An Eighty Percent Solution (CorpGov)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  After she cleared her nostrils of the silt, she called out, “Good sim, Augustine. Fell within 3 degrees of your prediction.” Because of this, both the Assassin teams closed safely on either side of its deadly swath.

  The platform, now canted at almost fifteen degrees, showed only sporadic areas still with lighting. Electrical shorts of blue-white flared out in random locations. Alarms continued to make useless noise. Loose material still slid around on the unnatural tilt. Sonya could pick up no deliberate movement by any of the internal response teams.

  “Sniper Team, switch to covering fire mode.”

  The first of the Assassin Team grav jumped up to the top of the first line of wreckage.

  “Team lead, we have Dayton response team inbound,” Augustine called over the link. “ETA six minutes. Response team is heavy. Repeat—response team is heavy in Sierra, India, X-ray minutes.”

  “Roger, Overlook. Assassin teams, abort. We can’t hold off a heavy weapons squad. All teams fall back to rendezvous point Bravo. Explosives Team will supply retreating cover and extract at Charlie.”

  “Overlook en route. Extraction Bravo forty-five. Extraction Charlie ninety.”

  “We didn’t get the prize, Tony, but you did well.”

  * * *

  “The Greenies once again perpetrated an outrage in a cowardly attack on a low-level computer training facility just outside the Ohio town of Fairborn.” The action committee of the GAM sat huddled around the tiny solido projector. From the large “LIVE” at the bottom, the feed presumably showed the listing and broken platform as it appeared right now. It looked different in the daylight. Firefighters helped injured people out of the wreckage as others shored up the rubble to make sure there were no other accidents. A line of ambulances waited off to one side. “The outlaw group butchered sixty-three, and wounded seventeen others.”

  “What the fark?”

  “Shhh,” several said in unison.

  The picture switched to one man wearing the blue coveralls of a computer tech. His face bore red splatters of blood and wept even more from a bandage covering his left eye. “They didn’t even give us a chance. First there was this horrific bang and the world tilted. Next thing we knew, they charged in with flechette rounds flying. I saw one of those bastards fire into my buddy Ron after he put up his hands to surrender.”

  “What is he blathering on about?”

  “Shhh!”

  “If it weren’t for the private security force SecWest,” the announcer continued as the view switched to show the tan and red uniformed gunmen keeping watch over the rescue operations, “the death toll would’ve skyrocketed.”

  The screen changed to an overly beautiful reporter questioning one of the SecWest officers, who wore a bandage around his shoulder. Without prompting, he said, “We were only able to apprehend two of the suspects and we were forced to kill four more as they open fired on us even when we had them surrounded.”

  “What a load of—”

  “Shhh!”

  “Captured? Are they barking mad?”

  “Will you shut up, too?”

  “…of our force lost their lives: Benjamin Anderson, twenty-five, and Celia Pauls, thirty. There will be a memorial in their honor Sunday at noon. At least their devotion to the sanctity of life and their ultimate sacrifice wasn’t in vain.” The view panned briefly to a grav litter, where the sheet pulled back to show what had once been a beautiful woman, now horrifically mutilated and torn apart across the throat. The image flashed back to the officer’s wounded shoulder.

  “And what about your injuries?” inquired the reporter.

  “Oh, this is nothing but a scratch. Not even worth worrying about. Honor Ben and Celia.”

  Someone in the room let out a Bronx cheer.

  “…is the security spokesman for WalMaCo, the parent company of the training facility, with a prepared statement.”

  “‘This is another case of patience leading to victory. While the Corporate Protection Act of ’24 allows us to try these two villains ourselves, we believe it’s in the better interest of the public to remand them to the custody of the neutral agency of the Dayton Metro Police. In this way everyone can understand just what monsters these terrorists are through due process of law.’”

  “I’ll give him terrorists…”

  “Will you shut up!”

  “…Director Atwell went on to say that the perpetrators were humanely questioned, revealing significant tactical data that may lead to further arrests. In other news…”

  The solidoset snapped off with a mental command from Augustine’s implants.

