels, or any other dangers, but only spotted a handful of workers in white jumpsuits and hardhats. “Each can hold twenty troops plus a driver and a gunner. Top speed about eighty on flat ground. Once we finish what I need to do, we grab those.”
“I don’t see anything but the sun,” said Silvia.
“I’m a doll,” muttered Nina.
Silvia laughed. “You’re cute, but looks aren’t going to help.”
“I mean… a doll. Military-grade artificial body.” Nina sighed.
“Oh, shit.” Silvia leaned away.
“Relax. I’ve got a real brain. Despite what your government tells you, I’m not going to snap at any minute and go on a killing spree.” She paused. “I mean… I am probably going to go on a killing spree in a few minutes, but not on civilians.”
“Real brain? Not a computer?” Silvia poked her in the arm.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Silvia relaxed. Seconds later, she squinted, and leaned close. “You don’t look like a robot. Are you playing with me?”
Nina smiled. “Thanks.”
“Three inside,” said a woman’s voice from a handheld radio on the dashboard.
“Holy shit.” Nina blinked. “Is that…?”
José laughed and picked up the walkie-talkie. “Yep. Ninety years old and still works. Those idiots aren’t even looking for this frequency.” He squeezed the button. “Copy. Three in the nest.”
“Are there any other CMO or DMS personnel in the town?” asked Nina.
“Oh, ladies,” said José into the radio, “any other foxes roaming around the chickens?”
The first buildings neared, such a ramshackle mixture of adobe, brick, and metal slabs, that Nina wondered if she’d already reached the Badlands. Closer to the center of town, the quality improved, but she still half-expected to see a pair of men walking out for pistols at high noon. A huge, gaudy, bright teal building sat on the corner of what passed for a town square. It even had the saloon-style doors.
“No,” said María Isabel over the radio. “They made it the police station. It’s right across the street from a school.”
“Dammit.” Nina stared at the roof and sighed. “Typical. Anyone in it now? The school I mean?”
José relayed her message.
“Yeah. Looks like a teacher and about fourteen kids. Mixed ages. Oh… four CMO inside the happy place.”
“No guns at ground level then,” said Nina. “Too much risk of stray bullets.”
Silvia shook her head. “I don’t think the CMO are going to accept those terms.”
Nina narrowed her eyes. “I wasn’t planning to offer them. I should be able to take them down. If they’ve set the place up as a police station, we can put them in a holding cell.”
“You’re not going to kill them?” Silvia gawked.
“I’d prefer to avoid it. The incidence of defection among the Corporate military is high… of course, that’s mostly on Mars.”
Silvia leaned at her. “These people like nothing more than to be bigger and more important than everyone. They were going to kill Nicolás because he’s psionic. You know what he can do? He can see the other sides of cards! He’s a little clairvoyant. So dangerous. And they would’ve killed him.” She choked up for a second as José brought the truck to a stop a few houses away from the police station. “I knew his parents. Grew up next door to them.”
“I’m sorry.” Nina looked down. “They killed them?”
“Nicolás’ parents knew what the CMO would do to him. They tried to protect him.”
José muttered a few curses.
“Those who fight monsters…” Nina closed her eyes. “I won’t hesitate to kill them if I have to, but I’m not here to exterminate. My primary objective is the facility.”
Silvia pushed open the passenger side door. “You are planning to place bombs, yes? If you put them in jail, they will still die. If you set them loose, they will call for reinforcements. You have to help us get out of here.”
Nina nodded. How sad a state the world has fallen into when the best option I have is to kill. Shit. Bombs. “José… We need to get everyone out of the school before my charges go off.”
“Aye. I will take care of that.” He shut off the engine. “How do we go in?”
Nina slid to the right after Silvia and hopped to the ground. “I’ll go in first. Hold your fire unless you absolutely need to shoot. I don’t want stray rounds going into the school. Watch my back.”
Silvia and José nodded.
Not having an MTOF active or a whispercraft overhead gave her a sense of nervous isolation, but at least it left her field of view clear, not cluttered with small, floating displays. Nina grasped her backpack strap with one hand, right arm swinging free as she speed-walked ahead along the edge of the road. She passed two larger homes, likely belonging to management of the solar facility, and a small empty lot with the ruins of a playground in it. Her pace slowed as she approached a burgundy-walled police station that bore little resemblance to a jail. The recognizable whirr of an air conditioner hummed from the roof.
This wasn’t built as a police station. It’s just the biggest house in the town.
