That's where I needed to be. Lose control of Langdon, lose control of the building.
In Langdon's mind the castle metaphor shifted to become a miniature version of the Police Precinct itself.
I grabbed the virtual building and cracked it along the vertical axis to get to the juicy guts of the Precinct's innards. Blue and red dots flowed through the veins of each floor. Blue dots were humans; red dots were bots.
Nobody had formed a coordinated response in the wake of the lockdown. Each floor responded differently. Some were a flurry of activity, with blue dots scurrying about, while on others the dots barely moved. That was a function of location rather than concern. Locations where nobody could enter or leave, regardless of desire. Labs and holding cells, for example.
I opened Langdon's eyes and glanced at the thick blast door covering the entrance to the lab. The officer on guard stared at Langdon, eyes wide, with a gun in his hand.
"What's going on?" he said, his throbbing carotid artery visible through the thin sheath of skin covering his flushed throat. The sudden spike of adrenaline had him tweaked and ready for a fight.
"Not sure," I said, trying to calm his nerves. "Maybe a drill?"
"No, this ain't no drill. They don't drop the blast doors in a drill. This is something else. I think we're under attack."
"Whoa, just calm down and take a deep breath. I'm in the Stream now, I'll see if I can get some answers."
"Good idea. See if you can get in touch with that Brandt guy, I'll bet he knows what's going on."
"Sure," I said, letting my gaze drop to the pistol in his hand. "In the meantime, do you mind putting that away?"
The officer looked at his hand in confusion before taking my meaning. "Oh shit, yeah. Sorry 'bout that. Reflexes, ya know?"
"Of course."
I blinked into the Stream. The Peacekeeper Internal Technology Unit fought me for control of the building. Moving up from ground level, they returned each floor to standby status, taking back the building slowly but surely. PIT were the best minds Time Vice had, but they weren't good enough. Though, with the handicap of operating the Stream through Langdon, it wasn't a frolic through fields of buttercups for me, either.
First order of business: locate and isolate Brandt. I pinged his location and the screen shifted perspective. It zoomed in close enough that I could read ID tags floating above the red and blue dots. On the tenth floor Brandt was surrounded by five blue dots.
Each floor could be dissected into four quadrants by sliding blast doors used to quarantine the building in case of attack, or threat of a biological contaminant. One by one I brought those doors down on the tenth floor.
Brandt's little dot separated from the pack, moving swiftly in the opposite direction of the rapidly closing doors. The blast doors slammed shut, one after another, but somehow he managed to stay ahead. The other blue dots hadn't made it more than a handful of feet before being quartered off.
Brandt's dot zipped past the final blast door and into the stairwell—a location that served my purposes. He'd be free to move up and down, but access to each floor remained sealed shut. The stairway was a roomy prison, but a prison nonetheless.
I let those thoughts simmer and turned to the second objective, getting to the parking garage.
Four elevator shafts running the vertical length of the building were represented on the display by faint red lines. They were in lockdown along with the rest of the building.
It required creative jiggering on my part to coax the security system into unlocking only our elevator, a function whoever programmed the building hadn't intended. But the building's infrastructure was a hand-me-down from a simpler time and a simpler encryption. Nobody, I guess, had thought to update it.
The ground swayed.
BLINK.
Back inside my own skin, I watched the numbers sitting above the door climb higher. At the top, the elevator shuddered to a halt. Through Langdon I studied the half-dozen blue dots milling about the parking garage.
Two guards, two attendants, and three random visitors in the process of coming or going.
I took a calming breath and opened the elevator. The doors slid apart, revealing the parking garage bathed in red.
The ever-shifting pattern of light and shadow was nauseating.
I jumped to Kellogg, maneuvering him to follow half a step behind, his pistol concealed behind my back.
I did a quick mental survey of the people standing outside the security booth. The two guards were obvious enough in their black uniforms, but a third man stood out as a possible plain-clothes officer. One of the guards stepped out from the booth, hand resting on the butt of the gun at his side, a casual stance with a hint of malice.
