by J N Chaney
I looked for Andrew Jones and saw him grappling with a masked attacker. I changed my grip on my blade, intending to run over and finish his opponent off for him. Before I could get there, Andrew caught his opponent’s attack and pivoted violently, throwing the man over his shoulder headfirst so rapidly that the assassin had no opportunity to even attempt a break-fall. His head hit the roof with the whole weight of his body behind it, snapping his neck with a sound I could hear even at three meters away. Jones stepped back, and the masked killer collapsed in a heap dead on the roof.
The sheer violence of the throw was almost as extreme as the acts Sasha and I had just committed, but none of those things could have prepared me for what I saw when I turned and looked for Vincenzo Veraldi.
I’d always seen Veraldi’s fascination with knife-fighting as being mildly pathological, considering that the knife is generally useless in most fights. I had to admit that he was highly skilled, but it’s like knowing how to tan your own leather or make your own 18th century buff coat. It might be interesting, but it’s not useful.
Well, our resident knife-fighting expert finally had his chance to shine. He’d been facing off with his opponent the whole time I’d been fighting mine, but unlike me he hadn’t taken any cuts. Despite the visual distortions produced by the assassin’s thermoptic holography setup, Veraldi was dodging and weaving like some kind of dancer, always out of reach of his opponent’s blade. By the time I finally took a step in his direction, Veraldi was ready to make his own move. He slipped under a cut and performed some maneuver with his own blade that made it flash in the night. Then he pivoted away and dropped back into his knife-fighting stance while the attacker stumbled and then stopped in place.
There was a gasp, but I don’t know if the assassin was the one who made the sound or if it was me. A second later, the man’s intestines came pouring out of the front of his cloak and coiling up at his feet like a pile of rope.
Luckily I didn’t have to look at the sight for long. With his opponent disemboweled, Veraldi no longer had anything to fear from the man’s two blades. Before the assassin could even fall, Veraldi kicked him directly in the face and knocked him backward off the roof. He disappeared, his guts trailing behind him as he fell.
“You don’t think that was overkill?” asked Jones, but Veraldi didn’t answer. He just walked to the edge, looked down at his handiwork, and nodded grimly at what he saw.
“Remind me to never, ever piss off that lunatic,” said Sasha Ivanovich.
Jones laughed. “It’s too late for that.”
I was still bleeding, so I turned back to the man I’d killed and searched him for anything that could stop it. Sure enough, he had a personal medkit under his cloak. “Hey Jones, these guys are carrying medkits.”
“Oh, right. I’m bleeding again. Thanks, Tycho!”
He soon found one for himself, and we were able to use them to get ourselves patched up and medicated—just enough to function and avoid infection. My hand was shaking as I applied the patch, and I realized I was slightly faint from loss of blood.
Andrew’s face looked slightly horrified. “You don’t look so hot, Barrett. I think you had a close one.”
“No doubt about that. Have you ever seen anything like that before?”
He shook his head. “No, but I get the legends now. That was some weird shit. Sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”
“It’s not as weird as it looks. Hold on a sec.”
I turned back to the dead Kagebushin in front of me and searched him quickly. It didn’t take me long; the holographic emitter was on his belt, right near where he had kept his medkit. I pulled it off and handed it to Andrew, who took it from me with an astonished look.
“Is this… is it what I think it is?”
“A holographic emitter?” I nodded. “Yeah. That’s how they make people think they can shapeshift.”
He kept on staring at it, turning it over in his hands. “I just don’t get it. How could an organized crime group on Mars have Earth military technology? We’re talking about tech that’s still in development.”
“I don’t know, Andrew, but that’s a question for another day.”
“You’re right about that.” He handed it back to me. “Here, put this on your belt. I’ll pull one off this guy. These could come in handy.”
Equipped with our own holographic emitters, we’d have a big advantage in any fight, not just close quarters. It’s hard to aim effectively at someone who isn’t really where you think they are. Meanwhile, Veraldi had returned from whatever dark mental universe he’d gone to during the knife fight. “What are you two doing?”
Andrew answered him. “You’re not going to believe this, but these guys have some sort of holographic emitters. I’d say they were prototypes given how advanced the tech is, but they look like production models.”
“Holographic emitters? You mean like this one?”
He pulled his shirt up, revealing that one of the devices was already hanging from his belt. Jones was stunned; he couldn’t even think of anything to say.
“I figured that’s what they were doing as soon as the fight started,” Veraldi explained. “I got in close with a sleight of hand trick and slipped it off his belt without him ever even feeling it. By the time I gutted him, he must have thought he was seeing double.”
I couldn’t help it and started laughing. Sasha looked at me like I was crazy. He probably thought we all were by that point.
Jones shook his head. “Vincenzo, you are more disturbing than I ever realized.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Now let’s get going while we still have the chance. There’s a crowd forming down there by the guy I disemboweled, and our problems are only going to get worse.”
That didn’t seem likely. It didn’t even seem possible. On the other hand, we still had a long way to go before we got out of East Hellas.
14
As we made our way across Fuji Section, I kept expecting the Kagebushin to make another attempt on us. After all, we had killed four of their supposedly invincible assassins. Shouldn’t they want us dead more than anything?
