How romantic. Does he not want to be near me? She adjusted her breasts and the straps but couldn’t find comfort. Silence filled the room, save for the electronic bip-bip-bip of his selecting holographic buttons on one of the displays. A plain shirt and baggy, fatigue-style pants, both black, made her feel like a CSB commando without the firearms. She wasn’t in the mood for fashion and passed over her knee-length, high-heeled boots in favor of more utilitarian military ones. After shrugging her coat back on, she turned toward the door, but found Archon in the way, close enough to touch.
“Cripes!” she yelled, hand over her heart. The room lights, as well as the desk terminals, all flickered. “Are you trying to make me brick it?”
He put a hand on her shoulder, drawing her into a gentle embrace. “Forgive me, Anna. The business with the ship has me out of sorts. All these people are counting on me. You have done nothing wrong.”
She rested her head against him, reassured by his breath warming her hair. “You had me worried.”
He held her for a few minutes, gently swaying side to side. “I wish we had more time. Once we are away from this horrid little sphere, we will have all the time in the galaxy. I suspect you might even grow weary of my company.”
“James.” Anna looked up at him. “Don’t be silly.”
She leaned up and kissed him, eyes closed, clinging as if he’d brought her to the precipice of a cliff. Something seemed different, as if he tolerated her affection more than craved it. She shut it out of her mind, blaming the distraction of everything going on. Archon had work to do; the ship—the key to their whole plan—had gone missing, almost a hundred psionic refugees had set their hopes on him, and now they had the matter of Aaron and Talis within strangling distance of each other.
Yes, I suppose he does have reason to be distracted.
“Be careful, Anna. They’ll meet you by the Sentinel Corporation wharf in Sector 9881, more or less due west from here.” He gave her another kiss, a brief peck, and wandered back around his desk. “Forgetting something?”
Anna followed his gesture to the credstick sitting by the empty tea mug on a small table adjacent to the divan. Before she could walk after it, the one-inch fob glided through the air to her.
“It’s a wonder telekinetics aren’t all enormous.” She tucked the small fortune into her coat pocket and walked out. “Don’t have to leave your bloody chair.”
Much like the autoshower, a couple of mechanically inclined psionics had coaxed the main building’s elevators into working. Anna felt certain no conventional technician could find a reason for the thing to be functional, nor did she trust it when Archon wasn’t there to ‘catch’ it should it plummet. She strode past it to the stairwell, trying not to look at any of the hundreds of bullet holes in the cinder blocks. Aurora, being Aurora, had told her when they first occupied the place that local gangs used the building for ‘gaming.’ By that, she meant they shot each other, like a video game, only with real bullets, and for no other reason than being bored and finding it fun. They used small guns and wore armor, but accidents were common.
The stairwell made for an ‘excellent level’ as Aurora claimed one of the ghosts said.
An eerie sense of being watched dogged her as she rushed down the switchback stairs. All her life, certain places felt wrong. Thanks to Aurora, she now believed them haunted. Apparently, all psionics had a degree of sensitivity to the presence of spirits that came as a side effect of one’s brain being opened to power. Fortunately, only a few could see or speak to them, and Anna never wanted to be an astral sensitive. If any sort of deity existed, she’d want to thank them for sparing her that.
Faint sniffling echoed off the bare walls from below. The sound gripped her with dread as her thoughts ran away with all manner of horrible explanations for why the sound of a crying child existed in a place like this. Bugger me. I am not hearing ghosts.
At the bottom of the second-floor landing, a reedy girl in baggy pants and jacket sat against the wall, head forward over her knees, long, dark hair cascading over clunky boots two sizes too big. She looked about fourteen or so, close enough in age and size to Faye to slap Anna with the hand of guilt. What now?
“Oy, are you alright?” Anna stopped. “You’re alive, yes?”
The girl looked up and sniffled; violet smears ran from both eyes down her cheeks. “Huh?”
“Kim, right?” Anna crouched. “What happened?”
A tint of rouge spread over the girl’s cheeks at being caught crying. “I’m sorry, ma’am.” She shivered as sadness traded places with fear.
