My visor switched to night-for-day lenses, but I went back to the tactical view, the unenhanced view. Spotting the Unifieds was easier in tactical, they glowed like golden ghosts.
The next explosion hit with volcanic force, shaking the building from its roof to its underpinnings. Something shook the building once, hitting with the overwhelming force of a hammer striking a nail, one cataclysmic shake, and the stairwell doors launched from the wall on which they were fastened and flew fifteen feet across the floor, trailed by an opaque hedge of dust and smoke.
Things would have gone more smoothly had Naens dialed down the pyrotechnics. Seeing the smoke and the devastation, most of the men guarding the floor raised their shields. Hoping to blend in, I raised mine, then I stepped behind a shoulder-high partition and spotted two guys who had frozen under fire no more than ten feet from where I stood. The bastards were all but sleeping on the job, facing each other as if they weren’t wearing helmets and communicating over the interLink, not bothering to raise their shields.
I raised my right arm even with my solar plexus and I shot them low. No one seeing me from the other side of the partition could have known I had done it.
Normally, I aimed for the head; this time, I went for the abdomen. This was U.A. ammo. These fragments had neurotoxin coating them. These targets would die from poison and paralysis before they bled out. Anyway, guys with bleeding holes in their helmets draw unnecessary attention.
Another idiot ran to the blown-out stairwell with his shields off. I let him get past me and shot him in the ass. He stumbled and fell on his face as if he’d tripped, a tiny geyser of blood spurting through his armor.
Naens had warned me that he planned to damage the elevators, but I hadn’t grasped his meaning. I shot that third guy, a silent moment passed, and more bombs exploded. Naens must have placed his charges in the bottom of the elevator shaft, turning the shaft into a cannon.
The LCB had two banks of elevators, each holding five lifts. The walls of the shaft withstood the explosions, meaning that the blasts fired the cars up the shafts like bullets in a barrel. The charges went off, the blast fired the elevator cars into space, destroying the roof’s structural integrity, and slabs of ceiling came tumbling down, cracking sections of the floor beneath them.
Suddenly, I saw clouds and skyline and pipes and wires where ceilings and walls had been. The north face of the building took the worst damage. A twenty-foot square of roof and ceiling collapsed, slamming into the floor with such force that it crushed men and furniture, and when the cloud of dust cleared, I saw that the floor had twisted and bent to a thirty- or thirty-five-degree angle. Men and debris slid down the floor and disappeared over the edge.
And then somebody shot me. I had my shields up. He couldn’t have hurt me with a rocket, at least he couldn’t have penetrated my shields, and his fléchettes left nothing but sparks in their wake.
I might not have noticed I’d been shot, but a red icon appeared on my visor warning me that I’d been hit and showing me where it hit me. Only one person shot at me. I had no idea how that person identified me as the enemy or why none of his fellows had caught on.
Slipping behind a partition, I tried to drop to a knee and learned something about my armor. With my shields raised, only the soles of my boots were allowed to touch the ground. The joints over my knees allowed me no more than twenty-five degrees of mobility, then they became stiff.
No wonder they always moved like zombies, I thought. When the fighting started, the Unifieds always marched forward. I’d seen them speed up, but I’d never seen them run. I had always assumed it was because they had shields and felt invulnerable, but that wasn’t it. They never ran because they couldn’t. They didn’t have enough mobility in their legs for a full run.
And me, I couldn’t kneel. I suppose I could have tipped over and fallen to the ground like a tree or a bowling pin. Then what? Would I have fused? The only successful strategy we, we meaning the Enlisted Man’s Empire, had found for dealing with shielded armor was burying the men who wore it. We toppled a building over on them. We led them into tunnels and collapsed the tunnels. Not a one of them had ever dug himself out. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe their armor had frozen around them, like the walls of a coffin.
I thought about the men we’d buried, trapped—some of them had lasted for weeks before dying. I felt no regret.
The son of a bitch kept shooting me. Every few seconds, the icon flashed in the bottom right corner of my visor, a red silhouette, a white dot marking the spot where his fléchettes struck.
