Adopting a sideways shuffling run, Pavo continued to shoot―more to foul their pursuers’ aim than do any damage. Risa took the first possible turn to break line of sight. Tamashī’s violent spasms eased to sporadic twitches. Three paces around the corner, two armored figures jumped from a side passage.
“Pavo!” she yelled.
As soon as he whipped around, she threw Tamashī at him. Pavo caught the woman one-armed, draping her over his shoulder as he took cover at the corner and fired in earnest at the larger group coming up behind them.
Risa kicked on her speedware and pulled her weapons from the harness. Men seemed to freeze where they stood. Bullets hung in midair, twisting as they inched along. Laser beams glimmered into ribbons of scintillating color. The new wiring didn’t burn right away; a sense of rising above humanity, of being a goddess lifted from the bondage of time, exhilarated her. She leapt into the air, rolling over to put her back to the floor. Muzzle-flare belched from the barrels of their weapons, a beautiful conflagration of azure fire exploding in slow motion. Bullets crawled over her as she flew.
Bright-red reticules bounced from target to target as she fired past her boots, each pistol targeting independently. Steaming blood welled out of holes wherever emerald lasers scored. Two died on their feet, two accelerated out of slow motion and dove for cover.
Crap. Professionals. Risa landed and slid to a halt on her back, firing a few more shots at the corner to keep the men pinned. A kickflip got her on her feet, and she backpedaled to catch up to Pavo.
“Pav―” She barely had time to get her guns holstered before Tamashī collided with her.
“Hold her,” he muttered. He pulled something out from under his coat, squeezed a button, and hurled a black cylinder the size of a synthbeer can after their attackers.
Boomf!
A muted explosion slammed the air in the tunnel and created a thick cloud of reddish-brown dust some thirty feet away. Distant disoriented moaning filled in the subsequent quiet. Risa didn’t bother shielding her eyes. Cybernetics protected her from the effect of a flash bomb, replacing the crippling light with pixilated snow. She struggled with the other woman’s weight, managing to get her balanced over a shoulder while breaking into a run. Pavo sprinted through a series of rapid, random turns until they entered an open chamber filled with the decaying remains of heavy machinery―from the looks of it, relics abandoned during the original digging operation responsible for the city’s existence. Primus Mons had been designed by ambitious men, but only sixty percent of the excavation held population. The eleventh tier down existed below ‘civilization’ and not too far from the abandoned tunnels.
Tamashī let out a weak moan. A line of drool extended from her lip.
A waist-high tire, fat and made of white rubber, provided a decent place to set the woozy cyberspace jockey. The six-wheeled crew mover it broke away from wasn’t going anywhere ever again.
“Ugh, what the fuck happened,” said Tamashī, cradling her head in her arms. “Feels like I got run over by a RedLink shuttle.”
“You got noticed,” said Risa, on the verge of being out of breath. “If we hadn’t been warned, we’d have been trapped in that hallway between two squads. Whoever they are, they’re dangerous. At least two have military-grade wiring.”
Pavo shot her a look, spitting. “I don’t know what the hell that was, Risa. I…”
Go to hell. She glared at him. Her anger evaporated after two breaths, and she gazed down at the floor. “You think I’m Cat-6, don’t you?”
The hurt in her eyes seemed to catch him off guard. “No. I… don’t handle weird very―” He whipped his head around to look back the way they’d come. “You hear that?”
Risa’s face went blank a second before six men rappelled from the ceiling to surround them. Tamashī screamed as one man pounced on her from behind, wrestling her to her knees with a pistol to the side of her head.
“Game over, Miss Black. This brat is irrelevant. We’re here for you. No games, or she dies and we take you anyway.”
“You just let him grab you?” Risa squinted.
Tamashī, despite having a gun to her head, made a disgusted face as she struggled. “What? We aren’t born knowing kung-fu.”
The girl whined as the man got his other arm around her neck.