As we crossed from one rooftop to another, I still had the sense that we were being watched. I’m sure we were, but whoever was watching us kept their distance. In the whole history of the Kagebushin, they had never before run into anyone they simply couldn’t handle. Now that it had happened, they probably just wanted us to get out of their territory as quickly as possible so they could start repairing their reputation. A crowd of civilians had seen their killers get slaughtered. They weren’t going to live that down right away.
We rested on a rooftop near the edge of the district, always ready for one last-ditch attempt against us. Veraldi was looking out across the city. “We’ll be at the airlock gate soon.”
Jones nodded. “Yeah. But how are we planning to get through?”
“One thing at a time. We need to see what conditions are like up there.”
I heard something from up ahead. A swelling and receding sound, like the tide.
“What’s that?”
Veraldi listened for a moment then shook his head. “Trouble. I don’t know.”
The closer we got, the more obvious it became that Veraldi was right. This was trouble for everyone. Street traffic had been choked off completely by a massive crowd advancing in our direction from the neighboring district. Many of them had their faces covered by the flowing scarves we had seen so often here in East Hellas. Some of them carried cudgels, or protest signs heavy enough to be used as such. Others carried slingshots, while still others were busy breaking up chunks of plasticrete to use as ammo or filling bottles to make improvised firebombs.
Blocking their way with obvious nervousness, a line of StateSec Officers stood with guns at the ready. They were holding the crowd back for the moment with the threat of lethal force, but if they made the mistake of acting on that threat the crowd could just as easily overwhelm them wi
th sheer numbers and rip them apart.
Little by little, step by anxious step, StateSec was falling back into Fuji Section. The only trouble with that, as far as they were concerned, was that a crowd was now forming behind them as well. Which side would Fuji Section take?
On the one hand, they might view the angry mob advancing from across their border as an armed invasion, in which case they would probably take the side of StateSec. On the other hand, they had just as many troubles here with Martian Sclerosis as everyone else in East Hellas, and the corruption and mismanagement of Ares Terrestrial was just as much of an issue to them. If they made the decision to join the revolution, the StateSec officers on the street below us didn’t stand a chance.
On the rooftops on the other side of the street, I saw two Kagebushin killers watching the scene unfold from behind their scowling demon masks. Any serious reform movement would have to do something about all the syndicates, so the gangsters would probably take the government’s side. That might not matter, though. When a whole populace decides it’s had enough, gangsters get swept away just as easily as any other institution.
From the state of the milling crowd on the Fuji Section side of the developing street battle, I couldn’t tell which way the district was leaning. People looked agitated, and some of them were armed. Some of them had masked up. But which way would they jump?
The swelling sound I’d heard from a few blocks away was the sound of the approaching mob, which moved with the eerie quiet I’d learned to associate with an East Hellan crowd. It’s not that they were silent, but they weren’t chanting or yelling, not yet. They were rolling forward like a mudslide, gathering weapons as they advanced.
Someone in the crowd rushed forward suddenly and smashed a long wooden pole through a storefront window. The glass crumbled and fell in, and there was an angry murmur from the Fuji Section people. Then another protester grabbed the vandal and dragged him back into the depths of the crowd. I don’t know what happened to him, but the message was clear. They weren’t here to fight Fuji Section—they were here to fight StateSec.
A slingshot whirled, and a chunk of plasticrete arced up and flew through the air to hit a StateSec officer directly in the head. He had gear, so he wasn’t hurt, but he stumbled back a step then steadied himself and resumed his place in the line. The crowd inched forward, ominously quiet and purposeful. Another chunk came flying, and then with no transition at all there were so many flying chunks of plasticrete that it looked like a hailstorm.
The StateSec officers firmed up their line, and an officer shouted an order. They all aimed at once, except for one who was unexpectedly knocked down by a huge plasticrete shard. When they pulled their triggers, I expected bodies to start dropping all down the advancing rebel line. Instead, tear-gas grenades shot out across the street, filling the air with a drifting cloud of white gas.
The crowd didn’t retreat, despite the fact that some of them were hit directly by the gas grenades and knocked over by the impact. Their comrades dragged them away to get medical attention, and the rest of the crowd just kept advancing.
The soldiers continued to fall back slowly, but the crowd behind them was giving them no space to retreat. They were starting to get hemmed in, and it could only be a matter of time before they made the decision to shoot their way out.
“What are those armbands?” asked Veraldi.
Some of the protesters on the frontline were wearing black armbands with green lettering. Jones peered down at them. “I can’t be sure from this distance, but those look like the armbands some of Bensouda’s Hafidi’s followers used to wear to show that they were willing to be martyred for the cause.”
Ivanovich scowled. “Yes, yes, the rich culture of East Hellas is always fascinating. Especially the unique customs of religious fanatics and street scum. Much more interesting than getting out of here alive.”
“The man has a point,” I said. “It won’t be easy to get through a crowd like that and get out of this section. Isn’t there some other way to get to Great Wall?”
