Specter Protocol

by Eddie R. Hicks

  The first RW approached and grimaced at the soup pot.

  Come on, come on!

  He took one scoop of soup and moved to the side. It was time for the other. He ignored it.

  “Oh fuck, malaka!”

  Ray pulled his hair. “Okay, okay, don’t panic. I had a plan for this.”

  “And that is?”

  Ray didn’t reply. He had work to do. The two RWs shared a table with other military personnel, placed their meal trays down, and started eating, or in the case of the first RW, drinking soup. Ray’s laptop flashed a notification on his screen, the nanites found an RW, the first one they watched. His fingers raced across his keyboard, inputting various commands to the nanites ingested by the first RW.

  “This better work,” Theo muttered.

  “If it doesn’t, then I don’t know what else to do,” Ray said.

  Theo snorted. “Guns blazing?”

  Ray shook his head. “That’s a good way to get them to destroy their secret project before we reach it.”

  A confirmation message flashed. Ray had infected the first RW with the virus. What happened next depended on Ray’s speed. He sent a command to the nanites still swimming inside the RW, issuing orders to leave via his nose, fly and enter the mouth of the second RW. Ray doubted the nanites had enough battery strength to do that, but he tried anyway.

  A second notification flashed. The second RW was infected, and four seconds after that, the nanites died. Low power was the cause, but that didn’t matter, neither of their AIs caught the intrusion as it was a small number of nanites entering via the head, traveling straight to the neural implants wired to their brains, and uploading the virus.

  There were now three screens showing Ray live footage, one from the drone watching from above, and two from the RW duo. Whatever their synthetic eyes saw, Ray’s laptop did.

  “Does that mean it worked?” Bashiir asked.

  Ray grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Yep,” he said. “How long, I don’t know. Never tested this. Their AI is still operational, I’m just hijacking some of its signals. If their AI clues in, then we’re fucked since their ability to operate nanites is still functioning.”

  Bashiir nodded. “Then we need to take advantage of this now.”

  Ray shut the laptop as Theo and Bashiir stood up, reaching for their guns, spare ammo clips, warm clothing, and coats to wear. Ray did the same, adding the task of placing his laptop into his backpack, and then looking behind at the katana on the bed. He debated for a bit, wondering if it was necessary to bring it, and then remembered his words.

  If bullets and IW powers weren’t an option, then the nanite katana would be. He grabbed the blade, hoisting it to his side, hoping things didn’t come down to the point where he had to use it.

  Ray, Bashiir, and Theo climbed into their rental car and drove north through the snow-covered streets of Anchorage glowing with bright neon.

  Thirty-One

  Miyuki

  “Here they come.”

  Yanmei’s words had Miyuki standing ready and clenching an automatic rifle in her slender hands. She ghostwalked with the Specter team that was spread out through the corridors of the Kobayashi. Minutes earlier, the Kobayashi made landfall in the Alliance and, as predicted, military personnel boarded the freighter, a dozen men and women armed with SMGs aimed forward with wincing faces.

  Two soldiers strode past Miyuki. She had to shield her eyes when the flashlights mounted on their weapons blinded her. And then she smiled when the soldiers continued walking, convinced nobody stood in the corridors with them.

  “Why are they here?” she asked.

  Yanmei stood between three other soldiers oblivious to her presence. “I suppose Yoshida realized their ship has become a ghost ship when it docked.”

  Miyuki laughed. “Literally,” she said and watched the military personnel walk past the Specter team standing in the corridors like invisible ghosts. “How do you know Yoshida sent them?”

  “Look at their uniforms.”

  Miyuki did. She saw the logo of the Yoshida Corporation painted on their armor’s shoulder pad and once more on the armor’s breast. “Yoshida’s Private Military Contractors.”

  “This is a corporate-owned vessel,” Yanmei said. “Yoshida must have asked the Alliance military to stand aside and let them handle it. Given how much debt the Alliance is in, they probably were okay with it. Less money they have to spend.”

