by Greg Rucka
Then it all went wrong.
Jo heard the metal ring off the floor, the clatter and slide of the grenades as they bounced around the corner. She shouted, twisting to dive through, throwing out her arm to catch Able and pull him down with her, and she’d managed half of the move when the explosions came, one atop the other. In the concrete corridor the sound was enormous, vibrating through her chest, making her teeth sing in her jaw. She knew, abstractly, that the grenades had been an act of desperation, that throwing frags in such an enclosed space guaranteed splash damage in almost every direction, that the shrapnel would bounce and fly until it had either found purchase in flesh or spent itself entirely. There was no intention of recapturing Able, there was no intention of taking Jo alive, and she realized she’d miscalculated, that the men hunting them were now hunting to kill.
Jo landed hard inside the elevator, felt the shock of her fall hard on her shoulder. Nails tore into her legs and one arm, and something ragged and hot slashed her face beneath her left eye. She lost time for an instant, came back to find herself already struggling to her knees, lurching for the controls to shut the elevator doors, assailed by confusion and sudden vertigo. She heard herself shouting for Ahab to get them the hell out, to get them the hell up to the roof. Smoke billowed in the hall from the explosion, and Jo thought she saw movement in the clouds, silhouettes of men in tactical armor, trailing behind the crimson threads of their laser sights.
She still had the MagSec in her hand, was firing it before she’d even thought to do so. One silhouette spun and dropped, a second pitched forward over the first. Answering shots sparked over her head, rounds burying themselves in the elevator wall behind her. She emptied the MagSec, dropping another two before the doors finally slammed shut and the car began to rise with a speed that threatened to empty her stomach.
Steinberg was screaming in her ear, but she wasn’t sure she knew who he was, her head still rattled by the explosions. She looked down, saw a half dozen cuts on her legs, the tears in her stockings, and noticed blood dripping onto her blouse. She realized it was coming from her cheek.
Shit, she thought dizzily, still dazed by the concussion. I’ve ruined it.
She’d been lucky, she thought, to come out of that sub-level with a few cuts and bruises and a stained shirt.
Then she saw the pool of blood spreading steadily out toward her, and she realized that Able had not shared her good fortune.
“Starbuck! Starbuck! Status!”
Able lay on his side, his breathing rapid and shallow, a froth of blood and foam beginning to run from his mouth. Jo pulled herself to him, dropping her empty pistol, running her hands along his torso, over his back. At his mid-spine she felt the blood, and when she looked at her hand, it was covered in it.
“It was a good try,” Able told her hoarsely.
“No,” Jo said. “No, no no no, you’re not dying, do you understand me?”
Able opened his mouth to respond, and instead of words, brought forth more foam, more blood.
“Dammit, you stay with me!” she screamed at him.
“Oh my God,” Steinberg said quietly.
“Please,” she told Able. “You can make it. Please, try.”
Able coughed, a spasm that wracked his body as a whole. But his expression didn’t change, didn’t falter, and Jo realized he was smiling at her with his shattered teeth and ravaged lips. He moved his hand, took hold of one of hers, squeezing it.
“It was a good try,” Able said again, and this time, she had to strain to hear him.
Jo just shook her head. It hadn’t been, it had been a bad try, she had failed. He was dying, he was dead, and she had failed. She wanted to scream at him, to hit him, to beat him to life, saying that he was wrong.
“Ask him.” Steinberg’s voice was even softer than before. “You have to ask him. Right now.”
For a moment, Jo had no idea what Steinberg was saying, and then she remembered, and it made her want to scream. What was the point? She had failed.
“Jo, please,” Steinberg said. “Ask him.”
She shook her head again, already defeated, squeezed Able’s hand in return. His breathing had slowed to a shallow, irregular wheeze.
“The year of the Rose, Mister Able,” Jo heard herself saying. “What was the year of the Rose?”
Able’s eyes closed, and his breathing stopped, and then his eyelids opened again, she thought she saw a realization there, an understanding of something great and profound. His smile grew a fraction.
“2016,” Benjamin Able said. “Of course, 2016.”
They were his last words.
“Get it together,” Steinberg told her.
Jo finished reloading her emptied MagSec, picked up the second pistol from where it lay on the floor by Able’s motionless hand.
“We’re eighty seconds out. Just stay down, move to the edge of the roof, north side, we’ll pick you up there. There’s going to be resistance, try to stay clear, you’re in no condition for a straight-up fight.”
Jo looked at the pistols in her hands, flipped the fire selector on each to three-round-burst. It would eat through ammunition fast, but it would guarantee the kills.
“You’re almost clear, Starbuck,” Steinberg said. “Just keep it together.”
Jo got to her feet, feeling the elevator beginning to slow. The cuts on her legs, on her right arm, on her face, all of them were beginning to smolder. She felt that she was smoldering, too, that she was waiting to burst into flames herself.
“I am together,” she said.
Then she used the butt of MagSec she was holding in her right hand to mash the subcutaneous transponder behind her ear into her skull. She felt the slight shiver as the tiny device fractured, felt the stab of pain as it splintered her skin.