“Well”—Jones tapped his foot on the roof as he thought—“maybe? Each district has several of those airlocks, one for each adjoining cell. They only close them during an emergency, so those gates are really just short tunnels through the walls separating the districts. Those walls are massive, but even so it wouldn’t take long to get through one on foot if you had access to an open airlock. There are vertical gates and horizontal gates, so in theory we could go just about anywhere. The only trouble is getting through them. There are usually train lines, and where there isn’t one, the gangs usually guard the borders.”
“I’ve seen that myself,” I replied. “I don’t think we want to run into any Kagebushin border guards right now.”
Veraldi grinned. “They’d be glad to see the back of us. But we shouldn’t change directions now, it might tempt them to try their luck again. The train station is right up there, and the trains aren’t running. With StateSec fighting to reestablish order and the trains stopped, we can probably just climb up and walk the rail.”
Jones nodded. “Yes, we take the train tunnel through the wall. Okay, Tycho, could you use your skeleton key to get the rail maintenance access open?”
“Sure.” I sprinted ahead and hacked the maintenance door. That wasn’t the hard part, though. The hard part was the pylon ladder, a long climb up the front wall of the train station. If anyone saw us from down below and took objection to our presence, they’d be able to aim carefully and pick us off one by one while we tried to climb.
As the others caught up with me, I pointed up the long metal ladder. “We’ll be easy targets up there.”
“Easy targets for who?” asked Sasha. “They’re too busy trying to kill each other down there to worry about us.”
“No, Tycho’s right,” said Andrew. “Anyone could shoot us. StateSec, the Kagebushin, anyone who recognizes our pictures and wants to collect on the contract.”
Veraldi craned his head to look up the ladder. “We’ll just have to take that chance. If we can get up that ladder, we’ll wind up on the level above this one and can cross over easily to the other side through the unused train tunnel. It’s too good to pass up.”
I wondered if it wasn’t too good to be true, but I wasn’t the field commander so I kept my mouth shut. Vincenzo went in through the access gate before anyone else—he just didn’t like to let anyone else take point—and Andrew went after him. Sasha was next, leaving me to bring up the rear.
It was a long climb, but my curiosity about what was happening on the street below us made it even longer for me. I kept pausing and looking down, checking out the battle as it unfolded. The StateSec officers still weren’t using live ammunition, but they were firing gas grenades directly into the crowd with a horizontal trajectory instead of letting them arc up and land on the protesters from above.
As they must have known it would, this was resulting in horrible head injuries. The protesters dragged a fallen comrade out of the way by his feet. The wound in his head left a streak of blood along the pavement. Once he was gone, the crowd took their revenge. A half-dozen firebombs came arcing out and landed among the StateSec officers in bursts of flame. One officer got hit and ran off panicking in a cloak of fire.
How long could this go on before somebody died? Had someone already died? I didn’t know. I glanced up the ladder and saw that my companions were well ahead of me. I was only about a quarter of the way up by this point. I reached up for the next rung, deciding that what I should really do was to focus on the task at hand.
That’s when I heard the screech. It was a strange sound to hear in East Hellas, where there is normally no vehicular traffic of any kind, but it sounded just like a speeding car. When I looked down at the street again, I saw an armored vehicle barreling down the street at high speed while civilians dove out of the way in one direction or the other. Even the StateSec officers had to jump to avoid it, although they looked like they might have been expecting its
arrival. When it rolled to a halt, the side of the armored vehicle slid open and three massive figures unfolded themselves from inside and stepped out onto the street.
The first one I saw was vaguely canid, though less so than the cyborg we’d seen on the train. The creators of this one—most likely including the man we were trying to escort out of the city—had given it a dog-like body and goat-like legs, a combination that seemed alien and disconcerting.
The second looked something like a polar bear and was by far the most frightening cyborg I’d seen up until that moment. In the Arctic city of Sif back on Earth, I’d seen a few dejected polar bears poking around in the trash at the city dump. I wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to those bedraggled creatures, but they were more sad than terrifying. This thing was majestic, the sort of monster you could imagine a caveman fighting back at the beginning of human history—except that its white color came from nanosuit plating instead of fur.
The third made the second one look like a cyborg teddy bear. It was a good fifteen feet tall, with long arms that reached all the way to the ground, and its body looked like a nightmarish combination of different primate species. Mounted on the monster’s back, it had what looked like two ship-to-ship cannons.
Erinyes. The bosses at Ares Terrestrial had sent the Erinyes in against their own people. For a brief moment, I thought the cyborg chimeras were just there to terrify the crowd into submission, to drive back the rioters, but no. As I clung to the ladder, my eyes wide with horror, the ape-cyborg reached down and grabbed a man up from the street in its massive hand then threw him casually against a building. The man’s body shattered like overripe fruit on impact. Whoever he was, the man hadn’t even been one of the rioters. He was part of the crowd from Fuji Section, which had not yet done anything to attack the security forces other than to block their way. Most of the crowd on that side had already started running, but the ape-cyborg quickly caught up with them and started tossing people left and right and crushing them underfoot as it charged through the mass of people. The bear-cyborg turned on Hafidi’s supporters and waded right into them, tearing and smashing with its massive claws. The canid darted in behind it, savaging anyone who fell to the ground.