“Well, Miss Black,” said a tall man in gloss-black body armor. A featureless, smooth helmet of polished onyx concealed any facial expression. “Your move.”
ine people stood in silence. Dust sparkled amid angled shafts of light that illuminated the center of the chamber in a haze of shifting particles. Risa stared into a tiny circle of blinding dots, overhead lamps reflected in a faceless helmet. Rubber creaked from the gun at Tamashī’s head as the man flexed his grip. Pavo glanced at her, moving only his eyes. Five armored silhouettes lurked in the dark edges of the room, rifles poised. Risa’s stance relaxed. She took on an awkward posture, a broken puppet dangling on strings.
“You seem to know who I am. Why do you expect me to care if you kill her?”
Tamashī looked up with an expression that said ‘how could you?’ A second later, her eyes went wide and she winked. The girl’s canine teeth lengthened to fangs with a droplet of clear liquid on the tip.
“What I expect is for the daughter of Colonel Darren Black to care about an innocent bystander.”
“Colonel Black is dead,” said Risa. “Betrayed by his own government.”
The onyx egg shook back and forth. “Oh, how little you know.”
Tamashī squirmed and chomped down on the forearm across her throat. The man leapt back, dragging the schoolgirl-sized woman to tiptoe by cybernetic fangs embedded in his armor. She clamped onto his arm to spare herself a broken neck, her angry growl abandoned to a muffled shout of alarm.
Pavo dove right. Risa tumbled left as the others opened fire. Orange lasers scored melt trails in the red-dirt ground, black scars wisping smoke. Risa swallowed hard. Even her new top-tier speedware couldn’t slow laser weapons enough to avoid them, not the way bullets seemed to hang in the air. She would have to evade their aim. Once they fired, it would be too late.
Tamashī’s scream repeated, louder, and tinged with urgency. Risa popped up, weapons out, as one of the men combat-walked at the trapped girl with his rifle pointed at her head. The small woman struggled to free her teeth from her captor’s forearm, wide eyes locked on the encroaching weapon. She whined and cowered, raising a hand over her face.
The mercenary seemed immune to her pathetic act.
Risa fired. Haste fueled by incoming laser blasts skewed her beam into the man’s thigh. His shot skimmed over the hacker’s shoulder as he twisted and fell backwards. Pavo’s energy pistol lit the right side of the chamber with orange flashes. In two seconds, he put four shots into the helmet of the man holding Tamashī. Grey-black bubbles of molten plastic swelled for an instant before bursting with bloody steam. Risa slipped around the side of a crumbling drill machine, hoping the dense indirium plating on the bit would stop lasers. Stuck by the teeth to the forearm of a corpse, Tamashī gave up on dragging him to cover and strained to reach over his chest for the handgun on his belt. Somewhere in the dark, a man screamed.
Nice shot, Pavo. Risa’s left hand fired again at the man pointing a rifle at Tamashī, her right at one of the two firing on her. The left-handed shot missed as the merc flipped backwards, his dodge sluggish. Their speedware wasn’t quite as good as hers. The other man hit the ground, wounded but alive. Two others chased her behind cover with a rapid flurry of green streaks. Adrenaline pounded the beat of her heart into her skull. Every near miss flinging fragments of metal in her face reminded her how little use her flexible armor would be against energy weapons.
A blur caught her eye. Her wiring reduced Pavo’s sprint for the girl to a plodding mess of flowing coat and distorted roar. Shockwaves ran through the skin of his cheeks with each strike of his boot. His arm swung up, pulses of orange light connected his heavy laser pistol to the
wall after piercing another black, egg-shaped helmet. Cracks formed, burning gore erupted, a skull exploded.
The others scurried for cover. Risa leapt over the tip of the dead drill sunk into a gouge in the ground, and somersaulted forward. A warm tingle raced up and down the bones in her legs. She slid behind a tipped four-seated cart and shut down her speedware. Time returned to normal.
“Cover me,” said Pavo, calm as anything.
Tamashī lowered her gun, her target dead before she’d even gotten it out of the holster. Pavo palmed the top of her head, lifted a touch, and then punched the arm. The armor slid free from her fangs with a squeak. Tears streamed down her face and she screamed into her hands.
