So, what did I know? Bodies, bullet holes, and hostages. Hostages including someone specific. If they'd killed the target they'd have wasted everyone to keep the witnesses from talking, but they'd eliminate anyone they didn't feel would be a good hostage anyway. That meant a lot of bullets, leaving a lot of holes. Bullet holes meant spent casings. Spent casings fired from semi- and fully-automatic weapons would fly everywhere, so there wouldn't be any large deposits of them in any one location, with the possible exception of inside a building, where they'd be a lot easier to clean up in an after-action sweep, pun intended. That left outside, which saved me from having to walk, possibly through several buildings, just to prove that they were too ubiquitous a design to be worth anything as evidence. So, even though they'd be hard enough to see if they were standard brass cases, they would stand out like sore thumbs compared to the lacquered steel cases from Alpha Zulu. Still --- no way in hell had they nabbed them all, or probably even looked, so they might have missed something big there. I couldn't think of anything particularly damning that they might have, but anything was better than nothing. A lack of cases would have been suspicious, especially after the ballistics reports came back. So. A quick search for cases would be in order, if only to eliminate one possibility. If I turned up any and they weren't lacquered steel the news would be dire indeed.
But I didn't have a metal detector, so how to do it without crawling around on my hands and knees moving the blades of grass like an idiot?
Mull it over, think about other things. Let the subconscious handle it for a minute. What else did I know? Not much. Inspecting the bodies for anything weird would probably be insightful but very time consuming, and I was not a forensic expert. Anything inside the buildings short of a surveillance system would be a waste of time unless I found nothing outside, and if they left anything even resembling such a system alone when they cleared out I'd be amazed.
Too many approaches for a team to narrow it down, not that it mattered. The whole setup was for training, not combat, and as a result it was wide open. A quick glance around with a military eye gave me half a dozen spots that I'd have happily set up a sniper that would be impossible to suppress without a sniper to return fire or a jumper on the opposing side, and at least four more that had at worst equally good fields of view and possibly even easier fall-back points. Most of the paths leading to the central area were forested or were going downhill, potentially allowing teams to approach dangerously close before exposing themselves. I could imagine the nightmare it must have become within seconds of the first fireteam coming into view.
In part because I had been part of assaults like that during my time in the military, in part because I'd seen the result.
Okay, if anyone was interested, the spray of spent shell casings would probably indicate where the assault had first started shooting, but that wasn't much help to me.
Casings. Why did I keep coming back to the casings? There wasn't any way to do a fast search to see if anything was amiss.
Or was there?
Damn it! I'd been thinking like a fucking norm.
"You might want to step back," I cautioned, breaking a few minutes of silence. "In fact, you might want to get a good ways away for a little bit. This might not be too pleasant to be around."
"What do you mean?" She didn't even bother to pull the cigarette out of mouth. "You gonna fart or something?"
"You know, you can stay or you can go; it's no skin off my ass either way; but if you don't drop the attitude I'm going to throw you so hard that by the time you land you're going to need a haircut." I kept my voice neutral but my stare must have carried the seriousness of my threat through to her. "I'm going to make a really loud noise, so cover your goddamn ears or go deaf."
Sound is nothing more than mechanical vibrations transmitted by an elastic medium. Most often in human experience that was air, but anyone who has put their head to the ground and heard someone walking nearby or someone pounding on a pipe in another room knows that "solids" conduct sound as well, and liquids were no slouches either. Vibration is movement.
And, just in case it wasn't clear by now, I was very good at movement.
I gave Slider a silent ten count before I took a deep breath, stuck my fingers in my mouth, and forced out a powerfully loud, high-pitched whistle. My ears throbbed as I felt for, and finally found, the vibration I wanted as it echoed off the buildings around me.
Bingo.
I forced the air to still in a protective bubble over my ears so I wouldn't go deaf as I enhanced and altered the pitch and force of the note.
My conscious mind maintained the steady increase of the sound as some part of it flicked back to the sound pressure level contests the maniacs who liked to spend a year's salary on a used car that cost less than half that much when brand new in an attempt to give it a ballistic-grade sound system. For a moment I wondered what they'd think of what I was doing.
Windows bowed inwards, somehow not breaking, as I tweaked the sound further. I held it at that level, feeling for everything I could, listening without using my ears to the harmonics around me.
Now that was sweet. I waved my arms around like a madman conducting an orchestra of the damned as the pitch drifted inexorably to the final crescendo, the perfect frequency... And there it was.
Using the sensation of this note echoing off the metal that made them, I used the vibrations in the metal itself to make every single shell casing around me rise into the air. At that point I let the sound die away and made the casings drift toward me. Yeah, I'd just fucked over whoever was going to try to reconstruct what had happened, but I had to see something. A sour note, as it were, among all the empty cases.
Yes, they were all lacquered, Russian-made, steel cases; some in a single, NATO-spec pistol caliber, but most in a high-velocity rifle caliber used in the majority of modern assault rifles. Some even had the remains of the sealant around the mouth where the bullet had been seated.
Okay. Not all of them. One stuck out like a strict Islamic woman at a nude beach; an unfired cartridge floated somewhere near the middle of the cloud of empty metal tubes. It sounded different than the others. It felt different than the others, and not just because the harmonics were harsher.
I let the empty cases fall to the ground, which they hit with a rather unpleasant crash, but I kept the cartridge aloft. It differed in three important ways from the ones that had been allowed to fall. Not only was it complete, it was a different color and shape than the others would have been before they were fired.
It also wasn't designed to rend flesh and kill.
"Slider? You there?"
"Yes," she said, her voice drifting from some distance away. "Thank you for the warning." That came from much closer. "You need something?"
"Yes. Go to the kitchen and bring me back a bucket of water with as much ice as you can get in it. Do it as fast as you can, do you hear me? Dump a bunch of salt to the water if you can, but don't look for it if you can't see some outright."
"Yessir." And she was gone.
I could feel the chemicals sizzle inside the cartridge hovering just outside arm's length in front of me. This was the proof I needed. Not only did it tell me exactly who was responsible, it told me exactly where they'd come from, but it was only good if the cold water could keep the floating disaster from blowing up before we got back.
No matter what, though, Kinsey was going to pay. Oh yes, as soon as I got my hands on him, he was going to pay. I was going to finish what I'd started with a hollow glass tube filled with salt.
The really bad thing about being so hard to kill was it took a long, long time to die.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Subject 12
Guild Files Volume 1
By S. W. Douglas
Guild Intelligence File 90-48-22K-4
Chapter 1
Guild Intelligence File 92-88-29F-1
Chapter 2
&nb
sp; Guild Intelligence File 92-36-55X-7
Chapter 3
Guild Intelligence File 77-51-83S-2
Chapter 4
Guild Intelligence File 86-09-71C-8
Chapter 5
Guild Intelligence File 62-51-97G-4
Chapter 6
Guild Intelligence File 92-96-42X-3
Chapter 7
Subject 12 Page 42