  Yanmei ordered the Specter team to follow the PMCs as they searched the ship, up and down. The wave of PMCs Miyuki tracked marched for the bridge, transmitting on their radios that the vessel was clear and without a crew. One of them referred to it as a ghost ship, another expressed concern that it was haunted, and they should leave. That soldier was laughed at but had the right idea. They breached the bridge, and their flashlights shone upon Serge sitting at a computer workstation.

  He spun on the chair facing them with a waving hand and smirking. “G’day, mate!”

  And then Yanmei gave the order. Miyuki’s blades sprang from her fingers, and she gave the screen floating in the middle of her combat HUD a second glance, tactical scanned data based on the PMCs armor.

  Armor Name: Yoshida Falcon

  Durability: 100%

  Energy protection: Low

  Armor-Piercing protection: Medium

  Firearm protection: Medium

  Unprotected areas: Neck

  Miyuki found the exposed neck of the soldiers, stood behind, and slit their throats in five sections with one hand stroke. She imagined the rest of the Specters did the same because there were no cries for help heard on the PMCs radio headsets. She lay their bodies to sleep in their own blood, making a mess of the bridge’s floor.

  “G’night, mate!” Serge finished.

  Serge and Miyuki carried a body each out onto the main deck and disposed of it by tossing them overboard. They marched back to repeat the process leaving red boot prints in their wake.

  Miyuki winced when the last of the dead hit the cold icy sea. If the Alliance was looking for a reason to declare war on the Federation, then they just gave them another reason too. She hoped the Specter team lived up to their reputation and name, leaving those that discover the Kobayashi to believe it was a haunted ship and that this was the act of vengeful spirits.

  “This way,” Yanmei said, gesturing back to the freighter’s interior. “The rest are securing the cargo.”

  Those soldiers too met bloody but silent ends with the finger blades, coating her hands red yet again. The blades now resembled the claws of the yūrei, red and long, razor-sharp objects protruding from her fingertips. Miyuki held the left and right arms of her recent kill, dragging him back to the edge of the ship, and a ribbon of red smeared the top deck surface, as with the bodies Yanmei, Serge, and the Specter team dragged. Multiple splashes below signaled the end of that effort.

  The ship was clear now. Yanmei and Serge led the way off. Miyuki remained looking overboard at the dozens of men and women whose lives were lost. Did they have families? Children? Spouses? Siblings, perhaps? Did she just make a brother or sister suffer the same grief she did when she learned of Nobuo’s fate? Was the body of the man she tossed overboard someone else’s big brother? —

  “Matsuoka!” It was Yanmei, breaking her out from her thoughts. Miyuki turned away from the sea, nodded, and moved to keep with the group.

  With her rifle in hand, she ghostwalked with her team, all of them keeping Serge protected like invisible bodyguards as they left the Kobayashi and stormed the port it docked at. The air was cold, much colder than the top deck they’d tossed the bodies over. Flakes of snow had fallen from dark winter skies, coating the surface, and idle ships, with a dusting of white.

  The group stopped at a gate. Serge pulled out his tablet and activated the hacking apps he had on it. The gate’s door swung open. Periodically they encountered PMC patrols speaking into their headsets, asking for a status report from the crew they sent aboard. Finger blades
released streams of blood gushing from their throats. Miyuki avoided taking part, and she couldn’t explain why. The cold perhaps, it was making her body tremble. Or maybe it was something else on her mind.

  According to Miyuki’s HUD, they were traveling east. Looking behind she saw a sign above the entrance to the port they left. It read ‘The Port of Alaska,’ in English letters.

  An hour of treading through the snow slipped by. The group stopped at a barbed wire fence separating a military base and keeping unwanted visitors out. She blew her warm breath into her numb hands during the delay. Miyuki wasn’t expecting to be near the Arctic Circle, nor was she dressed for it. Like the rest of the Specters, she still wore the black catsuit outfit.

  Serge stepped toward the barbed wire fence, shaking his head. “Can’t do anything about this,” he said. “Security’s hard to crack. Military shit. Gonna have to gain access to a network inside or steal command codes. The best I can do, right now, is disable the alarms.”

  Yanmei nodded. “Understood.”