  “Well they didn’t cage or vape any of our people, so this cast is make-believe,” Linc said, jumping in again.

  “So what? We move on. And keep going. This doesn’t mean anything to us.”

  “No way. I go’ peeps insis’ing we’re hur’ing peeps.”

  “Who cares,” Andrew said, standing on a crate and waving his hands vehemently. “Let them go to hell in their own way.”

  “I have to disagree,” Tony said as he gently stroked the recently reunited Cin as she slept in the crook of his left arm. “This is concentrated propaganda intended to drive the people away from us; make us into enemies of the people instead of their savior.”

  “What makes you so special, corpie?”

  “Shut up there, Andrea.”

  “Tony, you did a right smashing job on that training center.”

  “Yup, he sure did. He took just long enough for us not to finish them. Maybe he had friends inside,” Andrea objected.

  “Now, Colin, they have the right to whatever opinions of me they want,” Tony offered as nonchalantly as possible.

  Sonya finally intervened by standing from her customary lotus. The room fell silent. “I’d like to make two things clear,” she began. “One: as leader of the explosives team I take responsibility for failing that action. Tony worked faster than I thought possible and accomplished more than I’ve ever expected. Had it not been for Tony’s quick thinking and expertise with explosives, we wouldn’t have even brought the training center down.”

  Sonya turned and walked away, passing almost through the doorway before Linc spoke up.

  “Wait a minute. That’s just one. Second?”

  “I’d work with Tony any time against any odds. Any of the rest of you who won’t are idiots.”

  * * *

  The two static bursts Tony heard in his earpiece meant only one thing, “Patrol.” Nothing could be worse in the middle of a transition move. With no choice he hung by one arm from a ceramcrete cornice one hundred meters high on the outer façade of the NikInc Building while cursing to himself. No longer strapped to his chest, the 2 kilo explosive charge dangled from his left hand.

  “I tell you, that girl from the Beaverton mailroom is shooting eyes at you,” came a voice below him. “I say go for it!”

  Tony couldn’t move for fear of drawing attention to himself, pattern-mimicking clothing notwithstanding. His mission brief told him the guards carried gauss guns capable of flaying the entire building face to dust with millions of steel slivers. That thought alone gave him a healthy dose of respect.

  “Chrissy would castrate me,” the other guard complained.

  “She’s been leading you on for months now. She’ll never sign a cohab contract.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t I tell you what she told Cher?”

  Tony’s right arm began to throb. Shotgun bursts of air batted against him like a kitten at a ball of fluff at the end of a string. He listened intently as the pair slowly moved around the perimeter of the football-field-sized landing platform.

  “Yeah, yeah. That don’t mean nothin’.”

  “I tell ya, it ain’t gonna happen. You got a smoke?”

  “Sure, but don’t let O’Donnell catch you. You already have two reprimands. One more and you could get sacked.”

  “O’Donnell doesn’t worry me. I got the dirt on him. He can make all the noi
se he wants but he can’t get rough with me.”

  Tony could feel every crenellation of the cement digging into his skin. Fatigue rolled through his arm as his body rocked back and forth in the wind. Gritting his teeth gave limited relief.

  “I can’t believe that little dance with Candy has made her that gun-shy.”

  “I think it had something to do with the fact that you were both dancing on your clothes instead of in them.”

  Tony couldn’t wait any longer. He passed back the emergency signal, four quick bursts with his tongue to the mic in the roof of his mouth.

  He expected nothing more than Colin to run for his life while Tony tried something equally stupid to escape before betraying his presence. Instead, Colin walked out onto the platform in plain view.

  “But it isn’t like we we’re doing—Hey! Who the hell are you?”

  Tony didn’t hesitate at this break, quickly sliding the plastiques back to their carrier. Almost in the same motion, he slapped his nanite-coated climbing gloves and shoes against the wall. As designed, the nanites penetrated into impurities and pores in any surface they touched, giving him nearly perfect grip.