Anna made a show of looking around. “Stop. I’m not as much of a bitch as everyone thinks. Are you all right?”
“I lost my gun,” she whispered, cringing.
“Oh.” Anna rolled her eyes. “Is that all? Don’t worry, we’ll get you another.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“Kill you?” Anna blinked. “Why on Earth would I do that?”
Kim drew her hands over her face, shivering. “For fuckin’ up.”
“Kinnel… what the devil are you kids talking about at night?” Anna took Kim’s hand. “We’re trying to protect you. The last thing I, or Archon, want is for anyone to get hurt.”
Kim sat up straight and gathered her hair behind her. “What happened to Althea?”
“Althea?” Anna blinked. Why is everyone obsessed with that child? “I… Umm…”
“Piotr said we had to leave the station because of her.” Kim shivered. “He said you killed her ‘cause she tried to fight Archon.” Her gaze fell to the ground, and her voice to a whisper. “I thought she was nice.”
“I…” Anna gasped. “No, Kim. I did not kill her. As far as I know, she’s still alive. And aye, she is nice. Too much so.”
“Where is she?” The girl’s mood brightened. “Is she coming back?”
“I doubt that. She and Archon had a disagreement, plus the little primitive didn’t much like the city.”
“Why? Archon’s gonna save us all. Why would she want to leave?”
“Uhh.” Anna fidgeted with her coat. “I don’t… I mean, she’s too…”
“Innocent,” said Aurora from the first-floor landing. Much to Anna’s relief, the woman had covered herself with a clingy white dress. Skimpy beat nothing. “Sometimes the things that must be done for the greater good seem distasteful in the short term.”
Kim drew her knees up to her face. The fear Anna commanded from the rank-and-file as Archon’s right hand paled in comparison to the wave of unease Aurora elicited.
“Right, well. I’ve got an errand to run.” Anna stood. “You’re better with this sort of thing anyway.”
Aurora smiled.
The girl stared at her, eyes pleading and red. Had Anna been anyone other than the supposedly short-tempered lethal second-in-command, the girl might have attempted to hide behind her to get away from the creepy astral-clairvoyant. Instead, Kim went rigid and trembled, like a child caught between a tiger and a lion.
Anna hurried down the steps, not paying much attention to Aurora’s attempt to be soothing and explain Althea’s absence away as her being ‘too delicate’ for her own good, and ‘too nice’ to understand it was okay to hurt people who wanted to harm you. At Aurora’s claim Archon ‘felt awful and let Althea go home’ when she begged to go back to her family, Anna scowled and shoved open the door to the lobby.
If only.
She stomped through the azure glow of the ‘command center,’ where all the people with mechanical aptitude worked on a mixture of terminals and cyberspace decks. The look on her face sent a pall of tense silence over the room, spreading from person to person and leaving them frozen. One boy jumped out of his chair, abandoning his terminal to hide under the table. A number of adults on break from perimeter security made it a point not to look at her and found their rifles quite interesting.
“What?” she snapped.
Everyone jumped.
“I’m not a witch
!” she shouted, waving her arm at them. Holo-panels and portable lights faltered and recovered. “Go on, do whatever you were doing. Be happy. Smile or something.”
A flea farting would have been deafening.
“Kinnel,” she muttered, storming out to the courtyard. People being frightened of her was nothing new, but having other psionics react to her as if the Angel of Death had walked in got her gut aching. She hesitated as the automatic doors slid closed behind her, glancing over her shoulder at the room full of worried faces. Althea’s sad, pleading stare flooded her mind. How many of them believe I murdered that poor child? I’m not that mean, am I? She tried to remember Twee’s grateful smile after she’d rescued the girl from the CSB. No young people looked at her like that anymore; they all ran the other way and hid.
Anna took two steps toward Archon’s gold Halcyon-Ormyr before she stopped. “Drat. No. That won’t work. I’m probably picking up more than three people.” For the second time in five minutes, everyone in the lobby startled when she walked in.