"Hold up," he said, stroking the long whiskers of a mustache stretching from one ear to the other with his free hand. "Where are you two headed?"
"Trying to figure what's going on is all," Kellogg said.
The guard handed us a stare of pure paranoia and said, "How'd you get that elevator running?"
"Not a clue, but thank God it did. Shit, I never knew it, but turns out I don't like tight spaces. Was afraid we'd never get out," Kellogg said. I tried making him laugh, but it sounded like starting a dying Dragonfly. "Any idea what this lockdown is all about?"
The second guard poked his head out of the office, gave us the once over, and stepped out, circling us nonchalantly in the opposite direction of his partner.
I wasn't sure what kind of bulletin, if any, Brandt had issued before the lockdown went into effect, but these two characters were acting with a high degree of paranoia that made my trigger finger itch.
But it wasn't until the man I'd pegged as a plain-clothes officer shuffled to the right, into my blind spot, that I knew the gig was up.
Can never do things the easy way. Not today, at least. Maybe tomorrow.
I thought back to Sanders lying unconscious on the floor of the elevator. I'd crossed a line. One I couldn't return from. Turned my back on an oath I'd taken, an obligation. Betrayed the people drawn into the crossfire by duty and honor.
A seed of guilt sitting in my gut blossomed into full-blown regret. It sank its roots deep, latching on and refusing to let go for what I'd done to Sanders, to Raines, to the countless innocents I'd betrayed, and would continue betraying, before I'd taken my revenge on Malcolm.
Kellogg was about to become another one of those betrayals.
Per my command he sprinted forward, arms flapping like a bird trying to take flight. These guys were the equivalent of parking attendants with stun guns, so they wouldn't kill Kellogg, but using him as a diversion made my heart hiccup through the next few beats. Guilt would have to wait.
I activated my implants, then fired a round at the plain-clothes officer to my right while dropping to a knee and rolling left. It hit before the man had retrieved his pistol from the holster hidden beneath his windbreaker.
At the end of the roll I popped to my feet and tracked a guard diving for cover behind a parked Dragonfly. My nanocomp locked on and dilated time. He moved slowly, giving me plenty of time to fire a three-shot salvo. The first ring missed, but the second and third found their marks. The officer hit the ground in a crumpled pile of defunct body parts.
Swinging back, I sighted the guard with his weapon drawn on zombie Kellogg. Poor Kellogg charged forward, oblivious to the world of hurt awaiting him. Actually, that was probably a good thing.
The guard pulled the trigger, sending a tendril of electricity arcing into Kellogg. The drone officer flew across the mostly empty parking garage before landing with a gut-wrenching slap of flesh on the concrete.
Without a clear shot on the guard, I ducked behind a Dragonfly panel van and dropped to my belly to survey the scene from under the vehicle.
Three bodies; two guards and one Kellogg. The man who'd tasered Kellogg had disappeared, along with the three civilians, into the guard's station.
Luckily, I had no intention of going in that direction.
> I disappeared into the jungle of machinery, slinking between rows of Dragonflys, until I found a vehicle that suited my needs.
Well, if not my needs, then definitely my wants.
A burnt black Magnum-class Dragonfly with an engine that purred like a tiger fresh from a nap and the kind of curves that throw backs out from heads turning so quickly.
Flashy, expensive, but most importantly for what I needed, a ridiculously powerful Dragonfly.
In the handful of seconds it took to make a bad decision, I'd hacked the Dragonfly's security system, and sat behind the wheel.
BLINK.
Back inside Langdon, and the officer on duty stared at me like I'd sprouted a deity from my forehead. From his look of concern, it wasn't a good deity.
"You okay?" he asked.
So close to the finish line; I didn't bother with a response.
I dove Langdon into the Stream, a perfect entry, no splash. The Precinct display showed the bottom ten floors had been cleared by PIT. Thankfully, Brandt's dot was still trapped in the stairwell.
