by Greg Rucka
She edged her way cautiously toward the breach, stopping when she caught sight of the mercenary’s gun barrel, its muzzle jutting out from behind his cover. She’d been right, it was an assault rifle, the M16C. It was the weapon she’d have picked for jungle work if long guns gave her joy; with its shortened barrel, the M16C was ideal for urban and jungle combat.
Jo steadied herself, going still, shifting the silenced Falcon in her hands from low-ready to high-ready. She was preparing to move when she heard the crackle of the radio, and that surprised her. She had expected anyone they encountered to be wearing subcutaneous units the way she and Steinberg were, either CMO ThroatLinks or radio buttons embedded behind the ear.
Between their choice of assault rifle, and the unusual radio gear, she realized that the Hawks were intentionally avoiding the use of dataDyne equipment. Whoever was footing the bill for the mercenaries was certainly getting their money’s worth; if one of them were captured, they’d be completely deniable.
“Hawk Nine, Hawk Nine.”
The answering voice was soft, almost a growl, and Jo had to strain to hear it.
“Nine, go.”
“Building Seven secured, we’re on our way down. Status?”
“Clear. They’re still pounding jungle ground out there.”
“Command says keep a good watch, nothing comes back on us.”
“Affirmative.”
There was a pause, then another crackle from the unseen radio. “Debus ETA five minutes. Give us until exfil, then meet at the hopper, we’ll be coming with the package.”
“Confirmed,” the mercenary said. “Out.”
There was no immediate response, and Jo took that to mean that the conversation had ended. She looked at the pistol ready in her hands, realized what she was about to do, realized that, by the mercenary’s conversation, she knew exactly where he was, could envision precisely where his head was positioned. He wouldn’t stand a chance. He was going to die.
He was someone she had never met, just doing his job, and she was going to kill him. For an awful moment, Jo thought she was going to be sick. Yes, they were in a war zone, yes, he’d kill her if he had the opportunity, but he wasn’t going to get it, she knew that.
She didn’t think she could do it. Soldier or not, it felt too much like being a killer.
Then she remembered Steinberg saying that the Hawk Teams were mercenaries, but that they worked almost exclusively for dataDyne.
Jo stepped forward, pivoted, and put two bullets into the mercenary’s face. He died without ever having the chance to look surprised.
Jo pivoted back behind the cover of the fence, and motioned for Steinberg to join her. Then she crouched down and reached around the fence again, taking hold of the back of the dead man’s combat harness and pulling him around to join her. By the time Steinberg had reached her, running low with both Fairchilds in his hands, she’d gone through the mercenary’s gear, pulling half a dozen grenades and his radio.
“They’re after Rose,” she whispered to Steinberg when he settled breathlessly beside her. “Building Seven, we’ve got four minutes before they move for exfil. Sounds like they’re after him alive.”
Steinberg looked the question at her, and Jo held up the radio for him to see. He nodded, then slipped around her to look past the edge of the inner fence, onto the compound. After a second, he pulled back.
“You know what we do?” he asked.
“We let them do the hard part for us,” Jo answered, grinning. “Locate their ship and then give them one hell of a shock when they try to board it.”
Steinberg actually answered her grin, if only for a second. “We need to establish an ambush position around the vehicle, we need to do it without being spotted, and we need to do it in the next three minutes.”
Jo hefted her Fairchild, feeling the adrenaline thrilling through her, all memories of any moral quandary now utterly forgotten.
“What are we waiting for?” she asked Steinberg, and before he could answer, she was up and moving into the devastated compound, looking for the next person who might need a bullet or three’s persuasion to stay out of her way.
CHAPTER 28
Core-Mantis OmniGlobal-Solomon Islands Health and Healing Canbar-Hovoro Secured Facility-Building Seven (Life Storage Wing)- 17 km WSW Hovoro October 14th/15th (International Date Line), 2020
Now this is more like it, Hayes thought as he let a burst from his Liberator rip through another two Core-Mantis security guards. Both had submachine guns of their own, and both had seen him coming, and all the same he’d dropped each without them so much as firing a shot in his direction. Their deaths brought his running total to eleven since he’d hit the ground, but he might have been off; he’d been using grenades, and it was sometimes hard to tell how many people died when one of those went off, unless you wanted to go back and actually count, and Hayes just couldn’t spare the time.
Above, in the surrounding jungle, the war would be entering its last spasms, with Core-Mantis beginning mop-up operations, hunting down the last of Sexton’s spent forces. It would take them a while, but not so long that Hayes could afford to dawdle. He needed to find Rose, and he needed to do it fast, before the locals managed to get their buildings secured once more.
Hayes worked his way along the white-walled, sterile hallway, stopping only long enough to strip the grenades from the guards he’d just dropped. He moved with confidence, strength, none of this skulking around, because there wasn’t any need. Doors were spaced unevenly along both sides of the hall, and he used the Liberator to blast them open, then a grenade in quick succession, clearing his way with brutal efficiency. A couple times he saw white coats, wide-eyed in their labs, and sometimes he heard them scream before they died.
As long as none of them was Rose, he didn’t care.