A sideways glance in the windows revealed three men in desert-brown armor. One stood at the end of a desk, dabbing at his face with a towel while he fanned himself. Another sat back in his chair with his feet up on another desk, while a third hovered in the far left corner, pouring a drink.
The living room had been converted into an office with five desks and a handful of freestanding plastisteel storage cabinets large enough to hold armor suits. An archway led left into a sitting room, and two hallways went deeper
in from the back wall and to the right. Aside from the front area, the rest of the place still resembled someone’s home.
Nina barged through a wooden door covered in flaking dark green paint, into a blast of ice-cold air. She hurried toward a spot between the sweaty CMO officer and the sitting one, speaking Spanish in the tone of a frightened college student. “They’re here! They’re here! You have to do something!”
“Whoa, calm down there, little lady.” The man with the towel grinned at her. “You look scared.”
The reclining man lowered his boots to the floor and stood. “You lost, girlie? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.” He approached, squeezing into her personal space.
“Had two new engineers come in Thursday. Maybe one of them had a daughter?”
Nina’s ears registered soft footsteps on the porch outside.
The man in the back corner stoppered a bottle and raised a shot glass to sip. “So, who’s coming? Banditos?” He chuckled. “Maybe she saw a squealer.”
Reclining man laughed. “You know it’s a citable offence to waste our time.”
“You’re safe here.” The grinning man on her left patted her ass. “I’m sure we can overlook a little panic attack, hmm?”
The third man, with the drink, frowned. He started to turn away, shaking his head. Though he seemed to regard their blatant intent to molest her with distaste, he also didn’t move to stop it.
“You sure there’s something chasing you?” asked Reclining Man. He teased at her hair. “Who’s chasing you?”
Nina’s fearful expression went flat. “The Resistance. They’re right behind me.”
Time crawled to a near stop in her perception. She grabbed Reclining Man by the neck of his armored chestplate and pulled him as hard as she could at the floor before spinning into a kick that caught Towel Man in the small of the back. Shards of splintering armor flaked away from the point of impact as his body bent in half over her leg, until his calves touched his shoulder blades.
The corpse flew across the room at a speed as though he sank in dense syrup. Tequila Man’s facial expression started shifting to alarm. Nina whirled out of her kick, getting both feet on the ground. She swiped the helmet from Reclining Man’s desk and hurled it at his face.
Dust brown composite armor struck his hand first, forcing it into the shot glass, which brushed teeth aside like standing dominoes as it entered his mouth. Blood exploded around the shattering glass, which mashed up into his gums. The helmet crushed his face; impact waves rippled across his cheeks and down his neck. His skull rocked back, blood swinging up in streams from several points. The helmet fell away, tumbling to the floor. No trace of consciousness remained in what little expression a caved-in face could convey.
He bent backward and bounced off the wall.
Nina extended her Nano claws from her right arm, and drove them down into Reclining Man’s back. The instant her knuckles touched his armor, she disengaged her speedware.
José and Silvia ran in, both with rifles in hand.
Towel Man’s folded-in-half body hit the right side wall hips first, slapped flat against it, and fell off to land on a desk before flowing to the ground. Tequila Man crumpled in a heap.
“Mother of God,” muttered José.
Nina stood, extracting her blades from the corpse. They retracted with a soft click, and the two slits in her skin sealed. “We don’t have much time. I’m not picking up any EM signatures, so I don’t think they have cameras on this room. Help me look for a way downstairs.”
José hurried down the corridor straight ahead. Silvia ducked left into the sitting room. Nina went the other way, following a hallway past a dining room on the right, a small library on the left, a huge bathroom on the right, and a kitchen at the end. An impressively ornate sink had been piled high with dirty dishes and unwashed glasses.
“Wonder what happened to the people who lived here?” She checked six closets, finding pots, pans, cleaning supplies, and other miscellany before José walked in.
“Back hall only goes upstairs or out back.” He pointed at a narrow door with a rounded top located in the corner past the stove. “Basement?”
She gave up on closets and went to the door she’d dismissed as small. “Probably. Less work than putting in an elevator.” Opening it revealed an equally narrow passageway descending at a sharp angle. Patches of white paint and plaster chipped away from the walls among dark stains and a naked wire running along the rounded ceiling. “If I didn’t have night vision, I probably wouldn’t go down there.”
“Sil,” yelled José. “Kitchen.”
Nina drew her sidearm and headed down the creepy stairs. The cramped passageway went on longer than a single story down, and opened into a cavernous basement. Sawdust smeared the floor in the center, around a square metal hatch far too modern to belong in this house. The smashed remains of wine racks lay in a pile in front of still-intact wine racks standing against the wall by the stairs.