  “Soy perdido,” came Colin’s perfect Spanish.

  “Buddy, I don’t care if you’re lost or not. You stop right now or we’ll cut you in half,” the first guard demanded, training their guns smartly on the intruder.

  “¡Arrepentido!”

  “You’ll be sorry, all right. Kneel and put your hands behind your head.”

  “Si.” A few grunts on the platform later, Tony risked a look back to see one of the security guards using a low-tech fiber-graphite binder on Colin’s wrists as he lay face down on the ground. The second guard stood professionally, 4 meters away, with his weapon trained on the prisoner. Another binder went tightly around each of Colin’s legs, with one loosely between the pair. The best he could hope for was a night of crude physical torture, and Tony couldn’t imagine the worst.

  “Up on your feet.”

  “Si, jeffe.”

  “Walk straight through that door.”

  Colin complied, never once attempting to resist. Tony watched in amazement as they walked directly beneath him and disappeared from sight. Nothing in his life had prepared him for someone willing to sacrifice for someone else. Nothing. Every fiber in his body screamed for him to plant the bomb and run. He hesitated, unable to move, his mind adjusting to something completely new.

  His tongue flicked the mic on his right molar. “Augustine, I need you to break the security on the electrical hatch to my right. I need it in the next forty seconds.”

  “Not asking for much, are you?” the old woman chided from over forty kilometers away.

  “Are you going to work or are we going to jaw?”

  “Door alarm disabled,” she offered almost immediately over his earpiece. “Paralysis gas and electroshock ice disabled.”

  Sweat rolled off Tony’s brow because at Nanogate they wired two manual deterrent systems above those attached to the computer systems—a little tidbit he learned during his brief stint in the Physical Security Division.

  Opening the door, Tony crawled into an oval orifice, barely larger than a sleeping capsule, pushing aside bundles of wires and fluid tubes. His eyes and mind focused on looking for traps. The temperature dropped as he belly-walked in. Again, his career broadening assignment paid off. Cooling the tube improved infrared sensor capability, but infrared sensors generated more false alarms than all other parts of a security system combined.

  As Tony’s breath clouded the air, he spotted the sensor, right where he’d seen similar devices at Nanogate. Balancing on his elbows, he snapped off three silent shots from his automatic at the sensor three meters away before a tiny arc of electricity announced its demise. Holstering his weapon, he chose to assume security would be similar to what he remembered. In that case, the only boundary yet to deal with would be a nanite stream, a simple group of mindless microscopic robots continuously sampling for foreign DNA. Invisible, but not invincible.

  Tony unhooked his Kevlar canteen and began running a thin bead of water on the floor. As he crept slowly forward he watched the water. The stream suddenly took a left turn as if a knife-thick wind blew it. Looking at his watch, Tony sloshed a larger amount of water, pushing the stream forward, breaking it briefly. Three minutes and four seconds later, the stream again interrupted itself for just a moment, letting him know the exact cycle time. Definitely not invincible, he thought.

  He poured the entire canteen empty, breaking the stream significantly. Tony also blew on the water, scattering it even further. Precisely 183 seconds later, he scrambled forward as fast as he could. If his legs still lay in the stream, it would only be acknowledged when security of one type or another tied his own wrists with graphite bands. Just ahead another access hatch opened down onto an empty hall.

  The 5 meter ceiling height caused an indecorous landing, but with no damage except to his pride. “I’m in,” he sub-vocalized. “Do you know where they’re holding him?”

  “I’ve isolated a single room that has no net access, no room monitors, no halon fire suppression and no fire alarm. I’m assuming that’s it. Fifty meters and turn left. Third door on the left.”

  The sterile white hallway demanded speed, not stealth, for his special clothing would be of no help here. Tony sprinted down the hall.

  “Yup,” he agreed. Spitting out only a few syllables at a time, he managed, “Can’t imagine anything except a closet would be designed that way.”

