Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  “Listen up, everyone.” Andrea’s voice was flat, the nothing-but-business tone of someone who knows they don’t have any good news to impart. “We’re alone in a city that wants us dead. That’s just how it is. Between us and safety, there’s a giant wall and a border checkpoint crawling with East Hellas StateSec. We have to assume they’ll shoot on sight. If we make it past that, there’s the West Hellas side and the Royal Guard. We don’t even know what to expect from them. We don’t have any ballistics, and we don’t have any blades. Our survival depends on our ability to outthink anything that stands in our way. I expect everyone to do exactly that. We all go home. Understood?”

  There was a grim and awkward silence. We glanced at each other nervously, not sure how to respond to what she was saying. The idea that we could really survive on our wits alone, in a city being torn apart by revolution, seemed impossible.

  Thomas Young broke the silence. “So what you’re saying is that I’ll be the only survivor.”

  The silence continued for another second, although now it was more of a stunned silence than an awkward one. Then we all started laughing at once, and I suddenly realized that Young actually had a sense of humor.

  “Alright, alright.” Bray shook his head, still trying to control the laughter. “Fuck it, then.”

  There was nothing else to say. “Fuck it, then” was now the official motto of Section 9 for the remainder of the mission, however short and fiery that might turn out to be.

  The border station came into view up ahead of us, with the great rampart looming behind it. Thomas consulted his dataspike and decided it would be a good time to give us continuous updates on a terrifying situation we had no control over.

  “1000 meters and closing. 950 meters… 900 meters…”

  “Get ready.” Andrea raised her hand. Jonathan braced himself to pull the coupling on her signal, and I stood ready to engage the brakes.

  “850 meters… 800 meters…”

  Andrea’s hand went down, and Jonathan yanked out the coupling. I engaged the brakes, and our car stopped so suddenly that we were all thrown off our feet. I flew across the car, bounced off a row of tastefully upholstered seats, and fell backward into a sitting position. It isn’t impossible for a maglev to derail—as East Hellas StateSec was about to find out—but it isn’t easy either. We survived the stop, and the lead car surged ahead without us.

  It’s hard to describe what happened next. I could describe sight and sound of it, how the force of the impact’s shock traveled through the rail like a wave across water, how the engine car sheared through the half-ton plasticrete support columns as though they were made of sand, but that wouldn’t do the event justice. You’d have to feel the train rail whip your car through the air and know that you are held aloft only by the grace of electromagnetism flowing through a closed circuit that could fail at any moment. You’d have to feel the heat of the blast as broken fuel cells explode in a thirty-meter ball of flame doused almost immediately after with the byproduct of the reaction that created it. Most of all, you’d have to smell the carbonized flesh of everyone that had been too slow or unlucky to get clear. That was the second time I’d encountered that smell, and it never gets away from you.

  Everything in front of us was shattered and broken, and where the train had hit the checkpoint, there was now just an ugly gash of a wound across the stately, white facade. Beyond that gaping maw there would be broken bodies, human beings torn and mangled and flash-incinerated. As the wreckage settled, I looked on in awe and thought about Andrea Capanelli’s words. A nano scalpel, not a blunt instrument. How could something like this be the most discrete action possible?

  Sasha was holding his palm to his head, his eyes wide. Veraldi was pulling himself up from the floor. Jones had been knocked back into a seat and was wincing with what looked like lower back pain. Thomas Young was against the wall, shaking his head and breathing out slowly. Bray was grinning, still in a nearly hysterical humor.

  Andrea stood, her face as grim and humorless as it had been before the crash. “On your feet, Section 9.”

  19

  There were bodies everywhere, most of them in StateSec uniforms. The men we had just killed had indeed been waiting to ambush us, based on the weapons some still clutched in their severed hands. Half of a ribcage and a right arm hung from a twisted metal pole about fifteen feet up, and it was still holding a submachine gun. Nearby, I saw a severed leg, the top half of a woman, and a decapitated head with degloved face.

  “This shit is gruesome,” Bray commented, and I suddenly felt the urge to vomit. I stumbled over to the side and threw up against one of the many physical security barriers the maglev had sheared through. As far as I could tell at first, the train had left no survivors on the East Hellas side of the border control checkpoint. Andrea wanted to weaponize the train, and she had done so in spectacularly destructive fashion.

  “Hang in there, buddy.” Andrew clapped me on the shoulder. “This is not a great day at the office, I’ll give you that.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, having no idea how to respond to that bit of gallows humor. Jones went on right on talking. “Hey, it’s okay, Tycho. You don’t have to like it. You can always self-medicate later.”

  I opened one eye. “Are you planning to continue along these lines?”

  He grinned, but it looked as sad and sick as I felt. “Only if I have to. You need to keep moving forward, unless you want to join all these people.” He gestured at the ruined bodies strewn out all around us, and I nodded weakly. I stood up straight, wiped my mouth off on my sleeve, and said, “Okay.”

  Andrew just looked at me. “You know that was disgusting, right?”

  I shook my head and walked off, trying to get a sense of what was up ahead of us. The smoke made it hard to see, but we would have to go through that smoke to get where we were going. Andrea Capanelli was doing the same thing I was, peering into the gloom ahead of us with her hands on her hips.

