The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Combat mode had disabled pain; the six slugs that made contact registered a sensation no more bothersome than if someone had poked her with a finger. Her shot gouged a trench in the man’s shoulder as he tried to leap backward and limbo under the bullet―and put his head right where Nina thought he would. Nina’s second round burrowed into the side of his neck, sending streams of blood spraying from his ears, then nose as the pressure wave expanded inside his skull.

  She got a foot up on a terminal desk, shoving her body airborne in a sideways dive. Spinning, she raised her arm past her head to take a shot at another man before grasping her weapon in both hands and sending two more rounds past her boots at the other two who continued to spray automatic fire in all directions as they tried to keep up with a blurry smear. Sparks burst from the walls around the ceiling wherever projectiles struck stone. Her spatial awareness tracking registered all three of her bullets flying true.

  Nina hit the ground on her back and shut down her speedware.

  Four bodies collapsed around her.

  “Fuck that,” said a man in Russian. “I don’t get paid enough to deal with that shit.”

  Nina sprang up and pointed her weapon at a blond man somewhere in his thirties.

  He screamed and raised his hands.

  “What’s your role here?” She took two steps closer, pistol pointed at his face. “Do you have operator access to this system?”

  “I only see the files as objects… to relay them to another location. It’s a digital wormhole. I don’t even know where it goes.”

  “How much of the data you’ve collected here is still on site? Do you keep local copies?”

  “Uhh.” He glanced at a big, fancy desk in the middle of the room with a conspicuous red button. “There are backups.”

  “Go!” yelled a man behind her.

  She spun as a pair of double-doors slid open. Another six men in dust brown Department of Motherland Security armor rushed in. One bee-lined for the big red button. Nina launched herself at him, diving into a speedware trance. He hung in midair, arm outstretched, flying toward what she assumed to be a ‘master erase’ panic button. When her floating targeting crosshair met his forearm, her MCP50 barked at a mental impulse. The bullet left two neat 15mm holes in his armor, but the bones inside disintegrated. His limp hand slapped down on the desk inches to the left of the button.

  Bullets flew from the rest of the oncoming soldiers, though Nina stayed ahead of the wall of projectiles. She sprinted into a kick that caught the button-diver in the chest, crushing his armor. His body slapped into the ceiling as Nina dove under him.

  Silvia and José, standing at the end of the short hallway by the ladder, opened fire on the cluster of men. Nina hit the ground on her front and slid behind a terminal. By the time she popped up to shoot back, the DMS soldiers flailed about in a dance of death. She aimed, but didn’t waste a bullet. Her ammo readout showed ten remaining, of nineteen.

  She shut down her speedware.

  José moaned and slumped over clutching his side.

  The man who’d surrendered stood in a cringe, with one leg up and both arms crossed over his face, breathing hard, wheezing in Russian, “Shitting hell. What are you?”

  Nina kept a sliver of tactical awareness on him, but focused on José as she rushed over. “You’re hit.”

  “Figured this would be a one way trip.” He chuckled into a wince.

  “So are you,” said Silvia.

  Nina glanced at a few holes in her clothes and slung her backpack off. “I’m wearing armor. Nothing got in.” She took two stimpaks from it and handed them to Silvia. “Know what these are?”

  “Yes.” She grabbed them.

  Nina locked eyes with her. “Get him back to the truck. Make sure the school is clear. I’ll be out in ten.”

  Two of the men José and Silvia gunned down moaned.

  A door on the left side opened as a somewhat pudgy man entered holding a drink can and half a cheeseburger. In utter defiance of the bloodbath sprayed around the room, he strolled toward a rear hallway.

  “What the fuck?” Silvia pointed her rifle at him. “Stop.”

  “Sorry.” The man held up the burger. “I’m not on the clock right now. Lunch break. I’m not getting paid for this time, so I really don’t give a fuck what you people do.”

  “Are you going to start caring when you punch back in?” asked Silvia, a hint of growl in her voice.