I zeroed in on the nearest exit in relation to my position in the parking garage.
BLINK.
I tickled the gas pedal and the Dragonfly reared like a mustang passing a kidney stone. I whipped the wheel hard to the left. My spleen wasn't buckled in, and shot up into my throat. The vehicle spun one hundred and eighty degrees before I slammed the brakes.
Nothing but blue skies and an open blast door in front of me. I was practically doing a happy dance.
A happy dance that came to an abrupt stop when two Peacekeeper Kestrels swung into view flying in a tight formation that barred my path just beyond the exit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Sky Is Falling
My Dragonfly's computer couldn't tell if their weapons were locked on, but I operated under the assumption that they were.
Didn't much matter. Only way out was forward.
Bad decisions have a way of trickling into one another. Keep making them long enough, and soon they're all you've got left.
My foot became a lead brick dropped on the accelerator. The Fly lurched, ramming my skull against the headrest, and tossing my thoughts out the back window.
Rows of parked Dragonflys passed in a blur. Despite my collision course, neither vehicle showed interest in moving.
They hadn't thrown any bullets at me, so I figured it could have been worse.
Until they started firing.
A thread of bullets glowing red with heat ripped into the Dragonfly.
I sank deeper into my chair while bartering with the Fly to go faster. Bullets poked holes in the smart-metal frame. They pinged off the hood, a soft pitter-patter of children's feet on wooden floors.
Lots of children.
The Dragonfly's sound-dampening interior held up amazingly despite the brutality of the damages it sustained. I pulled back on the altitude adjuster, allowing the Fly to climb towards the ceiling, and out of the line of fire. Holding that trajectory until the last possible instant, I dropped the nose and dipped through the open blast door.
The Dragonfly erupted from the building like ashy magma spewing from a volcano. A velocity that put me, unfortunately, on a crash course with the Kestrel on the right. Physics carried me forward too quickly to turn, leaving only one option.
I cut the power to the thrusters beneath the vehicle and the nose dove sharply. Yanking hard to the left, I accelerated into the descent. The roof of the Dragonfly skimmed the bottom rung of the Kestrel on the left as I continued my engine-assisted plummet.
Every organ south of my stomach jockeyed for position in my throat. The pressure and speed of descent turned my eyelids into sandbags crushing my vision.
A silvery-gray Dragonfly laid on the horn as I dipped below the lowest level of rush-hour traffic. I fired up the thrusters and leveled out. The weight crushing my brain subsided. I glanced at the rear-view mirror with lighter eyeballs.
The Peacekeeper Kestrels were at home maneuvering the narrow city corridors. My commercial class Dragonfly, made for commuting, was no match for them.
Couldn't outrun them, but maybe I could out-crazy them.
My stomach curled into itself as I banked right into a corridor of tightly packed buildings lining the fringe of the Financial District. The buildings flew past, pushing my reflexes to the limits of their abilities.
I darted into a narrow alleyway formed by two buildings overhanging one another like a couple drunks bumping chests in the final moments before throwing fists. My guardian angel was somewhere in my gut, using my liver and intestines to hold on.
The Peacekeepers broke pursuit, opting to go over the buildings rather than through. The car got squirrelly. I over-corrected, and left my side-view mirror on the building to my right as a memento. I jerked back to compensate, but only managed to pinball off the building to my left, which took the other mirror for its troubles.
Down two mirrors, but still alive, so the math worked in my favor.
A third building, at the end of the alley, had something to say about that.
I slowed, rubbing the building on the right, but otherwise squeaking through the T-intersection with only paint left behind. Overhead, I saw the sliver of sky afforded by the opening between buildings. A silhouetted Kestrel kept pace, a shadow I couldn't outrun. I accelerated out of the turn, dashing for the daylight that appeared at the end of the alley.
A second Kestrel decided that would be a climactic moment to drop down in front of me. I pushed the brake pedal through the floorboards. Brakes, it turns out, were not designed to stop a moving vehicle that quickly, but I did my best to convince them they could, anyways.
