Ray winced when he realized he’d have to remove his gloves to use the touch screen. Doing so made it easier to control the drone. “Nothing yet,” he finally spoke.
Further in the distance were white blobs glowing brightly in a sea of night vision green, the flames from the crash were spreading. It tempted him to fly the drone closer and look, but what lay between the crash and their position had Ray concerned. There was someone else in the forest, and Ray had serious doubts it was the search and rescue team. The drone couldn’t detect any ships.
The footprints belonged to survivors from the shuttle crash, or hikers out for a late-night stroll, but probably survivors.
Ray stood, zipped up his bag, strapped it back to his back, and continued, this time silently. He kept a close watch on his tablet’s screen as the drone patrolled ahead. The three arrived at a hill, one they’d have to climb rather than walk up. Ray positioned the drone above it searching for easy spots they could scale up—
He saw movement on his screen.
Winds blowing the trees? Perhaps wild animals? He zoomed in and saw nothing else. Animal instinct fear told him to hide behind a tree and check the screen once more. He selected thermal vision. The green and white of the screen turned to deep blue with two humanoid-shaped blotches of yellow on the hill ahead. It looked like one of those blotches had crouched and aimed a sniper rifle forward.
Ray was in cover, the others weren’t.
“You two! Get down!”
A bullet cracked through the air. The shot pushed up darkened snow before Theo’s boot. It got him running and diving for cover. Bashiir did the same and came to roll away from three new plumes of snow shooting up from the ground.
Sniper rifle fire echoed four times. Ray felt the tree he placed his back against shake from the impact of multiple rounds. Frozen splinters scattered in every direction.
There was a pause in the weapon fire, the sniper reloading he guessed. Gunfire echoed again. He didn’t feel his tree shake. Debris and snow kicked up from where Theo and Bashiir covered in the darkness. The shooting didn’t stop, the sniper saw where they hid.
Silence came, it allowed Ray to hear the beating of his heart, and nothing else. Not even the movement or breathing of Theo and Bashiir. Ray hoped it was because they were playing it safe. He was fucked if Bashiir and Theo were dead. They had their IW powers, and Ray had hacking skills that were useless in a forest separated from the city and networks.
Two minutes later. “We good?” It was Theo. Ray exhaled white mist—
The rifle crackled again echoing its call for death in the air.
Broken tree branches tumbled before him after the bullets flew past. When the silence came again, Ray gave his reply. “Nope.”
They all lay low in the snow, heartbeats racing when the reality that hostile individuals had detected them kicked in. Breathing became rapid, body temperatures rose. Ray’s balls weren’t cold anymore, and neither were his hands as he brought his pad to his face, viewing the camera footage from the drone hovering above. The sniper didn’t shoot at it, meaning it or their partner spotting for them didn’t notice it. Ray mustered a smile. It was a short-lived smile when he checked the drone’s battery life, 21 percent and not a single place to recharge it. He hated the wilderness.
“Fuck…” Ray groaned to himself and watched as the sniper and their spotter stood from their cover and moved forward, scaling down the hill.
The sniper and spotter leaped to the base of the hill. Ray peeked ahead. He saw nothing. He grimaced while returning his gaze to the pad’s screen. The drone continued monitoring the thermal heat signatures of the two targets, ambling with weapons drawn, inching closer to the cover of the three. Ray peeked again and saw nothing, not even the new tracks in the snow they made. These were the Specters Bashiir and Theo spoke of. And they were fucking good.
“Two targets incoming,” Ray whispered.
“Bad time to ask,” Theo whispered back. “Is that drone armed?”
“Of course not,” Ray whispered. “That’d be the smart thing to have…”
The sniper and spotter were near now, near enough to hear their feet crunch the snow and fallen branches below, not that any of the three heard it. Telepathic manipulation told their senses nobody else was there. Ray put his smart glasses on and peeked, he still saw nothing—
His lenses populated. There were multiple vulnerable icons, and they were moving closer to him.
The attackers carried networked technology on them, cyberware to be exact according to the expanded information his lenses gave. They were RWs, but at the same time, the IW Specters. They were IWs fitted with cyberware, just like the ones he encountered last month, just like Piper. And as Ray recalled, Piper was the only IW with cyberware outfitted with an AI. He hoped these two didn’t have an AI and were like the rest.