He was feeling like a god, and it was about damn time as far as he was concerned. Too often in the last two weeks he’d felt like a failure, instead, and he’d had more than enough of that.
New York had shaken his confidence, to be double-teamed the way he had, first by Carcareas, then by the redhead. He’d returned to Doctor Murray’s home in Vancouver in severe withdrawal, shaking and paranoid, certain that his father was going to take his failure as an excuse for another pound of flesh. Instead, his father had patched him immediately, then listened to Hayes’s recounting of the day’s events with a half smile on his face.
“It’s not that bad,” Doctor Murray had told him. “You accomplished what you needed to.”
“But the woman from Carrington—”
“Carrington will not be able to stop the attack on the Solomons, Laurent.”
“He’ll try to stop us!”
“How? He wouldn’t dare warn off Sexton, he wants Rose as much as we do, I’m sure of it. And if he comes to Hovoro in the hopes of acquiring the man, he’ll certainly fail. His will be the harder job, remember, he wants Rose alive. All you need to do is kill him.”
That had made sense, but Hayes had still been troubled. It seemed to him that they were missing something, that there was something that had been forgotten or neglected.
But his father had assured him that the situation was still going their way, at least as far as he was concerned. He was particularly pleased at the thought of Sexton’s impending self-destruction, and what he called the “comeuppance” the man had in store.
“Asking for joint credit,” Doctor Murray had said with disgust. “Imagine the arrogance.”
Then his father had told him to prepare for his trip to Hovoro, to make certain he would be able to identify Rose by sight when he saw him. He sent Hayes off to collect his weapons and to prepare his gear, and before noon, Hayes had been ready to depart. Before he left the house, his father stopped him.
“For you,” he said, and then showed Hayes the dermal resting in his palm. “Try it, I think you’ll be pleased.”
Hayes had set down his equipment, then offered the back of his neck to Doctor Murray, felt the
one patch already in place come free with a quick tug, then be replaced by the new one immediately. The sudden rush of heat had coursed down his spine, made his head throb and his fingers tremble, and then it had all passed, and he’d straightened up and looked at his father, and it was like looking at him with new eyes. Not that the picture had changed, that wasn’t it, but it was now clearer than ever before, as if everything Hayes saw had been magnified, focused.
“Do you like it?” Doctor Murray had asked. “I’ve been working on it for some time. It’s based on the previous iterations, of course, still derivative of the standard combatboost. But I’ve been able to heighten the nutrient feed, so you should feel a substantial increase in both your reaction times and your mean physical dexterity.”
“It feels … good …”
“Well, that is the point, my boy. I want you at your best for this.” Doctor Murray had patted his shoulder. “It should last you until you return. You’ll have to tell me how you do in combat with it, all right? Try to remember the sensations.”
“I will, Father.”
“Go, Laurent.”
Hayes went, first by low-orbit transport to New Zealand, and then by fast boat to New Georgia Island, coming from the west side, on the opposite coast as Hovoro. He’d made landfall before evening, and had had more than enough time to travel cross-island and find a safe and concealed position well away from the Hovoro facility. Then it had only been a matter of waiting, a trick harder than it had first seemed. The new patch made him feel even more high-strung than usual, made it almost impossible to sit still. His nerves sang, all of his senses tight, hearing, feeling, smelling, seeing everything around him. He’d marveled at nuances of color around him, the infinite variations of green in the jungle leaves, the distinct sounds of a thousand different insects.
And when night had fallen, he’d watched the first exchanges of fire painting the sky, the Core-Mantis OmniGlobal missile batteries trying to shoot down the R-C/Bowman automated attack drones before their payloads could be delivered to target. He’d felt the jungle trembling with the battle, hearing the leaves around him rustle and the life living beneath them scurry in panic and confusion.
When he’d thought the time was right, when R-C/Bowman troops had begun their ground assault in earnest, he started his own.
Hovoro Facility Building Seven reminded Hayes, in many ways, of pharmaDyne Vancouver, or at least, of the lab and research portions of the latter. The hallways shared the same institutionalized sterility and lack of personality, though here, from what Hayes could see, it was all-pervasive. The building existed to serve research, period. No bland corporate art, no traditional potted plants, or even muted tan carpeting. Just row upon row of cream-colored hallways, tiled floors, and lab space.
Hayes thought that blood added some much needed color to the place.
Turning a corner, he found himself in a rectangular open room, some sort of common area used by the white coats as a break area. There were vending machines and couches and video screens and a coffee maker on a table near the far wall. There were also four more security guards, and without pause, Hayes opened fire on them. Whatever his father had given him in the dermal, he was as accurate as ever, and faster than before. The fastest of them managed to take three steps, running to take cover behind one of the couches.
Hayes strode forward and dropped three of the guards in quick succession, firing tight, controlled bursts delivered one atop another. He kicked over the break room table, flipping it onto its side, which sent the coffee pot on top of it crashing to the tile floor. He stooped low, using the table as cover.
He waited what seemed like a very long two seconds for the surviving guard to return fire, then rolled out and fired low. The last guard screamed in pain and collapsed, groaning, to the floor.