  Another wounded man moaned.

  Lunch Break eyed the carnage. “You know… I think I’m feeling a bit sick. I might take the rest of the day off.” He braced his stomach with his forearm, burger still in hand. “It’s unpaid, but I just don’t think I can finish out the day the way I feel.”

  Silvia fired into the pile of wounded, putting an end to the moans.

  The man with the burger went bug-eyed and ran for the back hallway. In the second Nina debated guilt at shooting him, Silvia spared her the moral dilemma. Her burst caught him in the back; he slid on his knees, arms waving for a few feet before he fell forward. The burger scattered across the floor while his drink canister rolled out of sight.

  Who knows what was back there. He was probably faking. No one is that callous.

  Nina jumped in the big chair and attacked the terminals.

  “What about him?” Silvia pointed her rifle at the man who’d surrendered. “You’re going to be upset if I kill him, aren’t you?”

  “I’m still not sure how I feel about Lunch Break. Take―”

  Gunfire erupted outside.

  “Here they come,” said Javier over the radio on Silvia’s belt.

  Nina looked up. “Dammit.”

  “They were watching the front. There must be more CMO on the way.” Silvia grabbed José’s arm and hauled him to his feet.

  “Take this guy with you,” said Nina. “Watch him. If he gives you any reason to doubt his intentions, you know what to do.”

  José put his arm around Silvia’s shoulders and groaned with the effort it took to walk.

  The DMS man kept his hands up.

  “In front.” Silvia one-handed her rifle, using it to point at the exit tunnel.

  “Si, si,” said the man. “No dispares.”

  Silvia pointed the rifle at him. “If you don’t want me to shoot, get moving.”

  As the three of them made their way to the ladder, Nina searched the terminal in front of her. One status window displayed 852 active connections, Harmony-infected people back home sending everything they saw and heard to the ACC. Shouting and gunfire continued outside, mixed with the giant-mosquito buzz of one of the resistance bikes. The revving and automatic fire made Nina think of a high-speed drive by. Fortunately, she heard no screaming children.

  I hope they got them out of there…

  One sub window held a connection manager that provided stats on data relay to a network address she knew didn’t belong to this place. From the first few digits of the IPv12, she assumed Europe. A mental impulse took a still image of the screen via her eyes.

  Twenty seconds of searching among folders and icons led her to a data repository, where she tapped one icon. The file expanded to a larger square that showed the date and time of the file’s arrival, plus a giant alphanumeric string she assumed to be the ID of the sender. A prompt at the bottom asked for a decryption key. Grumbling, she minimized it and took a neural memory stick from her backpack, which she connected to the terminal’s M3 port.

  When she attempted to drag all the data to the stick, each file expanded to ask for the same decryption key.

  “Shit.” Dammit… she squeezed the demolition charges through the backpack. There’s gotta be some way to check this data. If they got something vital, we need to know. She hadn’t brought a net deck with her, and did not want to expose her internal systems to whatever counter-intrusion mechanisms might be in play here. Nor did she have time to experiment.

  I wonder if that bullshit thing is still online… if I log in direct from this termi
nal, they can walk right in.

  She went to the GlobeNet site for Floyd’s Bakery. The logo ‘The most mediocre bagels in the world’ scrolled across the window above a generic list of baked goods. After tapping the ‘user login’ button, she entered ‘anyonethere’ as the username and ‘804332C3’ (her Division 9 ID) as the password.

  “Come on… come on…” She looked up at the exit tunnel as a tremendous boom of metal-on-metal shook dust off the ceiling.

  Four slow single shots preceded nineteen seconds of silence before two quick rips of automatic fire accompanied a staccato metallic clanking. A bang sounded, followed by hissing, and a fthoom of a deflagration. Nina hoped she hadn’t heard someone machine-gunning their truck to death.

  “Hey sexy,” said a voice from the terminal. “Enjoying the sun?”