  “What’s up there?” I asked.

  “The demilitarized zone. Which, as always, is a hell of a misnomer. It’s four kilometers wide and the only thing standing between us and West Hellas.”

  “Can we make it across?”

  “I don’t see why not. As far as I can tell, everyone on the East Hellas side was killed on impact.”

  Her voice sounded completely cold, but when she lifted a hand to brush her hair away from her face, I saw that she was shaking. I was surprised to see that. Her limbs were prosthetic. Her mother really must have been an expert surgeon to get that kind of integration when the science was two decades younger.

  She noticed me looking and balled her hand up into a fist. “Go see if you can find a weapon.”

  I didn’t move immediately. Before I had joined up with Section 9, Andrea and I were well on the way to being friends. But an officer has no friends, so they say, and now that I was on the team, she was my commanding officer. She turned away from me, making it clear she had nothing else to say. I finally stepped back and wandered over toward the first set of bodies to see what I could find.

  Bray was already looting the dead. He looked up as I approached. “Is the chief okay?”

  “A bit shaken I think, but yeah.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Killing is hard the first time you do it. After a while, it’s just like any other job.”

  That wasn’t my experience, but I didn’t want to contradict the man. I sometimes felt like I was haunted, like the ghosts of all the people I’d killed as an Arbiter and now as a Section 9 operative were always there, just beyond the periphery of my vision.

  “Don’t make that face.” Bray cuffed me on the shoulder. “The thousand-yard stare isn’t a good look on anyone.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yeah. I need to find a weapon.”

  “Ammo too.”

  Bray was already doing just that. I looked around for a moment, trying to find something useful that didn’t have to be pried out of a deathgrip. It didn’t
take too long. A few feet away from me, a StateSec officer crushed from the chest down lay staring up at the ceiling. He had a rifle beside him and a few spare magazines in one of his pockets.

  I grabbed the magazines, tossing aside one that looked too bent to be used, then took the rifle. It was still warm to the touch from the blast. I checked to make sure that it still seemed functional. The bolt carrier moved cleanly, and there didn’t seem to be any warping of the barrel. I had to admit to myself that it felt good to be holding a gun again. The thought crossed my mind that the dead man I’d taken this from had probably felt pretty secure with it too.

  I stood and saw Andrea pulling a submachine gun from inside of a body. The person had died in a fetal position and the flesh had fused, meaning the easiest way to free the weapon was by pulling through the stomach and out of the lower back. It came free with a sickening noise, and she looked it over then nodded in satisfaction.

  “Okay, everyone. We’re about to make the crossing through the demilitarized zone to the West Hellas border. I want all of you to move slowly unless we come under fire. The Royal Guard should be considered friendlies, but remember that they have no idea who any of us are. When they see a group of armed refugees in work-suits, the first thing they’re going to do is tell us to drop our weapons.”

  “I’m not dropping my weapon again.” Bray scowled, holding a high-capacity handgun that looked like a child’s toy in his massive hands.

  “These are in case we run into surviving StateSec on this side. When we reach the West, we’re going to have to let them take us into custody. We can coordinate later through the consulate for release and assistance. That’s our only chance.”

  Jonathan shook his head, clearly unhappy with the whole idea. Andrea looked around, waiting to see if there were any other objections. No one said anything. Even Ivanovich kept his mouth shut, although his face was positively mournful.

  “Right, then.” Andrea stepped aside. “Bray and I will bring up the rear. Jones and Barrett on point. Veraldi, stick tight to Ivanovich. Understood, everyone?”

  “Understood.” The chorus of voices sounded grim and subdued.

  Up until that moment, we had been standing directly in the wake of the train as it slammed through the station. Up above us, the ceiling had collapsed and sections of the floors above were visible. I glanced up as we moved out and was surprised to catch a glimpse of movement.

  “Someone’s alive up there.”

  “Move fast,” Andrea called out. I headed out at a jog, keeping an eye on the upper floors as I went. I caught a glimpse of a StateSec officer taking up a position near the hole in the ceiling. A few feet away from him, I saw the unmistakable figure of a Black Kuei gunman.

  A bullet suddenly pierced the floor in front of me, and like the first drop of rain that precedes a thunderstorm, it was rapidly followed by a downpour of fire. I was already veering off to the right so I took cover behind a slab of the shattered ceiling. With nowhere to go, I just listened to the rain pour down.

  When it finally started to taper off, I popped and shot at the first human form I could spot, a syndicate gunman who was peering down over the edge to see what they’d accomplished. He clutched at his chest, staggered, then tumbled over through the gap and slammed into the floor a few feet in front of my cover.

  I managed to get a glimpse of the other side of the thoroughfare before ducking back down and was able to confirm that Johnathan, Vincenzo, Andrew, and Ivanovich were all huddled against the wall on the other side. That only left Andrea and Thomas, but before I finished the thought, there they were, sprinting to my position.

  “Suppressing fire,” Andrea ordered, and turned back to the task. She backed me up, and between us we managed to convince our opponents that it wasn’t a great idea to get too close to the edge. We were firing conservatively, making every shot count. We didn’t always hit anything, but we always came close enough to force the shooters to back off.