The Marine stood no more than twenty feet from me, his arm up and aimed at me. He could shoot me, but he couldn’t hurt me. I could shoot him, but I couldn’t hurt him. With our shields up, we had reached an impasse. I broke the stalemate; I lowered my shields. Well, I stepped behind another partition, shut off my shields, and dropped to a knee at the exact same moment. The bastard might or might not have seen me drop my shields, but he didn’t shoot.
I sat on the carpeted floor, my back against a desk, hidden by a partition as I rifled through compartments in my armor. I found a pistol. Useless. Rappelling cord. I’d need it later. A half dozen grenades.
Crumbling roof . . . damaged floor. Holding the grenade in my right, I crawled farther, hid behind desks, hid behind partitions. I would need to throw the grenade before I reengaged my shields. If I had the grenade in my hand, the shields would destroy it, maybe even make it explode in my palm.
Where are you, you son of a bitch? Where are you? I pulled the pin, allowed a few seconds to pass, stood, and tossed the pill where I thought the bastard should be. He wasn’t there, but there were others, standing, watching, not sure what they should do as I stood, tossed the grenade with a quick flip of my wrist, and brought up my shields at just the right moment.
A lone fléchette hit me from the right side, my stalker, and the grenade exploded, causing an avalanche over the heads of three shielded men. Maybe the floor caved in beneath them, or the percussion sent them flying through holes in the walls. When the smoke cleared, those Marines were absent and unaccounted for, and the chaos I had walked in on seemed like a precision drill compared to the scene I now saw.
A couple of Unifieds dropped their shields and ran toward the nonexistent elevators. I shot them from behind before they changed their minds. I had begun to like these poisoned fléchettes; if I so much as nicked my targets’ fingernails, they still died.
I ducked behind a pillar, cut off my shields, dropped to my knees, and hid under a desk. Ten feet from me, the final remains of an outer wall framed a perfect view of monument alley. I saw streets and cars with lit headlights, and colorfully lit fountains and sleepy marble buildings, all ten floors below me, maybe 150 feet down.
The first fléchette missed me by a hair-width. The guy was smart. He didn’t look for me, not by hide-and-seek rules at least; he must have scanned for me using heat vision and spotted me stooped with my shields down under the heavy metal desk. I stood, bringing the desk up with me, balanced on my head, neck, and shoulders, and I sprinted forward. Holes appeared in the desk as he and his comrades fired fléchettes at me, but they didn’t have a clear shot and I was an erratic and clumsy, moving target; and then I threw the desk from my shoulders, flexing my muscles as if doing a bench press. My blood was full of adrenaline and testosterone and had been all night, and the desk traveled about four feet through the air and struck the Marine. There was a bright flash and sparks, and the desk seemed to melt in its center, but it was heavy and had velocity and it carried the bastard with it as it fell through the space that had once been a wall.
Now several Unified Authority Marines shot at me, but I already had my shields up. Their fléchettes had about as much impact as mosquitoes slamming into bulletproof glass. When they hit my shields, they didn’t just melt; they evaporated. They disappeared so completely it was as if they had never been there.
I stood just outside Tobias Andropov’s door, which was closed. At the moment, th
at simple closed door posed a problem. It didn’t even have a lock, for speck’s sake, but I couldn’t touch the knob without shutting down my shields. I fired a fléchette into the knob. It did nothing; neither did the seven or eight that followed. I thought about kicking through the door, but the joints in my armor fought against me. I couldn’t lift my leg high enough.
Meanwhile, a half dozen pricks shuffled around me, shooting me with fléchettes, angling for shots that didn’t matter in the slightest, making sure I kept my shields up.
One of them came within a few feet of me, made a point of stepping into my line of sight, and fired shot after shot at my visor. The fléchettes flashed and disappeared, flashed and disappeared, but the guy was eating into my battery life. These shields worked off a small battery that ran out after an hour of nonstop use. Every time something touched my shields, the power surged to fight it off.