Hayes picked himself up and walked over to the fallen guard, reloading as he went. Leading with the barrel of the submachine gun, he looked down.
The guard’s face was contorted in agony, his hands soaked with blood from his destroyed shin. Hayes saw that he was already losing his color, too, and figured the man was well on his way to shock.
“Ah God, God please,” the guard said. “Please don’t kill me.”
Hayes pushed the barrel of his weapon against the man’s forehead. “Where’s Doctor Rose?”
“God please—”
“I’ll shoot you again. It’ll hurt.”
“I don’t know a Doctor Rose, I don’t know—”
“How do I get to the secured labs? How do I get inside?”
The guard blinked rapidly, trying to clear the tears of pain from his eyes, and Hayes saw the man’s tongue flick out in an attempt to wet his parched lips.
Yeah, this guy’s gone, Hayes thought.
“C’mon, quickly,” Hayes said. “I’ll get you help, just tell me what I need to know.”
With a blood-soaked hand, the guard gestured back, behind him, toward one of the hallways running off the common area. “That way, it’s … it’s that way, end of the hall, there’s an elevator … locked down, now—”
“I need the code.”
The guard winced, trying to remember through his haze of pain. “Twenty-nine, sixty-nine, forty-three … forty …”
“You’re sure? Don’t lie to me, you lie to me, I’ll leave you here to bleed out.”
“No, no, it’s … that’s the code … there’s only one way for it to go, you take it down … that’s the—that’s the experimental wing …”
“Anything else?”
The guard shook his head, weakly, again clutching at his lower leg with both hands. He tried to keep from sobbing. “That’s it, swear to God that’s it. You’ve got to help me, I’m losing a lot of blood, here … .”
“You can still lose more,” Hayes said, and shot him.
He met less resistance than he’d expected upon entering the secure wing, and grew sloppy as a result. Coming out of the elevators and through the second security checkpoint, he heard a shot and felt a round punch him squarely between the shoulder blades. The bullet failed to penetrate the proprietary dataDyne ballistic weave of his light body armor, but it staggered him, and he nearly fell.
He had a moment of indescribable delight when he spun around to see the look of surprise on the guard’s face. He made sure she died with it still in place.
Then he scavenged her body, rearming himself, this time with Core-Mantis weaponry. Most of the guards were using Vipers, a close-quarters automatic shotgun, and Hayes went with that, discarding his submachine gun.
Outfitted once again, he started with the labs, discovering that the majority of the research and technical staff had been evacuated to this very location. Apparently, someone had thought the high-security wing was the safest place in the Hovoro facility.
Boy were they wrong, Hayes thought.
In one lab, he found six of the white coats clustered together, looking like a clump of panicked deer waiting for a wolf. When Hayes entered, one of them, an Asian man in his early fifties, tried to throw a stoppered beaker at him. Hayes shot him before he even had the chance, the Viper blowing a very satisfying hole in the man’s chest. He toppled, and Hayes jumped forward with a sudden burst of speed, catching the beaker in his left hand before it could fall to the ground.
“So what’s this?” he asked.
The white coats were mute, so he shot another one of them, this one male, Caucasian and apparently in his forties.
“It’s an acid, that’s all it is,” one of the female scientists said quickly. “Just a distilled acid, high potency, we use it for—”
Hayes pointed the barrel of the Viper at her, and she went silent as if her throat had been slit.
“Rose,” he said. “Where is he?”
There was no immediate response, so Hayes shot the woman in the head. Two of the remaining scientists screamed.
“Rose,” Hayes said again. “Where is he?”
“Why should we tell you anything, you’ll kill us—”
Hayes grinned. “I’m definitely going to kill you if you don’t.”
The oldest of the white coats, another woman with a head of curly silver hair, spoke softly. “Continue down the hallway, there’s an intersection, numbers painted on the wall. Follow number four, it’s the last door in the corridor.”
Something in the way she said it made Hayes hesitate. Not the resignation of her statement, that wasn’t it, but something else.
“You don’t like him?” Hayes asked.
“You won’t, either. You’ll see why.” The woman drew herself up to her full height, squaring her shoulders. “If you’d please, I’d prefer it in the head. It’ll be quicker that way.”
“Yeah,” Hayes said. “It would.”
Then he smashed the beaker into the woman’s face. She screamed, collapsing to the floor, her flesh melting away in rivers. He carelessly shot the others, then made his way down the corridor, following hallway four, thinking that everything was finally working out the way it should.
He was still thinking that when he discovered a half dozen dead Core-Mantis guards on the ground, each of them shot multiple times. Then he saw the door to the lab, the door that should’ve been locked and sealed, but wasn’t. Someone had blown it open.
No, he thought. No, no, no, this isn’t fair … .
Hayes stepped through the blasted doorway, the gun held ready in both hands, discovering that he’d entered not a lab, but an office of some sort, and that the office had been thoroughly tossed. There were filing cabinets and two destroyed computers, and on the desk, he found a nameplate, and the name it gave was ROSE, THADDEUS K. Two more doors ran off the office, and like the one he’d just passed, they’d been blown, too. Carefully, he checked each of them.
One was a lab, apparently undisturbed.