  She snapped her attention down to find Joey staring at her from a small window. Relief and urgency crashed together in her heart. “I’m logged in from their main system. I can’t copy any of these files without inputting a crypto key. I don’t have time to sit here and fuck around with this, and I’d really prefer to get this data under a proverbial microscope rather than burn this place out blind. Oh. Here.” She sent the image of the network address. “This place is just a waystation. They’re relaying everything to that address.”

  “Not a problem, babe. I’m on it.” He winked. “Looks like somewhere near Warsaw.”

  “Might want to hurry that along. There will be an unexpected server error in five minutes.” Nina stood.

  He cringed. “Software?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She held up one of the demo charges. “Hardware problem. Unrecoverable data loss.”

  Joey grimaced and rotated to face away from the camera. “Abs, Mindy… Dive in on this link. Need more hands. We got minutes.”

  She headed down the corridor where Lunch Break lay dead. Ten feet from the body, a left turn held a small alcove with weapon racks holding ten rifles, numerous magazines, and a handful of grenades. Son of a bitch. A short distance later, another left turn led to a small barracks-style room with double-decker cots, but no people. Five feet past the sleeping quarters, an armored door blocked her way.

  Nano claws made short work of the quarter-inch thick plastisteel. She grabbed the excised slab and pulled, peeling the opening wider like dense plastic. A grid arrangement of sixteen processing towers took up most of the space, each about her height and as big around as a domestic refrigerator.

  The scream of a terrified schoolgirl came from her left as she squeezed past the hole she’d made in the door.

  She straightened to her feet inside, and locked stares with a light-haired man in his middle twenties. Scrawny, with a large nose and Adam’s apple, he radiated ‘techie.’ Though he clutched his sidearm in both hands, he shook so much she doubted he could hit the wall. Behind him, a thin silver table held three terminals, their holo-panels showing video feeds of the outer room.

  Her Nano blades retracted with a faint whirr and click that overpowered his weak, stuttering breaths. She took a step toward him, and he made a piteous squealing noise. The crotch of his pants darkened.

  “You must be the head tech.”

  He collapsed to the floor and scooted backward under the table, abandoning his weapon. “Töten sie mich nicht!”

  “I’m not going to kill you.” She squatted in front of him, grasped him by a fistful of shirt, and pulled him out of his hiding spot. “But you’re not going to want to stay here.”

  He whined. “Warum? Was wirst du machen?”

  “I can tell you’re afraid. You understand me, yet you’re answering in German.” She lifted him to his feet and smiled. “I know you watched what happened out there. You’re not going to do anything stupid. Are you?”

  “Nein! Nein! Ich bin kein soldat.” He paled, trembling, and seemed about to vomit. “Ich arbeite nur mit den computern.”

  She swatted the gun from his hand and shoved him toward the door. “I’ve got a satellite overhead that can see the pores in your scalp. Get out of here and don’t do anything stupid, or I’ll give you a nice close look at what an orbital neutron beam platform is capable of.”

  Grabbing at the air as if that would help him move faster, the gangly man sprinted for the door. Nina tried not to laugh that he believed her bluff about a satellite laser and decided to set two charges in this room, in case the servers had armor. She slipped between the outermost ring of machines and placed the charge on the face of the second one in from the left on the second row.

  A window opened along the right side of her field of view:

  ‹Charge A Status: Armed›

  ‹Charge B Status: Safe›

  ‹Charge C Status: Safe›

  ‹Charge D Status: Safe›

  The scuff of sprinting tech shoes ended with the dull thud of a body hitting the floor. He started to scream, but the sad sound drowned under a torrent of vomit. Nina shook her head and placed another charge on the third machine in from the left on the third row back. Two of the four cabinets at the center of the arrangement had charges, which would obliterate the other twelve surrounding them.

  Charge B changed status to armed.