“I found a cable coming out of the ground into the house.” Silvia’s voice echoed in the tunnel. “Looks new. Somethin’ hi-tech.”
Nina approached the hatch, and walked around it once. Concrete dust from its installation still gathered in drifts on the floor nearby. “This hasn’t been here too long.”
“What’s that?” José reached the bottom of the stairs and walked over, Silvia behind him.
“This is what I’m looking for. I still have no idea what I’m going to find down there, so be careful.”
“Can we shoot down here?” asked Silvia, sounding annoyed.
“Yeah. There’s enough dirt overhead.” Nina squatted by the front where a small glossy square glowed blue: a fingerprint reader.
“Be right back.” Silvia started for the stairs. “I’ll grab a few fingers.”
“Wait.” Nina popped her Nano claws. “I brought a key.”
She thrust the lower of the two blades, the one protruding from between her pinky and ring finger, in a few millimeters above where metal met concrete. With a faint sawing motion, she duck-walked around the square until the cut met the spot she started.
José whistled.
Nina retraced the blades and lifted the hatch mechanism out of the way, exposing a square shaft with rounded corners and a rubberized ladder. “Haven’t seen Nano blades before?”
“No. They work like magic.” He smiled.
She holstered her weapon, grasped the sides of the hole, and lowered her legs in. The drop looked easy, about fifteen feet. Electronic thrum filled the air in the space below, along with a few murmurs of conversation and one man complaining in louder Russian. Nina ran an analysis on the sounds; a small window popped up in the lower left containing a shimmering mass of tiny blue dots.
“What’s the point of us having this enormous pipe to the GlobeNet if we cannot even use it?”
“We can’t draw traffic here. You know that, Arkady. The UCF, they are dumb, but they are not so blind. This place looks like the back end of nowhere. Don’t be stupid.”
The mass of dots coalesced into something resembling a map.
“Bah,” said Arkady. “Watching Frictionless would not arouse their suspicion.”
Text appeared in the virtual window. ‹Estimated unique voice prints: 5›
Acoustic resonance analysis predicted a room twenty feet wide by thirty or forty feet long. Red spots identified the most likely origin point of the voices. She played connect the dots in her mind.
“Going in,” she whispered.
Nina let go of the edge and engaged her speedware. Her backpack floated a few inches away and her hair bloomed upward. She drew her pistol while extending her legs to meet the floor. A digital crosshair floated in her field of view as soon as her weapon pointed forward, courtesy of a wireless link. She sank into a short corridor lined on both sides by lockers, which allowed her a view into a larger room full of workstations. Two men in DMS armor sat behind standing walls of holo-panels, projected from mirror-silver plastic loafs on the
ir desks.
The instant her boot tips touched concrete, her crosshair lined up with the first man. Her electronic ears filtered the tremendous report of the 15mm handgun in such closed quarters, but her targets had no such protection.
Her heels came down in time with the first man’s head bursting in a shower of gore and skull fragments. She shifted aim to the left, firing a second round as her weight transferred from her feet to her knees. The back end of his head blew out, leaving a flapping face with a hole in it. Misted blood settled on workstations as the impact wave rode up her legs into her hips.
The third man cringed from the sound of gunfire. Before his hands reached his ears, she shot him in the chin, painting the terminal behind him with brain.
Nina’s body sank into her legs; her cheeks wobbled from the impact of her jump. She kicked off the ground, springing up to a sprint into the room. Walls on either side fell away. Another DMS man within arms’ reach to the left caught her off guard; having been focused on his work and not talking, he had no corresponding dot. He’d gotten half out of his seat, face warped with alarm, but he showed no reaction to her sudden appearance.
She pounded her handgun into the side of his head; a sickening slow-motion wet crunching emanated from his collapsing skull. The hit redirected the trajectory of his attempt to stand into the wall.
Blue flashes from the right came from three men in armor, firing rifles in her general direction. One man in plain clothes shot twice at her chest, moving in almost real time. His bullets slowed as if stuck in thick mud, creeping closer. She sprinted to the right and toward the men, weaving between clouds of spinning projectiles.
The boosted man corrected his aim, shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger. Like a bizarre version of 3D chess, Nina wound up with nowhere to go that wouldn’t walk her straight into a bullet. Deciding to spare her face at the expense of chest and legs, she cringed and braced for impact while firing at him, once at his head and once a little off to the right and down―at empty space.
The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2) Page 67