“Randall?”
An athletic man over by the ‘security team’ sputtered coffee and tried not to drop his rifle. “Y-yes, ma’am?”
“Would you be a dear and bring the van around?”
He leapt up and sprinted down an interior hallway. Anna crossed her arms and leaned on the wall, pondering the sudden thought they might not be so much afraid of her as afraid of Archon. Don’t be foolish. Anna’s smile further tensed the room. He’s a teddy bear inside.
5
El Tío de la Muerte
Kate
Vulnerable points in the green-tinted metal wall lit up with thin red circles as the targeting system in Kate’s helmet identified them. The heavy exo-armor suit thudded across the ship’s cargo hold, feeling much like a wearable leather couch due to the padded interior. She thumbed a button on the side of the huge, boxy rifle in the suit’s articulated metal hands to launch a spray of six mini-missiles from her shoulders.
The explosion rumbled the floor; for a brief instant, the sensation of carpet on her backside broke the illusion of being in a thirteen-foot-tall mechanized battle armor. Car-sized spider bots swarmed out from the smoking hole left by the barrage of missiles. Her vision exploded with a mess of blue and red HUD rings over each target.
Kate opened fire with a rifle as big as a human body. A hail of 55mm slugs swatted leaping spiders from the air, detonating them into sprays of parts. One dropped from the cargo hold roof onto her back, knocking the exo to a knee. She rolled with the impact, crushing the bot with the weight of her suit before the laser-tipped mandibles could burn holes in her helmet.
“Odd targets, one through fifteen, fire,” said Kate.
From the ground, she fired the rifle at bots on the left side while the micro-missiles operated on automatic, singling out targets given odd numbered designations by the system. One by one, her attackers flew to pieces, but they kept on charging, electronic brains incapable of fear. She fought her way standing, punting two more out of the way, and ran for the bulkhead door.
The passage she hoped to be a way out turned into a dead end. Ten feet from the cargo hold, the ship ceased existing—a starfield full of debris was all that remained of the front half of the ISS Excelsior.
“Shit!” she hissed. “How do I always fucking forget this?”
She looked back at the unending swarm of murderous robots, then out at the infinite blackness. This run had been her fourteenth attempt at this level, and so far, every time, she died here. A glimmer of light caught her eye in the distance, drawing her attention to a hole in the side of a chunk of hull floating by. The opening used to be a corridor before the Excelsior broke apart.
“Son of a bitch.” When she looked directly at it, the suit’s electronics calculated the distance at three hundred and forty meters. “Fire boost!”
Four thrusters in the suit’s back ignited, hitting her like a Gee-ball defender determined to earn a penalty, launching her in a calculated drift toward the distant opening. Spiders spilled out of the breached hold behind her, but she didn’t dare fire her cannon lest the recoil send her spinning to oblivion. One of the robots widened its mandibles as it glided nearer. Kate stared at the approaching hole, squinting when unfiltered sunlight peeked over a large hunk of debris with a blinding flare.
Time froze.
Kate, the spider, the sun, even the tiny flecks of starship debris all stopped moving at once.
“What? Bullshit! I’m not dead. This has to be what you’re supposed to do here!” Kate’s scream fogged the visor.
Neon green words appeared in the stillness: ‹Incoming call.›
“Dammit!” She grumbled. “Fine, fine. Pause.”
The senshelmet shut down, reducing the space battle scene to blank darkness and releasing its hold on her neuromotor control. She lifted the flimsy plastic visor away from her eyes and found herself once again in her apartment, sitting cross-legged on the floor. A mess of wires connected her two-day-old white-and-pink Yume Koujou game system to the helmet, the only thing on her. On the far side of the apartment, the Vidphone warbled, indicating an inbound call.
“Who is it?”
The Vidphone ringing stopped long enough for a familiar voice to say, “El Tío.”
She let her head loll back onto the sofa cushions. “Answer.”
A hologram of her former benefactor faded in as if sitting in the recliner at the right side of the couch. As soon as he took on the appearance of being solid and real, he raised an eyebrow at her.
