by James Wake
“That will do dreadful things to my figure,” Nadia said, turning her nose up at the garment. “Look how masculine the cut is. It’s positively—”
Tess shoved it into her hands, looking anything but amused.
“Very well. Since you asked so nicely.” Nadia struggled to slide the thing over her head. It was flexible but thick, and as heavy as it looked.
It stopped at her waist. “Nothing vital down here?” Nadia said, waving at her general groin area and a generous portion of her lower abdomen.
“I got you something else too,” Tess said. Still not amused. She held up a small holster.
Nadia narrowed her eyes. “Where did you get that? Why did you get that?”
“Just in case.” Tess shrugged. “It’s only a three-eighty.”
It did look like a proper lady’s weapon, slim and short and shining black. But it didn’t matter.
“No,” Nadia said.
“Nadia…”
She held up a hand. “No. I refuse.”
Tess scrunched up her nose in a little pout that she’d probably be enraged to hear was cute. “Take the gun.”
“I don’t even know how to use one of those things!”
“You’ve never fired a gun before?”
“I’ve never even touched one before.”
“It’s easy. Look,” Tess said, drawing the weapon with her right hand.
“Put it away.” The mere sight of it sickened Nadia. “I am not carrying a firearm. End of discussion.”
Sighing, Tess put the weapon back in its holster.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone, Tess.”
“You’ve already hurt people!”
Nadia rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
Tess set the gun down on her bench. She rested her hands on it, staring far away.
“Are we ready?” Nadia said. “Goggle check, and then we‘re ready. Correct?”
Silently, Tess walked over to her and slid a mask over her head, followed by the beloved goggles. Nadia smelled a trace of whatever Tess had sprayed down her throat, sharp and stinging in her nose.
So close. Nadia felt a strange impulse to…several things, really. Take Tess’s hands in hers, hug her, simply lean against her for a moment. Hold an ice pack to her forehead. Feel that skeletal black hand resting on top of hers, finally warm compared to the ice.
The small space between them yawned on forever as Tess fiddled with the goggle straps. It ached, oddly, ached in her chest deep down, in a place she had long ago given up on feeling anything.
Done. Tess stepped back, sniffing loudly and clearing her throat. Gone. Just like that.
“Be careful tonight, okay?” Tess said with a sad smile. “No theatrics?”
“No promises.”
* * *
“You okay?”
Jackson nodded. More than twenty-four hours awake now. This used to be easy.
Ortega held up a small paper packet and offered it to her. Jackson knew what was in it, knew the pair of pills inside would have her awake and alert and ready to fight for hours. They also would have her sweating and blind and useless for a few hours after that.
She shrugged and took them anyway, dumping the pills down her throat and swallowing them dry.
“You wanna go up there, don’t you?” Ortega said.
Jackson shrugged again, waiting for the pills to loosen her tongue. She and her partner were posted outside what had to be the rear entrance, a large and impressive bank of doors at the foot of the skyscraper. Bright panels of white light decorated the building’s exterior, marked with that sweeping scarlet letter “A,” its legs descending into a double helix.
“He’s up there,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the tower looming over them.
“Come off it,” Ortega said. “What makes you think it’s a he anyway?”
Jackson tapped her stomach. “My gut.”
“Does your gut also tell you it doesn’t make sense to so quickly locate a single source of what’s obviously a distributed attack?”
That gave her pause.
“What does your gut say about how it’s awfully convenient APS found the culprit way out here? With few witnesses to worry about herding away?”
Jackson glanced out behind her—past their parked bikes and the patrolling officers and security barriers—at dark and empty streets.
Her gut considered these ideas while her mind fought to wake up. Her hand—antsy and fidgeting, ready and eager—cradled the grip of her revolver. “You saying this is all for show?” she said.
“I’m saying it makes more sense.”
“You sound so sure,” she said, cautious not to agree too much. She had a feeling their superiors would closely scrutinize their goggle feeds after tonight.
“Hold still,” Ortega said, his fingers twitching at his sides.
“What are you…?”
“Shh!” He held up one finger, then went back to typing.
Jackson sighed, still waiting for the kick of the pills to come in. Flickering blue and red bathed everything around her, dozens of squad cars and tactical vehicles forming a barricade around them.
Something clicked in her ears.
“Officer Jackson,” Ortega said, “I think you’ve had an unfortunate equipment malfunction.”
Her HUD changed. GPS offline. Her comms layers were…strange. The status readout kept changing, garbled text not forming anything near a word.
“Huh,” Jackson said, “Didn’t take you for a hacker.”
“I’m not,” Ortega said. “But I have good friends.”
“Can I still call out?”
“Yeah, you can start connections.” he said, “Try it out.”
She scrolled down her list and expanded the section under Taco Team Bravo. “Vicks? Come in?”
“Jackson?” his comms said back, clean and clear. “Can’t talk. We’re landing on the roof.”
She looked up at the lights of a helicopter swooping in to touch down on top of the building.