“They’re the ones about to come apart,” Jo added, to no one in particular.
The doors opened onto the rooftop parking lot, revealing a beautiful, cloudless day with the smell of ocean and autumn in the air. She counted six men in full tactical gear, all of them armed with Dragons, and then saw a seventh, different from the rest, holding a combat knife in one hand, a Tranq-7 in the other. Unlike the others, he was dressed in an exquisitely tailored business suit, but missing its necktie and jacket, with long dirty blonde hair falling down over his shoulders. In the moment before movement, she wasn’t even certain of gender, his look androgynous and almost effete.
Then the moment for movement came, and Jo sprang to life, dropping targets as quickly as she could acquire them, not much caring for life or death, not even her own.
CHAPTER 11
pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters— Cormox Street, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020
Hayes beat the redhead to the roof by half a minute at the most, just enough time to deploy the Beta response team—or at least, to begin deploying them—before the cargo elevator came to a stop at the rear of the parking lot. He was still grappling with the twin emotions of surprise and humiliation. Surprise that the Carrington strike team had seemed to consist of only one person, and that the person in question had turned out to be the hot little redheaded number he’d been eyeballing only ten minutes or so earlier.
The humiliation came from the fact that this one person, all by herself, had made it this far. From what Hayes could piece together over the radio, apparently she’d turned all of Alpha Response into a squad of fools. Their news that they’d managed to get a grenade or two in was poor consolation, especially when they failed to confirm any kills.
So Hayes had raced to the rooftop, trying to intercept the redheaded hellion who was, thus far, turning a very good day into a very bad one. His intention in intercepting her was simple. He’d kill her, he’d kill the spy she’d come to rescue, and then he’d offer both of their heads to his father. If Beta Response did the deed, he was fine with that; if they failed, he was patched and armed, and more than eager to do the deed himself.
The first thing he noticed when the freight e
levator’s doors slid apart was that the grenades had, it seemed, done half their job. The spy, the one he’d been interrogating, was motionless on his side on the floor of the car, lying in a puddle of his own blood.
The second thing he noticed was that, while the redhead appeared to have been winged, she was up, armed, and ready.
The third thing he noticed was that she was fast—much faster than he’d expected. Maybe as fast as he was in his chemically enhanced state.
She was so fast, in fact, that she’d dropped two of Beta Response before she’d finished leaping clear of the elevator. The MagSecs she held in each hand spat their charged rounds out in groups of three, and each burst had no trouble punching through the faceplates on his team’s helmets, or cutting through their ballistic jackets like water. This was part of the problem with dataDyne; the corporation was so large that while one division was developing a new ballisticresistant fiber, another branch was hard at work building a weapon that would cut through the same.
Hayes scrambled for cover, catching sight of a third member of Beta Response as he went down, missing a large portion of his throat.
Hayes glanced down at the weapons he was holding, cursing himself for his choice. It had been arrogance to choose such close-quarters weaponry, but an arrogance that was, in his experience, justified. Normally, he never had any difficulty getting close enough to a target to finish them by hand.
He heard the chatter of one Dragon opening up, followed quickly by another. He rolled back to his feet, using the side of a Bowman Constellation for cover. A fourth member of his assault team cried out in sudden pain, and Hayes tracked the noise in time to see the man drop his weapon and clutch at his groin before collapsing.
The redhead, Hayes realized, hadn’t missed yet.
Still using the Constellation for cover, Hayes worked his way toward the front of the vehicle, trying to flank her. From the irregular chatter of her MagSecs, he had a localized idea of where she was and which way she was heading. He guessed toward the north side of the rooftop, presumably where her exfil would arrive.
There was another exchange of gunfire, followed quickly by a second burst from one of the two remaining Dragons. Hayes scurried from the Constellation toward his Hunter, catching sight of the redhead as she broke cover, sprinting toward one of the massive air recycling units that formed the borders of the parking lot. Only one of his assault team sprang up to try and tag her, and Hayes assumed that meant he was the only one left. The man was firing in panic, laying heavy on his trigger, and his shots went wide, chewing ragged gouges into the tarmac.
The redhead launched herself in the air, twisting to bring first one MagSec, then the other, into line. Again, each burst was true, and Hayes saw his last man go down out of the corner of his eye. She was still in the air, and he was certain she’d go down now, and hard, but she continued her spiral, dropping the now-empty weapons and bringing her hands out in front of her, and it wasn’t a dive, it was a tumble, and she was back on her feet and sprinting for the northern edge of the rooftop.
If Hayes hadn’t hated her so much, he’d have fallen in love with her then and there.
But love was a dermal supplied by his father, or the power of making a strong man scream, and instead, Laurent Hayes ran after her with all the speed he could muster. He emptied the Tranq-7 at her, firing again and again until the last narcotic pellet was spent, and she stumbled, suddenly, falling to one knee before lurching to her feet again. He didn’t know how many times he’d hit her, but it didn’t matter—once should have been enough.
That confirmed it for Hayes; like himself, she was doped up, some Carrington cocktail to give her an edge.