  Screaming, scrambling, and tripping over everything possible, the techie clambered across the outer room and made it to the ladder tunnel a second after she exited the server room. She placed Charge C on the roof at the archway separating the main area from the hallway back to the barracks and servers, hoping it would cause a cave in.

  Four NE8 charges in this little space is such damn overkill.

  Nina peeked into the room Lunch Break came out of to check for another offshoot, but it held only a tiny kitchenette with a sink and food reassembler along with two chairs and a round table. She crossed the main chamber to the doorway where the six DMS soldiers came in from. It led to an area half barracks and half improvised fitness center. A scattering of free weights made out of dead batteries and metal spars sat around a treadmill they’d probably stolen from upstairs.

  Nothing in here of any intelligence value.

  She returned and placed the fourth charge on the desk next to the master erase button. Joey’s window remained, though contained only black. “Still there?”

  “Little busy,” said Joey, without appearing.

  “Three minutes twenty seconds left.”

  “Noted.”

  She brushed her fingertips over the intangible screen, tinting them blue where they made contact. “You going to be stuck late again tomorrow night? I don’t think I’m going to make it home today.”

  “I can make an exception.” He leaned into the frame long enough to give her a cheesy grin, and disappeared again.

  Nina slung the mostly empty backpack over her shoulder and grasped the strap. She gave the room, and the bodies within, a cursory glance before heading to the ladder.

  Four rungs up, her amplified hearing detected a moan.

  Shit.

  She jumped off the ladder and hurried back over to where the pile of bodies lay in front of the ‘fitness center.’ If anyone had survived, it would have to be one of them. No doubt remained that the men she’d shot or hit died instantly.

  “Which one of you is still alive?” she asked in Russian, then German.

  None of them moved.

  “Fine. Stay here and die when the bombs go. I’m not going to finish you off. You’re no threat now.”

  A helmet moved.

  Nina crouched over the bloodied figure; scanners in her eyes picked up three holes in his chest plate, and two in his leg. He’s minutes away from dying anyway. Without a second thought, she grabbed a stimpak from her bag and jabbed him in the neck with it. Not enough to get him functional, but it should stop him from bleeding to death.

  She grabbed the back of his armored chestplate and dragged him to the ladder, letting him dangle while she climbed up to the house’s basement and crossed it to the stairs. That much explosive is probably going to cave the house in. Shame… this was a nice
place, if not a bit creepy. His boots bounced and clattered over each step. Nina hurried along as the low, rounded ceiling and tight walls triggered a mild sense of claustrophobia.

  I feel like the girl walking away from the house in a horror vid, only I’m the monster.

  The man gurgled and moaned, but made no effort to move as she hauled him out of the kitchen down the hall to the front door. Her speedware activated on its own, a bright red circle appeared in her vision highlighting an incoming bullet.

  Silvia and Roberto hunkered down on the porch, hiding behind the flaming wreckage of a plain blue car. A dead man in CMO armor slumped over the wheel. Two bodies lay in the road in similar armor, and a fourth CMO officer crouched in the doorway of the school, the source of the bullet coming for her chest.

  A small girl wearing a white dress with pink ribbons in her hair stood in front of him, hands over her face. The tightness of the dress across her chest indicated he held a fistful of cloth at her back. Nina released the injured soldier and sprinted. She leaned to the side, allowing the incoming bullet to pass as a second projectile left the man’s rifle.

  In the darkness behind him, the forms of children huddling on the floor around their teacher became clear. A block and change down the street to her left, Roberto and one of the women on motorbikes traded shots with armored figures in an alley. The other bike lay halfway between here and there―next to its motionless rider.

  Nina ducked under the second bullet and lunged at the man, who only started to show a reaction to her speed as her fingers closed around his rifle. His eyebrows crawled upward. She wrenched his weapon in an outward twist, too fast for him to get his finger out of the trigger guard. His hand warped into an unnatural shape along with muted splintering crunches. At the same instant, she thrust her right arm down between him and the girl, grasping and crushing his wrist to free the child’s dress from his grip.