“Wooooo!” Wedge called out in the background of Vicks’s mike. “Lock and load, ladies!”
“Gotta go,” he said. The feed cut out.
“Well, I’ll be…” Jackson said. “Nice work, pal.”
“Figured it might be smart. Since we have strict orders to keep to our post.”
She gave Ortega a quick chuck on the arm. “Not bad for a soft downtown dweller.”
“Hey, don’t thank me yet. I still don’t know how we’re gonna—”
He stopped, cut off by a loud something coming from the other side of the building. Groaning, squealing metal.
“Get in without being noticed,” he said.
Something crashed, echoes bouncing at them from around the corner.
“Was that a bomb?” Ortega said.
“No.” Jackson grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him with her. Every cop nearby was looking at their goggle feeds; some of them held a hand to one ear. “Let’s move.”
* * *
An AGF satellite office, the reporter had said. The building certainly was at the edge of downtown—no lie there. The border that shielded the area from the slums was less than a block away: emergency seawalls from before the reclamation, now just plain old walls. Concrete and barbed wire and cameras running for miles. Not even a checkpoint nearby.
Nadia watched from across the street, hiding several floors up in a construction site. The tower across the street looked more like a deserted building, new but empty. Most of the floors were dark. The calm in the middle of a storm of flashing lights and people in armor, guns drawn and facing it.
Not a single break in the crowd.
“Welp. That’s too bad,” Tess said in Nadia’s ears. “No way in.”
“You’re not trying very hard.” Nadia ducked under an empty frame of a wall and slithered inside. Dark and
empty. A skeleton of a skyscraper.
“Have I told you this is a stupid idea?” Tess said.
“A hundred times. Which is impressive, considering the time span.”
Nadia perched near the edge, inching her head up enough to look down on the security forces a few floors below.
“Look, I can’t even get Dronicus close to the building across the street,” Tess said. A feed appeared in the corner of Nadia’s goggles, a hovering camera hedging nervously at the edge of the crowd, while larger, meaner drones patrolled the air.
“You’re terrible at naming things,” Nadia said.
“You know what I’m not terrible at? Oh, yeah, breaking into a building that’s surrounded by cops.”
“What do you want me to do? Turn around and come home?”
“Yes!”
Nadia rolled her eyes, catching something on their trip up. A crane straddled the edge of the construction site, a bright-red steel behemoth that stretched into the sky. Dormant.
“That crane is quite close to the completed tower,” Nadia said. “Seems dangerous. Looks like it would hit the building if it swung over.”
“And that’s important why?”
A fair question. Nadia’s eyes wandered up and down the completed tower—sheer glass, nothing to climb as far as she could see. The top of the crane itself was still far below the top of the building, red and green lights blinking along the length of it.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Any chance you could control that thing? The crane? Swing the arm?”
“Jib.”
“What?” Nadia hunkered down, still staring up at the crane.
“It’s called a jib. The arm part of the crane.”
“Wonderful. Thank you. Can you swing the jib?”
“Uh…like, operate it?”
“Yes, if I get you connected to the crane?”
A few moments of silence.
“Is that a no?”
“I’m looking stuff up. Hang on.”
More silence. Nadia shifted on her feet, feeling her slippers scratch the dusty, bare steel.
“Very sweet of you to come to my rescue.”
She tensed up, a swarm of voices squealing in her ears. “Did you hear that? Those voices?”
“What? Dronicus says there’s no one anywhere near you.”
“Silly girl. This is a private channel.”
Nadia glared up at the tower rising across the street, where Auktoris Private Security helicopters were landing and taking off from the roof in quick succession.
“Your help is appreciated but unnecessary. Go home.”
“Okay, I think…I can control it, yeah,” Tess said. “You owe me big if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“All the same,” Nadia said, “I trust you’d like to work with me?”
“Well, I mean, I do want to see who’s in there,” Tess said.
“Clever. I’m not even there. Turn back.”
“You know I’m not going to walk away from this,” Nadia said, not believing Cheshire for a second.
Tess let out a long sigh. “Fine. Get me connected.”
Nadia crawled down through the construction site, slowly and carefully. No cameras on this side of the street, no guards, no motion at all. The bones of a flight of stairs drifted past her as she climbed down wall frames, planned out but empty of insulation or sheetrock or drywall.
Ground floor. Nadia crept from cover to cover, using her wrist camera to check corners, watching a feed from…Dronicus keeping an eye on her surroundings. The edge of the site was a chain-link fence, the only object standing between her and the crane towering up into the sky. She scaled the fence as though it were nothing, then slipped over the top and gracefully landed into a crouch.
Nothing moved, not even the tarps thrown over piles of cinder blocks and steel beams.
“I don’t see the controls,” Nadia said. Nothing but a bare frame and a cage elevator here.
“The operator cab is up top, idiot.”
“I’m sure you only know that because you looked it up a minute ago.”
“Guilty,” Tess said. “Should be a maintenance panel on that leg over there.”