The stumble wasn’t much, but it was enough, and Hayes threw aside the drug gun, screaming hatred at her as he dove forward, slashing with the knife for the back of her neck. It should have been a kill stroke—it was a kill stroke—but at the last second the redhead pivoted, turning out of the attack and bringing both arms up in a rising cross-block. She trapped his knife hand and twisted, smashed his nose with the butt of the hilt. Hayes cried out, staggered, and the knife clattered to the pavement between them.
That was her best move, it seemed, or the tranquilizers were finally doing their job, because when she lunged at him, he was able to sidestep it easily, and countered with a combination: once to her sternum, once to her gut. It rocked her, and he saw the pain paint her features, and Hayes grinned and kicked with his right. She managed a partial block, kept the blow from connecting full with her knee, but enough got through that he heard her gasp. Now she was backing away, unsteady on her injured leg.
“Hello, meat,” Hayes said. “I’ve got an examination room just for you.”
What the redhead said in response was slurred, and very unladylike.
Hayes feinted a lunge, moving at her, and again she backed away. Her eyes were unfocused now, and he knew she was trying to keep her gaze on him, that the tranquilizers were compressing her vision. On the rooftop, with the horizon dropping away in every direction, he knew her vertigo must be almost blinding.
His right loafer hit the blade of his knife, and without looking away from her, he hooked it with the toe of his shoe, kicking it into the air. He caught the handle with his right hand and smiled, licking his lips. He could taste his own blood, running from the blow she’d given him to the nose.
“We’re gonna have a lot of fun together,” he told her, and then feinted again, with the knife this time, as if to gut her. Again, the redhead danced back, and this time he was sure she almost lost her balance, almost went down.
“Running out of roof, sweetheart,” Hayes said. “You fall down here, it’s a much shorter drop.”
The redhead spared a glance over her shoulder, saw that he had been telling the truth, that the edge of the rooftop with its retaining wall was only a meter behind her. When she looked back, Hayes lunged at her again, pulling it short, and that did it, she backed into the concrete barrier, out of room to retreat.
“Can you fly, hot stuff?” Hayes asked her.
The woman’s eyes flashed a brilliant blue, almost unnaturally intense, and he saw the focus return, surfacing for a moment against the crush of the sedatives pumping through her veins.
“Yes,” the redhead said, and then she fell backwards, off of the rooftop.
Hayes lurched forward in disbelief, dropping his knife and taking hold of the top of the short wall to look over its edge. Immediately, he jerked himself back, barely in time, as the wing of a blue-black VTOL dropship passed silently bare inches from his face, nearly costing him his nose. He could see the sliding door of the main compartment open, see the cargo webbing extended from its side, stretched out between two extended arms.
He could see a man dragging the redhead off the web and into the body of the ship, helping her to her feet, and he watched as she turned back to face him, staring at her from the rooftop.
She gave him a two-fingered salute.
Then the door of the dropship slammed shut, and there was a roar from its engines as the stealth baffles switched off, and Hayes was left alone on the edge of the pharmaDyne rooftop, surrounded by the bodies of six of his men.
Wondering just what it was he was going to say to his father.
CHAPTER 12
Hotel Regina-Apartment 4-2, Place des Pyramides, Paris, France September 28th, 2020
Daniel Carrington swirled the remnants of the wine in the glass in his hand, looking out the window at the lights of the Parisian night beyond, and asked, “How badly do you want it?”
Still seated at the small table where they’d shared their dinner, Cassandra DeVries nearly choked on her own glass of wine. “Daniel!”
Carrington turned slowly, mischief in his eyes, and she knew the innuendo had been intentional, even if it hadn’t truly been the purpose of the question. She set her glass down, used her napkin to wipe her mouth, fighting the urge to giggle. It was one of the things that had drawn her to him, one of the reasons that she lov
ed spending time with him. He was the maverick she wanted to be, and he never failed to take her by surprise.
On the surface, they were an odd couple, she had to admit. No one would mistake Daniel, with his odd, out-of-date clothing and generally rumpled appearance, for a worldclass lothario.
But Cassandra responded to qualities beyond a handsome face. Daniel’s fierce intellect and his charm had impressed her, almost as much as the way he became more animated, more engaged when discussing a particularly difficult problem. More than anyone she’d ever met, Daniel Carrington made her think, made her race to keep up, which she found far more fulfilling than simple physical compatibility. She’d seen a side of Daniel no one else had ever seen, and that had cemented their mutual attraction.
Carrington reached for the bottle of wine, refilling first her glass, then his own, before sitting heavily in his chair opposite her once more. He winced as he did it, and she felt a pang of sympathy. The pain seemed most often to come from his hip, and there were times when it seemed to not bother him at all, when it seemed that the cane was an affectation, part of the Carrington Persona. But the more time Cassandra had spent with him, the more she had come to recognize the injury as sincere. When she’d asked him about it, he’d been evasive, and when she’d pressed, he’d told her, with uncharacteristic bluntness—at least for their relationship—not to ask again.
She hadn’t, but still she wondered about it. Not so much about the origin of the injury, but about ways to alleviate his pain.