“Kate. They told me you’d gotten over your little issue.”
She lifted the helmet off and set it in front of her on the rug. “I did.”
“And yet you’re still naked.”
“Makes the game more real. Less conflicting sensory input. Besides, I’m home alone.” She got up and walked to the bedroom. El Tío vanished from the chair and shimmered into view standing to her left. He waited, not quite watching, but also not quite averting his gaze, as she put on a robe. “I hope you’re well.”
“I am as well as can be expected. You don’t look very happy to see me.”
Kate glanced at the grandfatherly figure in the dark coat and black fedora, unable to help but feel guilty at the standoffishness she radiated. “I’m sorry, El Tío. So much has happened to me. It’s hard to adjust.” She smiled, tying the satin belt closed while walking closer to the digital ghost. “I will never forget what you did for me.”
He took a long pull from a Nicohaler made in the shape of a cigar. “I never doubted that.”
“You were always good to me.” She gazed wistfully at his shoes, hoping he could see the sincerity on her face.
“So it’s true then, you wound up with the police?” He chuckled.
“Division 0. Psionic police. They don’t care about your business.”
“I need you again, Katherine.”
“Need? I’m… I can’t do that anymore.”
El Tío’s image took a step closer. “I am sorry to intrude upon your idyllic new life”—she cringed—”and remind you of dark times, but no one else can handle this. The job is a psionic.”
Her mind raced for a way to say no to El Tío. Such a thing was generally considered impossible at best, unhealthy at worst. The reality of having to ‘repay’ his generosity for the rest of her—or at least his—life settled in her gut like a puddle of ice water. He’d found her living naked in the streets at fifteen and given her a lifeline: the heat-shielded NetMini that projected hologram clothes. He’d provided the education that lifted her up from a feral wild-girl to a functional member of society, fed her, protected her, and perhaps had even become fond of her somewhat like a father.
All she’d had to do was kill whoever he asked her to.
She couldn’t bear to tell him she felt more grateful to a little ten-year-old blonde girl with glowing blue eyes. That child had freed her of the curse, and let her join the world instead of stand outside watching it.
Sh
e sank to the floor at his feet, staring down.
“El Tío, please forgive me. I can’t do what you ask. They are watching me. If I resolve a job for you, they will… They said they’d forget everything in the past, but I don’t know if I can keep doing it.”
“Kate,” he said, half-whispering. “I am aware of your special circumstances, and believe me, I would not ask if it was not a last resort. This individual has already cost us significant amounts of money and has spat in our eye on multiple occasions. He has killed and humiliated our associates and is responsible for the death of Julian Cray.”
If this guy can get to someone that high up… Kate gasped. “Cray’s dead?” Good for him, bastard.
“Yes. Tseng as well. The mark is psionic, and you are now a police officer who hunts psionics. We can help you arrange it to look justifiable. The old men are willing to pay you two million.”
She gathered the robe tight around her body and stared at the floor. El Tío had taken her in, protected her, but what had he asked in return? He had hardened her, made her a killer, and destroyed whatever innocence remained in her heart. The face of David Ahmed appeared in the back of her mind, smiling at her. How would he feel if he knew she considered doing what the Syndicate wanted? What form could El Tío’s disappointment take if she said no? She clutched her hands over her heart, cringing at the sensation of tears sliding down her cheeks. Her life seemed a continual process of finding herself trapped in untenable situations.
“W-who is it?”
El Tío’s hologram took a datapad from his coat pocket and held it up to the device recording him. The face of a blond man in his later twenties appeared on its screen, hovering above the shoulders of a Division 0 uniform. “His name is Aaron Pryce.”
Kate wheezed as if a hand squeezed her throat shut. He wanted her to kill a cop. The Syndicate considered succeeding in a hit on a police officer the only way to redeem oneself after a betrayal, but doing such a thing and walking away alive never happened. El Tío may as well have put a bullet in her head himself. They didn’t expect anyone to come back from those jobs. Her eyes burned red as she found the desperation to look him in the eye.
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 6