“Shouldn’t bite on armor, kid.” He winked.
“I’m not a―” Her sarcastic face evaporated to concern as a shadow moved to their left.
Pavo whipped his arm up. Two blasts into the dark caused a gurgle and a thud. Tamashī scrambled on all fours behind the rover, clinging to her stolen sidearm like a child to a security blanket.
Pavo backed up to her, firing at any shadow that twitched.
Risa. Raziel’s voice tingled through her, absent its usual paralyzing presence. You must leave now. Follow the path I provide. More are coming.
A thread of amber light appeared, hovering in midair as if an invisible pixie sped off toward the far end of the room. The marker stopped by a shaft labeled ‘Dig Nine.’ Without a second thought, she sprang up and ran, grabbing Tamashī by the arm.
“Where the hell―” Pavo broke cover, rounding the end of a driller unit as several blasts melted into the tire. “Risa? Where are you going?”
Risa kept running. Tamashī gathered her balance and kept up. Somewhere behind her, Pavo let off a heavy sigh, and the clomping of his boots at a full run grew louder. She sprinted across the open space to the tunnel. The unexpected, foolish charge must have been a surprise: none of the men firing scored a hit before she made it to the archway of a heavily armored door.
Pavo skidded to a halt at the mouth of the tunnel, out of breath and shaking his head. “Risa, what―”
Flashing yellow lights on the wall made him look up. He lurched forward as a six-inch thick plastisteel door fell from the ceiling to block the shaft, dropping like dead weight. The impact flooded the air with dust and let off a deafening boom.
A virtual stream of amber light glimmered against pure black. Night vision only amplified available light. It didn’t do anything in pitch darkness.
She switched to the Wraith. Her companions and the corridor appeared in perfect, albeit colorless, detail. “Come on, Pavo.”
He groaned, coughed, and waved his pistol to clear the air. As it became evident the men outside could not breach the door, he put his sidearm away. “Dammit, Risa. My map shows this as an incomplete passage. I don’t know how the hell you closed that door, but we’re trapped.”
“We’re not trapped. Raziel’s given us a way out.”
His grey figure leaned back, as if staring at the ceiling.
Tamashī took her hand from her mouth, wiping it on her legs. “If he’s found us a way out, we shouldn’t keep him waiting.”
“Not you too…” Pavo sighed.
The diminutive deck jockey tilted her head. “Not me too what?”
“Come on.” Risa turned to follow the glowing line. “Have a little faith. If this doesn’t work, you can call me Cat-6 as much as you want.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’re dead.” Pavo stared at her for a few seconds. When she didn’t relent, he grumbled, shaking his head.
She jogged along the glowing trail, following it around a right turn, a two-story stairway, and another ten minutes of straight corridor. Pavo’s flashlight added random smears of color to her motion-sensing vision, setting off the occasional sparkle from dead electronics in the walls or patches of ore. Twenty-three minutes after Raziel closed the door behind them, she came to a halt where the gold trail penetrated the slats of a ventilation cover.
“I know where we are now.” She pulled at the bottom of the hatch, opening it like an awning. “Follow me.”
Risa climbed into the duct, relying on instinct as she crawled to the end and turned right. Her guess proved correct forty meters later when it linked up to a large main feeder channel that ran beneath the settled parts of Primus. Two huge conduits met at the approximate center of the city. For long-distance trips across the city, she’d found it faster to descend all the way down and cut through the wide straightaway.
Passage after passage went by on either side, filled with intermittent skitters of rats or tiny bots hunting for vermin. Rattling and clunking from Pavo and Tamashī followed her as she counted them off, estimating her position by the number of openings. She hooked left at the junction in the mains, going north, and hurried to the seventeenth passage to the right. That led to a vertical channel, which would bring them up into the higher tiers and civilization.
After almost two hours of crawling, Risa emerged from a duct cover into a secluded alcove adjacent to a commerce quad. The second tier of Primus City was as civilized as it got. The first tier, thirty meters below the surface, belonged to the military, except for the tourist area by the main entrance. Dozens of voices echoed from the square ahead, mixed with the smell of street food and melody of advert jingles. She crawled out into the (more or less) fresh air and straightened up, rolling her shoulders. Tamashī scooted out behind her, followed by Pavo.