The Dragonfly threw me forward, giving the seatbelt a chance to catch me in its stringy embrace. It did, and for services rendered, it took all the air I'd been storing in my lungs. It beat going through the windshield, though.
The Kestrel and I hovered, two insects squaring off over a dollop of pollen; however in this instance, it was the equivalent of a wasp versus a gnat.
I didn't like my chances.
A rod descended from the undercarriage of the Kestrel. A blue beam of light flickered twice from the tip of the pole.
I was trapped between buildings with no way to get clear of the electro-magnetic pulse. The light hit me. The Dragonfly powered down. I fell, along with the multi-ton vehicle, to the ground.
Impact was a tuning fork set to my harmonic resonance and placed against my coccyx. The reverberations shivered through my bones. My head bashed the steering wheel. Teeth sank into the fleshy innards of my cheek. Blood squirted from an open wound on my forehead.
My head lolled onto the headrest while my mouth filled with the bitter tang of copper. I spat what blood I could onto the leather seat beside me.
Drool leaked onto my cheek, but I didn’t care. I tried opening the door to the Dragonfly. It wouldn't budge. Very little gusto remained. I scraped what I could from the bottom of the barrel and drove my shoulder into the bent doorframe. It gave way, creaking open on damaged hinges as a second EMP released its warbling blast.
Seized by instinct, I covered my head.
A second later, the Peacekeeper Kestrel crashed to the ground. Its collision with the ground was as jarring as it was inevitable. Billowing smoke filled the alleyway.
I stepped out into the haze on wobbly legs, inhaling putrid mouthfuls of early evening air. In response, four Peacekeepers emerged from the wreckage.
I looked behind me for the exit and considered running. There were a multitude of reasons why that was never gonna happen. Chief amongst them was I didn't fancy getting shot in the back. A close second, if I was being honest with myself, was that I simply didn't feel like running.
Sometimes, I can tell when I'm beaten. I'd pushed my luck as far as she'd go. I dropped my pistol onto the driver's seat, and took a step towards the Keepers. The pain from my splintered ankle had faded, but the bone felt weak and tingly, which caused me to stumble. Gravity made
an awkward example of me and dragged me to the ground.
I stared into the remains of a puddle filled with substances unknown. The dim light of dusk settled on the fringe of the cesspool, making it glow magenta. The mystery fluid was probably not water, but that didn't matter. The oily soap scum offered an adequate reflection.
Two black eyes had turned to purple squash. My right eye was a shock of burst capillaries, which complemented the cut running the length of my cheek. I traced the edge of the raised skin and felt nothing. The nanobots did what they could to get me to a hundred percent. Nobody bothered pointing out the futility of their efforts.
Less than eight hours left. The nanites should phone this one in.
Chunks of gravel and broken safety glass chewed into the sensitive undersides of my palms as I propped myself up against the grill of the Dragonfly.
I'd kill for a Quick hit. I patted down my pockets with a junkie's optimism, hoping maybe, just maybe, the god of bad decisions had slipped me one when I wasn't looking.
Nothing.
The wind shifted. But it wasn't the wind itself I noticed first. It was the four silhouetted Peacekeepers standing in front of me. They looked up in one coordinated movement as if they were marionettes tethered to a single line.
I followed their gaze, and saw the belly of a Kestrel I figured would be my ride back to the Precinct. That is, until I saw the two men dangling from the side of the vehicle with weapons drawn.
The detail in that picture that mattered was that their guns were pointed down, but not at me.
Which got me replaying the image of the Kestrel crapping out of the sky. A small detail, the importance of which my mind had skimmed over.
A disembodied voice boomed over a loud speaker, "Drop your weapons."
I felt reasonably sure it wasn't talking to me.
The Peacekeepers hesitated, no doubt weighing their options against an opponent with the high ground. Nobody in that posse of land-dwellers liked their chances, and they discarded their weapons. Rifles rattled on the ground like cheap, heavy plastic toys.
Time Heist Page 21