Frustrated by the door, I glared at the guy, not that he could see my expression through my visor. He shot me several times. I thought about running at him. What would happen? I wondered. We’d probably bounce off each other, might even repel each other like similar poles of a magnet.
Thwack. Another fléchette hit me in the face. Thwack. He shot me again. He wasn’t hurting me, not even touching me. I wanted to kill him. He was a pest. A nuisance.
Using an optical command, I brought up the code again—819. It would take less than a blink to send it, just a twitch of my eye, and the bombs would explode. All of Washington, D.C., would shake and collapse as the ground below it turned to ash and the air filled with radioactive cinders.
I’ll kill them all, I thought, and with that code still up on my screen so that I could initiate the blast at any time, I rushed at the guy with fléchettes in a movement that came as close to running as I could muster.
I closed on him quickly, just three seconds, and he stood there, unmoving, probably stunned as I plowed into him. The blinding electrical flash might have occurred in the world or possibly just my visor. White and gold and yellow spots danced in my eyes, and I couldn’t see clearly, but I saw enough to know that my shields had shut off and his shields had shut off as we fell to the floor, and I brought my arm up and pumped five fléchettes into the bastard’s gut before we reached the floor. Still partially blinded, I tucked my shoulders, and rolled over his dying corpse and vaulted back to my feet. It took two tries to get my shields back, but they were up before anyone hit me, and the guy I had shot was still down on the ground.
Shoot me again, asshole, I said, maybe out loud, maybe just in my head, and I laughed, and the jagged sound of my laughter sounded bad, even to me, but it didn’t stop me. It didn’t even worry me. I didn’t have time to worry as I ran at the next Marine, bored into him left shoulder first, and fired fléchettes into his chest and stomach. This time I didn’t fall with him. Our shields went out the moment we made contact, but I had my eyes shut and balanced myself as I ran into the son of a bitch as if he were a door that I needed to break. We hit, our shields went out, and I restored my shields and shot the bastard as he fell to the ground, and I laughed at the way he dropped and stayed where he fell.
Now that the poor fools saw what I was, they didn’t know what to do. I was a cat in a room filled with mice. I was a wolf, and they were small lambs. They didn’t know what to do. They had come to protect; I had come to kill and to die. I had nothing that I didn’t plan on losing; they had lives they wanted to keep. In the heat of battle, those who worry too much about their lives often lose them.
I was enjoying myself, watching the glowing gold ghosts scatter like small fish. There were only three of them left at this point. It would have only taken two of them to kill me—one to charge and one to shoot. Really, one could have done it though he would have died along with me.
They trotted across the floor as quickly as their armor allowed, weaving through desks and partitions, heading in three different directions. One sprinted toward the elevators. Another dashed to the far end of the building, possibly hoping to hide. I watched him and chuckled as I lowered my shields and pulled a grenade. There I was, offering them my hide, but they were running. And suddenly I understood some of their confusion. They must have been watching the entire fight through night-for-day lenses, and unable to see when I had my shields on and off because night-for-day filtered out ambient glow. They wouldn’t have known when to shoot at me.
I threw the grenade sidearm, the way you skip rocks over a lake. It sailed over the tops of several partitions, barely skimming over the top of the last, and exploded in midair. Safely behind my shields again, I watched that partition vanish in a flash of light and a cascade of dust and ceiling tiles and cement. As the cacophony dissolved, I looked for the glow of the man’s shields. The area was dark. I found small flames using heat vision, but nothing large enough for a man.
Killing the bastard with the grenade had worked, but it hadn’t offered much in the way of satisfaction. I mused at how I had become the cocky hunter stalking after the panicking rabbits. I didn’t bother running after them; they had no place to go.
I saw the one who had run to the elevators for safety. He stood by an open shaft, staring into the bottomless empty pit. If he’d packed a cord, he could have rappelled to another floor. He turned, saw me coming, turned back to the hole, and scampered away.
Where are you going? I asked, unaware if I had said the words or only thought them.