A box lit up in Nadia’s goggles, a bundle of cables growing out of it and climbing the steel leg of the crane like ivy. With one more glance over her shoulders, she went over to it; it was locked with a simple badge-reader. The same model she’d seen on dozens of doors by now. When she pressed her sleeve up against it, she was surprised to see it blink red.
“Crap,” Tess said. “That’s a pretty nasty lock. Don’t think I can get in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pressed her sleeve against it once more. Green.
“This is still insane,” Tess said. “Just putting that on the record.”
“Again. Noted.” The box opened up to a mess of exposed cables, no labels or order to any of it.
“Third blue one from the left,” Tess said.
It didn’t make sense. “The teal one?”
“No, the other blue.”
“That is cyan.”
“Ugh. They’re all blue.”
One of the wires lit up, outlined in her HUD. Nadia dug it out from the bundle. “Splice transmitter?”
“You remembered!”
Nadia attached a small nub to the cable—like Tess’s usual connector but with a clamp instead of a plug. It lit up and cinched itself tight.
“Done. Connecting…” Tess said.
Nadia closed the box and crept back into the shadows of the fence. Still nothing moving around her. She did a quick scan with her thermal on: all cold and blue.
“Okay, I think… Yeah, I think I got this,” Tess said.
“Leave. This is too dangerous.”
“You probably want to be over by the entrance when I do this.”
The cat had waited to speak until Tess was finished—he must have been able to hear her as well. So their communications were completely compromised. If Nadia’s mind hadn’t been made up before, it certainly was now.
She hopped the fence again, taking up a position at the edge of the construction site with a clear view of the street and the officers. It would have been a straight shot to the doors if not for the jam-packed crowd of cars, vehicles, and people in the way.
“You ready?” Tess said. “This is such a fucking mess.”
“We didn’t exactly have time to plan,” Nadia said, tensing up on her feet. “I’m ready.”
“Okay, and…on!”
A low, groaning squeal rose out of the sky above her. Nadia snapped her eyes up to it, catching the crane come to life and swing toward the finished building. It looked so slow, size and distance conspiring to give it a dreamy kind of pace.
The crowd in front of her changed tone, all of them looking up. One pointed.
The crane kept swinging, the jib coming closer and closer to the tower.
“Er…you’re not going to actually hit the building, are you?” Nadia said.
“Hadn’t planned on it. How’s this?”
The jib stopped almost directly above her. Something on the end of it moved, and a long whining spooling noise grew out of the night sky.
The guards in front of the building backed off, slow and nervous.
Louder and louder. Horrible scraping spinning. Feeling a breeze pick up around her, Nadia squinted at the object falling out of the sky. She started to zoom the view in her goggles, but the thing was falling far too fast.
It landed, a hook block the size of a car crashing into the street to her left. She felt the ground lurch under her feet, heard the officers yelp and scramble for cover as pieces of asphalt flew in every direction.
“Wow!” Tess yelled. “That was satisfying.”
A pair of steel cables went slack over the thing, then pulled tight and lifted the hook block out of the
giant pothole it had created. It swung in place then flew toward the crowd, dragging an APS van with it.
Like panicked ants, fleeing in every direction.
Nadia took her chance, sprinting across the street in a matter of seconds, a nervous rush coursing through her at being out in the open. Crouched low, she darted between vehicles, her glowing blue goggle eyes turned off for once.
Almost there. She hopped the hood of a car, slid across prone, and took off like a stalking cat, barely missing a step. The entrance was a row of glass doors up a wide, low set of stairs, something she could bound over in a few strides.
With screams and the swinging of the crane behind her, she burst her way through an unlocked set of doors into the tower.
“Wait up!” Tess said. “Dronicus is still outside. Hold the door open a sec?”
Still crouched, Nadia turned to see a trio of Domes staring out the glass walls of the dark lobby. She darted to the empty reception desk, rolled over it, and curled up underneath.
“Damn it. I’m stuck out here,” Tess said.
“You’re still with me, even if Dronicus isn’t,” Nadia whispered, poking her wrist over the counter. She turned her wrist to see a row of elevators waiting for her. Only a quick crawl away…and there.
“I don’t see any cameras,” Tess said. “Weird.”
“The lights are all dead,” Nadia said, keeping an eye on the guards over her shoulder. The lobby was mostly lit by the streetlights outside and painted with the shifting pulses of red siren lights. She pushed the “up” button next to one of the elevators. Nothing. It didn’t even light up.
“No power? That’s gonna put a real damper on my effectiveness. I think I saw stairs over…” Tess started, as Nadia slipped her fingers between the elevator frame and the door. “Okay, never mind?”
A moment’s resistance, utterly folding as the strength in her sleeves took over. She yanked the outer door open, then the inner. Once inside, she spotted a ceiling panel she could pop open.
In moments, Nadia was standing on top of the elevator in a dark and endless shaft, just as she had at the lab months ago. Dim light peeked out from doors far above her, the flickering of searching flashlights.