  “It isn’t a closet. Those are clearly marked on the plans. This is called a ‘utility room.’”

  “Keep an eye on the alarms.”

  “As if I wouldn’t. You pay attention to your job, son. I just disabled the tangle field you were about to run through.”

  Tony didn’t have any more breath for chitchat, or to even choke out a thank-you. His breath came in hot, ragged gasps.

  “What is your plan, anyway?”

  As an answer Tony put the muzzle of his assault weapon against the lock and fired just as he slammed the door with his full body weight. The door exploded inward. Colin struggled, chained to a chair. Two guards wore surprised faces.

  During his brief training, Tony’s marksmanship had improved from abysmal to merely awful. His first three shots stitched almost at random across the room, one creasing Colin’s hip and the last flattening against the chest armor of one guard, staggering him backward where he fell flat onto the floor. Colin screamed, falling backward in the chair, lowering his profile.

  Tony’s momentum, barely slowed by the door, carried him right over the chest of the downed guard. Tony’s boots elicited crackling noises as he trod over the man’s head. In a classic mistake, Tony fanned his automatic like a death beam, spinning up and to the left with the recoil of the old-fashioned weapon. None of the bullets even came close to his target. The remaining guard, responding quicker than most would to the mayhem, drew his gauss gun and fired a burst, but he misjudged Tony’s headlong speed. Instead of ripping Tony’s head off, the guard’s shot tore a gaping hole in the wall behind his target’s maniacal charge. The guard’s second burst chewed a dinner plate-sized hole in the plaster ahead of Tony as he slammed into the wall with a loud grunt of pain.

  One of Tony’s second bursts, wobbly and hurried from his impact, remarkably caught the second guard in the lower thigh between the armor plates and the knee. A second scream reverberated through the room as the he went down. A third cry followed as Colin rolled his chair over on the guard’s injured leg. Tony placed the red laser pointer dot on the man’s forehead and squeezed off the final projectiles of the battle.

  Breathing hard, Tony checked the man he’d stumbled over, finding a boot-sized impression rapidly pooling with blood in the corpse’s head.

  “You all right, Colin?”

  “Good enough to get out of here. Find the cutters.”

  With a certain amount of distaste, Tony scavenged through the deceased guards�
�� pockets before finding a pair of wire cutters.

  “You have three alarms going off,” came Augustine’s voice. “Vital function monitors from each of the guards, and environmental alarms on the nanite stream.”

  “We’re already on our way out.”

  “Don’t tarry. You have less than a minute to clear the building before they lock it down, and you have less than thirty-four seconds before guards erupt all around you.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.”

  “By the way, what’s the third alarm,” Tony asked as he ran.

  “Explosives detectors. You still have the package.”

  It wasn’t conscious thought that grabbed the explosives from his chest, flicked the timer down to as short as it would go and stuck it in the first doorframe he ran past.

  Tony thought Colin, even injured, probably set a new unassisted record for speed—less than fifteen seconds later the pair sprinted off the landing platform in a 300 meter base jump.

  “Yeehaw!” Colin yelled over the abyss. Behind them a bass roar and gout of flame announced their mission accomplished, if in an unorthodox way.

  Their chutes opened barely high enough over the ground to allow them a rough but survivable landing. Other than the quizzical looks of three nearby Nils, nobody noticed or cared. Tony and Colin cut off their chutes and quickly dove down a manhole. The remainder of the escape proved only silent professionalism.

  * * *

  After two weeks of walking nearly everywhere, Tony missed the comfort of the TriMet. Suet led him off the TriMet at Vancouver Tower. While no civilians moved away from the green warrioress, none actively crowded her either. Her body modification demanded respect.

  “Where are we going, now?” Tony asked for about the third time.

  “You run your mouth more than anyone I know,” Suet said in mocking tones about an octave above comfortable.

  “Talking is one of life’s great—”

  A jade-colored tentacle placed itself gently over his lips. “P’ease be quie’.”