  I was feeling pretty good about it for the first few moments. The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked it. We were making them keep their heads down, yes, but we had only killed a few of them, and there were a hell of a lot more than a few of them up there.

  Our original impression that the train crash had killed everyone in the checkpoint had been completely wrong. Everyone on the ground floor had died, but there had been a large presence on the upper floors as well, and most of them had survived unscathed.

  Our previous encounters as we crossed the city must have convinced them to take us seriously, even when they thought they had us trapped and unarmed. Now they had us heavily outnumbered and pinned down, and it was only a matter of time before those advantages swung the fight in their favor. In fact, there was every possibility they were only holding us here until a reserve force could come up from behind us.

  Our friends over on the other side of the thoroughfare couldn’t do anything to help us. They didn’t have any cover except the angle they were at, which was effectively a blind spot from the perspective of the people who were shooting at us. On top of that, they just didn’t have the right weapons to do much damage, except for the occasional potshot when the opportunity arose.

  Our situation then became worse and better at exactly the same time. It got worse when a StateSec security officer stepped out from a room on the floor above Bray and the others and handed a grenade launcher to a gangster. That single weapon nullified the protection of our cover and dramatically shifted the odds of the fight. Still, it made our situation better because the officer hadn’t conjured the weapon from thin air. He had come from a room with slatted metal bars over the windows. A security office.

  With the right sort of weapons, we could turn this situation around and make the final push across the border. It was just a matter of getting up there and taking what we needed before they blew us all to pieces.

  Andrea ducked backed down. “Reloading!”

  That meant it was my turn to fire. I leaned out and waited instead, scanning for the gangster with the explosives, hoping he’d make a play in the lull. My bet paid off, and he came out of cover to take the shot. I got him first, and he tumbled through the hole. I saw a tongue of fire leave his weapon as he fell, heard the ring of metal against plasticrete, and immediately threw myself to the floor as I called out “Grenade!”

  I heard it go off and felt something like needles across the back of my neck and the side of my face. Unidentifiable pieces of viscera covered the floor around us. I felt my neck for wounds and touched something small and sharp that was lodged into my skin. I pulled it free and found a quarter-inch shard—not of metal, but bone. The grenade had bounced and burst in the air. If not for the falling body taking the brunt of the explosion, Andrea, Thomas, and I would have been showered with lethal shrapnel.

  I needed to access that security room. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get into it, and the weapons locker inside could already be cleaned out, or my skeleton key might not even work in the first place, but it was try something or die.

  “Andrea! There’s a weapons locker up there, above Bray and the others!”

  She nodded, immediately understanding what I wanted to do. “Leapfrog it,” she ordered. “You first.”

  She laid down some suppressing fire, and I ran out into the open five meters then knelt down to do the same for her. She ran out while I fired, then she turned and opened fire so I could run. Crossing the open and totally exposed, our only hope for survival was to throw plenty of lead in their direction. That’s when I remembered the holographic emitter I’d taken off that Kagebushin assassin. It hadn’t helped me with the cyborgs, but there was no reason to think it wouldn’t help now.

  While the gangsters and StateSec up above me ducked their heads to avoid my fire, I reached for the emitter and turned it on. The effect was apparent immediately. A Black Kuei gunman decided to take his chance, but he fired a good foot and a half to my right. I could still see his confused look when my return fire went through the
top of his skull. Before his body even hit the floor, a StateSec officer unleashed a long burst three feet to my left. Andrea grouped three shots into his face and he slumped down dead.

  Every casualty we inflicted made the enemy more cautious. The small arms fire stopped, and for a few breaths, the space was quiet until someone decided to try a grenade again. Before I could even dive for cover, Andrea jumped up over my head and caught the thing in midair, then she batted it back toward whoever had thrown it. The explosion freed a weakened section of the damaged ceiling, dropping everything and everyone above it down to our floor in an avalanche of plasticrete and bodies.

  We used the collapse as an opportunity to join Jones and the others on the other side of the thoroughfare. Bray whistled. “Holy shit, chief. You’re really something in the low Gs.”

  She glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. “That’s the idea here, Jonathan. I’m going up. Tycho, you’re coming with me. I’m not sure you can make the jump without prosthetics, so we’ll do it another way. You see that staircase over there?”

  “Yeah, I see it. Flanking action?”

  “You got it. I’ll cover you.”

  “No way,” Bray announced. “You have enough to worry about. I’ll handle the suppressing fire.”

  Without even waiting for her to answer him, he stepped out from the wall and opened fire on the men upstairs with his handgun. He didn’t give me any time to think, so I bolted across the open space and headed straight for the stairway. Somebody did take a shot at me, but thanks to the holographic emitter it wasn’t even close. I reached the staircase in seconds and bounded up the steps.

  If the men we were fighting had had any time to think about it, they probably would have rolled a grenade down that staircase and stopped me from getting anywhere near them. As it was, they didn’t have time for anything of the sort because Andrea jumped straight up through the hole in the ceiling and landed in their midst.