“Well?” asked Risa.
Pavo swatted dust from his sleeves. “Well, what?”
She replaced the vent cover and kicked some trash up against it. “A few of those passages might have been tight for you, but we got out. Do you believe me now?”
He squinted. “If I ever meet your Raziel, I’ll shake his hand.”
Tamashī rolled her eyes. “No one ever meets Raziel.”
“At least not in this world,” said Risa, earning a raised eyebrow from the hacker.
“Whoa, hey, wait.” Pavo abandoned his urge to sigh at the ceiling and lunged to grab Risa’s arm. “You can’t simply walk out there in public. There are MDF officers all over.”
She winked at him. “We have to get out of sight fast. None of those tools have a clue what I look like. They all work on ImDent signals. If Olympus went down, they wouldn’t be able to figure out how to put their ass on a toilet.”
Pavo caught up to her, dragging Tamashī behind while whisper-shouting, “You do realize I’m still active duty MDF, right? I don’t need the police network to find people. It just makes it a lot easier.”
Risa walked past a pair of crimson-armored MDF security troops. Neither so much as turned their helmets toward her. “Yeah, Pav, but you’ve seen my face. The rest of them only read briefings they’re not even interested in.”
She crossed the shopping quad and hooked a left down a wide street that could have accommodated six lanes of traffic if not for all the people. Holographic signs flashed with logos for various cyberware shops, clothing vendors, and more than a few bars. Risa followed it for about a mile before taking a random right into a place named Great Red Burger. The restaurant’s façade spanned the entire section of solid wall between two street-tunnels, its only door a rolling cage retracted to the ceiling.
It smells enough like beef. She helped herself to a booth seat. Pavo stood at the entrance, shaking his head. When she didn’t move, he trudged over. Tamashī flopped in the bench facing her like an eager teen on her first date. Pavo grumbled and sat with her.
“What the hell are you doing?” He glared.
“I’m hungry. They’ll never expect us to stop for lunch.” I don’t want to deal with Maris screaming just yet. Risa took out her NetMini. Garrison’s going to shit. “I liked the smell.”
Tamashī tapped her hands on the table, drumming along to nonexistent music. “So, now what? What’s my cut for a near miss?”
“You’ve got blood on your lip, girl.” Pavo pushed a napkin generator toward her.
She huffed. “I’m not a child.”
“You look and act like one.” Risa snagged a napkin from the box and dangled it in front of the girl’s face between two fingers. “Hence, you are one.”
The little machine whirred and produced another.
Tamashī took the faux paper and wiped. Her frown vanished in an instant and she became the thirteen-year-old she resembled when she got a look at the screen. The girl squealed and bounced in her seat. “Is that right? That’s a lot of zeroes.”
“You look shocked,” said Pavo. “I thought she yanked the wire before you could get it.”
“It had to be Raziel.” Tamashī folded her arms. “You’re right. I was up to my tits in defense constructs. I’m amazing, but even I can’t fight off twenty-four grade six trolls at once.”
“You don’t have tits. Wait, trolls?” Pavo gazed up. “First angels, now trolls. Is the entire world going nuts?”
Risa stared into space.
“A troll is a rudimentary program construct designed for net combat. It’s got one function”―Tamashī did her best mimic of a caveman voice while scissoring rigid arms to bang her fists into the table―“smash it. Smaaaaash. Smashie.”
Pavo groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose as a woman in a plain black shirt and pants approached. He ignored the constant banging and stared at Risa. “You’re sure she’s not really thirteen?”
Tamashī crossed her eyes. “Smaaaaaaash.”
The waitress reached their table. “What can I get ya?”
“Sanity,” said Pavo.
“Sorry, we ran outta that last month.” She smirked. “Everything here’s vat grown. No Omni-crap.”
“Combo 2,” said Risa.
Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1) Page 12