  She gave a nod to Nguyen, Porter, and Brown. The three seasoned Specters approached the fence with their hands glowing white. Rather than entering a ghostwalking phase, they stretched their hands out to the fence, eyes shut, and wrists twitching. The barbed wire metal wall keeping them out buckled, bent, and twisted apart creating a one-meter wide opening. The team entered the restricted area of the base.

  They stopped when Yanmei held her fist up.

  Yanmei pointed out a patrolling man treading through the snow-covered field. Armor protected his body head to toe, and for a moment Miyuki thought he was a robot. She had to run an optical scan to make sure.

  Armor Name: MK. II Yoshida TEK Suit

  Durability: 200%

  Energy protection: Medium

  Armor-Piercing protection: High

  Firearm protection: High

  Unprotected areas: None

  “TEK suits…” Miyuki grunted. “Military-grade weapons too by the looks.” She watched the TEK suited patrol remain in the general area, never withdrawing from sight. Off in the distance were others doing the same, others that wore TEK suits. “They’re not moving much.”

  “We must neutralize them,” Yanmei said. “If they spot Smith, he’s dead and we need him inside.”

  “Roger.”

  Miyuki checked the status of her MEP gauge. She had two minutes left on her ghostwalk. Perfect. She crept forward lifting her rifle up like a hunter in the snow, zeroing in on their target. Yanmei’s firm hand pushed her barrel down before she pulled the trigger.

  “Not a good idea,” Yanmei said.

  Miyuki winced facing her. “I thought you wanted them neutralized?”

  “Look at your scans again.”

  Miyuki examined her HUD again, viewing the scanned data regarding the TEK suit. High durability and firearm resistance with no unprotected areas. Miyuki was asking for trouble by pulling the trigger.

  “Bullets won’t cut it,” Yanmei continued. “At least not ones fired from that weapon. So, tell me, Matsuoka, what do we do?”

  “Huh?”

  “You claim to be ready for operations. How would you handle this if you were the team leader?”

  “Well…” Miyuki bit her lip and instantly regretted it. The icy winds kicking up snow from the ground would chap it. She viewed the overlaid scan data floating in her vision a third time, there had to be a way. Why else would Yanmei ask her? This was another test.

  If bullets couldn’t penetrate the TEK suits, then daggers weren’t an option either. Psychokinesis was risky as it’d prevent ghostwalking, and Specters weren’t as proficient in it, unlike standard telepaths—

  She saw it.

  Energy protection: Medium.

  It wasn’t high like everything else.

  “Energy,” she said. “It will melt the armor and disrupt its electronics.”

  “Very good,” Yanmei said. “But we are Specters, we lack offensive IW abilities. Now what?”

  She looked at the rifle the TEK suited soldier carried, its appearance highlighted green as her optical scanners analyzed it and fed its results to her eyesight.

  Weapon Name: Yoshida PXS77

  Damage: High

  Clip size: Depends on the battery charge

  Rate of Fire: Medium

  Range: Medium

  Type: Plasma Rifle

  And every soldier held the same weapon. Miyuki grinned.

  “They have energy weapons,” she said. If she and the Specters were standard telepaths, the answer would have been mind control and force the patrols to commit suicide. “Guess we’ll have to borrow one.”

  Yanmei patted her shoulder. “Bring one back.”

  “Just me?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked to the field before her, littered with snow and TEK suited soldiers. Then behind, beyond the fence with a small hole ripped through it where Serge and the remaining Specter team stood and would remain standing until Miyuki returned. If she returned. She saw grins and smiles. Saito and Arakawa whispered back and forth, while Brown and Liu made a bet with Nguyen that Miyuki would chicken out.

  This was a test of her power, another one Yanmei gave her. The unit didn’t trust her, and she had a feeling it was for the hesitation she showed during their last stealth kill. Should Miyuki die, then they’d be rid of a weak team member. She had to prove them wrong. She had to live through the test. She had to learn what her big brother died for.