In the distance, I saw the flashing lights of a helicopter sliding across the night sky, probably a gunship. I didn’t care. Waste of fuel, I thought. They couldn’t use it, not in this crumbling building, not unless they cared more about killing me than saving Andropov, the man in charge. Andropov had the instincts of a rat; he cared a hell of a lot more about saving his life than ending mine.
Not watching where he set his feet, the man stumbled over a heap of cement and fell onto his knees then his face, and his shields went dark. And there I was, ready for him, holding a five-foot length of jagged-ended pipe that had fallen near him, and I hit him with it. I hit the back of his neck, then his helmet, then his shoulders, then the helmet again, and it cracked, and the cracks spread. And then it caved in and when I hit him again, blood welled out of the crater. I tossed the pipe away, booted my shields, and fired a fléchette between his shoulder blades to make sure he stayed down.
That left one man.
He had hidden in a bathroom. Using heat vision, I saw him quite clearly, cowering against the farthest wall, a faceless orange silhouette, shaped like a man but as scared as a child. I even thought about leaving him, allotting three extra minutes to his life as I killed Andropov, then detonated the nuclear devices . . . the nukes. They no longer scared me the way that they first had. They had become part of my world.
The Unifieds, however, not realizing that they had already lost this fight, sent a gunbird out to kill me. The gunship floated right up to the LCB, stabilized its position no more than ten feet from the outer wall, and started firing chain guns in my direction. Behind my shielded armor, I didn’t worry about bullets, not even bullets from a gun that cut men into ribbons. The guns shattered walls and splintered partitions. They hit me like a strong wind, unable to hurt me but shoving me aside.
And then the gunship exploded. The fireball was gorgeous, a luminous twisting, glowing, yellow-and-orange knot that rose and faded but briefly seemed to fill the sky. Naens was alive. The little son of a bitch was alive, and he’d found rockets of some kind.
The chain-gun fire had penetrated the walls of the bathroom, shattering toilets and sinks and pipes from which water gushed out like they were fountains. The U.A. Marine fired three fléchettes at me as I came through the door; they hit me and evaporated, and then he brought his arm to his body and cradled it as if he had broken it and he curled one leg in front of the other, forming a standing version of the fetal position. He didn’t even look at me. He stared into an empty stall as I lowered my shields, grabbed a grenade, and pulled the pin. I bowled the pill toward that s
cared child of a soldier, then I turned and walked out of the bathroom without bothering with my shields, which turned out to be a bad mistake.
He fired at me!
Three tiles shattered as I reached for the door. They coughed little puffs of dust into the air.
I laughed and switched on my shields, but not because of that fainthearted bastard. Moments after I stepped through the door, the grenade exploded. Door and wall burst behind me. The shock wave sent me lurching forward, and I twisted my right leg. I lowered my shields again; I was alone. Almost alone.
The next step I took on my leg sent a shock up my spine, but I hid my wound as I walked to the door of Andropov’s office and kicked it aside. Twenty feet ahead of me, behind a desk I had once occupied, sat Tobias Andropov.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-ONE
Andropov wore shielded armor, but he hadn’t bothered putting on his helmet. It sat on the desk, and without the optical interface in the visor, the shields did nothing.
I didn’t worry about guards or assassins hidden inside this office. Any protection Andropov had, he’d spent outside, trying to keep me out at all costs. He’d known what would happen when I entered. He’d known how that would end.
I said, “I don’t know if you knew this, but you’re supposed to wear the helmet; it’s not going to protect you sitting on a desk.”
Andropov was still a young man by politician standards, a man in his forties. He looked soft but trim. His hair was still dark.
His face said it all, his wide-eyed stare, his clenched teeth. He didn’t blink.
Even without his helmet, he could still fire the fléchette cannon on the right sleeve of his armor. I’d seen tapes of this man taunting prison guards he knew were about to die. He acted brave when he held the cards. Now, in a cracking voice, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”
Hearing the fear in his voice, I wondered if he had wet himself under the desk.
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