  Miyuki tiptoed through the snow, it wasn’t necessary as she was ghostwalking, but it quelled the animal instinct fear that made her feel like an arctic hare trying to move past a pack of wolves in the dark. She snuck behind the first TEK patrol. Her balance was steady, breathing under control, she had this. The stress had her sweating, despite the cold winter air and white flakes falling onto her bobbed black hair—

  The patrol spun around.

  The flashlight on his rifle blinded her with white light. Her heartbeat sped up. She dove and rolled to the left, but nothing happened. Her ghostwalk was still performing its duty while her MEP gauge continued to shrink, it was at 57 percent now. She focused on the plasma rifle clasped in his armored grips, then looked down at her cyberware augmented hands wondering if they’d be strong enough to snatch the weapon free. She was about to find out.

  Miyuki advanced again from behind and reached for the rifle. She tried not to think about the fact the man in the suit was over a foot and a half taller than her.

  She felt the rifle in her hands despite the numbness and pulled hard to yank it free from his grip. It didn’t move. And then she got overpowered, the armored man’s battle-sharpened mind reacted. She struggled again to pull the weapon and nothing. Her MEP gauge grew lower, Miyuki’s ghostwalk was almost up. It was up to her cyberware now, its strength augmenting her grips and arms to pull it from him.

  She heard footsteps near in the distance, the backup for the TEK suited man. Fear seized her focus, and it made her ghostwalk fail, despite having a few more seconds of MEP left in her body. She was visible, and nobody came to her aid. The Specters wanted her to fail.

  She lost the tug of war for the rifle, then received a big icy boot to the face. The blow threw her petite frame backward, but not before her nimble hands snatched a grenade from his belt. Miyuki hit the snow-covered field, back first. She primed the grenade for detonation with a quick flick of a switch. Warning lights pulsed red immediately as the raging TEK suited patrols briskly aimed for her, his backup behind entering the scrap.

  The grenade left her hands with cyborg speed, soaring through the air, plunging into the snow, and vanishing from sight. Had the incoming group of TEK suits saw it, they would have been able to avoid their explosive end when the grenade went off. One loud boom scattered armored legs and arms in every direction, and the multiple thuds that followed were the bodies that used have those limbs attached crashing into the snow.

  She got up and ran, the servos in her limbs whirring, giving her speeds the huma
n wasn’t expecting. Plasma bolts shot past her, melting the snow when they hit, one after another. Miyuki raced for the mess of human remains that she’d ended with the grenade blast as her fast-moving body kicked up a mist of white in her wake. She dove and reached for a smoldering severed hand still clenching a plasma rifle. She caught it, spun, took aim, and pulled the trigger. A barrage of hot plasm hit the soldier left standing in the chest. His TEK suit melted. She fired again aiming at his arms. His left arm burned off at the elbow and plopped into the snow, taking his plasma rifle with it. He was still standing and retook his weapon, prying his dead left hand from it, and wielding it with the other.

  He returned fire, she dove and rolled as plasma fire blasted the snow. Miyuki had some good news; her cooldown phase was over. She was ghostwalking again, strafing around the TEK suited man, with her finger holding the trigger. The plasma rifle thundered at the TEK suit until the suit’s batteries ruptured from the heat. It exploded. The magnitude of the blast shook the ground, rattled her eardrums, and tossed human remains mixed with liquified metal away from the six-foot fireball brightening the darkened snowfield.

  The explosive outburst caught the attention of three additional patrolling TEK suits. They rushed to her with plasma rifles aimed forward. Taking them on alone wasn’t part of the test. The Specter team stood with her, armed with the plasma rifles and grenades that littered the battlefield Miyuki single-handedly created, and had survived.

  She passed the test.

  Now there were plasma rifles for everyone once the last TEK suit patrol fell.

  Thirty-Two

  Ray

  Bashiir switched off the car’s headlights that were brightening the falling snow covering the scenery around. Ray couldn’t remember which of them suggested they buy thick and warm coats, gloves, and winter boots, but he was glad they did. He had a feeling it’d be several hours, if not a whole, day before they’d be indoors for a long period. He sat alone in the back seat with his laptop on his lap, and an opened backpack, full of his equipment and supplies to his left.