He peeked again, a risky one as the two were now in range. Ray saw four icons near the ground, moving as if they were legs. Above were four more icons, their arms he guessed. It was good enough for him. He reached for his phone and accessed the RW hacking app he’d been developing and hoped the two didn’t have an AI.
Disrupt Cyberware
Force cyberware augmented limbs to cease and go haywire. Targets available:
Left-arm
Right-arm
Left-leg
Right-leg
Ray started with their arms. Cursing in Chinese echoed. It didn’t seem like they had an AI.
He dropped the pad into the snow, freeing one hand to reach for his pistol, the other clenching his phone.
“Take it to them!” he yelled.
He pivoted from his cover, taking aim. Bashiir and Theo did the same, SMGs in their hands. Nothing happened, just a long stare down at open space in the woods.
Theo grimaced, keeping his weapon drawn and steady. “Ugh, to who?”
The sniper and spotter Specters faded in and out of reality like ghosts haunting a trio of hikers in the snow. Neither of them fired a round, hard to when your hands and arms won’t work. The hostile duo still had control of their legs and went running for cover after their bodies became visible. Neither of them made it into cover.
Theo’s hands glowed blue. He thrust his left blue glowing hand forward, and it forced the snow around the fleeing sniper to melt only to refreeze around their legs, encasing it in solid ice. A single gunshot plastered their brains to the tree behind.
The spotter remained and was about to dive behind a fallen tree trunk. Ray reached for his phone, selected the same cyberware disruption app, this time targeting both legs. The malware he uploaded into the Specter forced the servos in his legs to cease and give out midway into his escape. He plummeted into the snowy ground. Bashiir ensured he never stood up again with a headshot that made the snow red.
Ray, Bashiir, and Theo lowered their weapons, all three grinning triumphantly. Ray ran back to his cover, searching for the pad he’d dropped into the snow. He found it.
“Good fucking job by the way…” he muttered while lifting it up.
Bashiir stood above his kill, looking down at the cyberware enhanced IW with half his head blow off. Theo did the same, his glowing blue finger pointed at it.
“What’s with the blue glow, Theo?” Ray asked.
Theo brought his fists to his face, glancing at them. “Was using cryokinesis, malaka.”
“Yeah, but I always see you use electro.”
“We’re out of the city now.”
“So?”
“There’s electricity everywhere in the city. Electrokinesis gives me the power to gather and control it for whatever I want. But out here in the cold and snow? I can only use cryokinesis, and hydrokinesis since snow is made of water. If the winds pick up, maybe aerokinesis.”
“Great, so just like me, being out of the city limits you.”
“Pretty much.” He shrugged. “Get a fire started and I can control it for pyrokinesis though—”
“Guys.” Bashiir gestured to the body he stoo
d over. “We have a problem.” Ray and Theo joined him, looking down at the bloody mess, wires, and cyberware sparking from the remains of the downed target’s head as it turned the snow red. Bashiir pointed it out. “The rumors are true.”
“That’s not good,” Theo said stepping away. “IWs from the Federation with cyberware. I guess there were more of Nobuo’s people, and they’re back.”
“How did you do that, Ray?” Bashiir asked him. “How did you disable their mind tricks?”
Ray waved his phone. “I just fucked with their cyberware.”
“They must have panicked when you did,” Bashiir said. “You need complete mental focus when ghostwalking and they lost it when you hacked them. Losing focus will force them to appear.”
“We’re just lucky they don’t have an AI to kick me out,” Ray said.
“Then what’s that?” Bashiir asked and pointed at the downed target’s head.
Ray looked closer. “Fuck.” He saw the remains of an AI computer chip. He held his phone and tapped through the screen to find its logs. “His AI was seconds away from removing my hack. We got lucky.”
Bashiir moved to the hills, their original destination before the sniper attack. “I’d be careful with that app,” Bashiir said. “You might target a Specter with an AI expecting your hack, and your abilities will do nothing when you were expecting it to.”
Ray grabbed the sniper rifle, wincing when his hands had to apply more strength to lift it than he thought was needed. Its magazine was full according to its digital ammo counter, the sniper had reloaded before they made their approach.
The three were on the move and scaled up the hill. Ray periodically checked on the drone’s camera feed, an early warning for other targets in the area. From what he understood about the Specters after double-checking with Bashiir and Theo, they used telepathy to convince you they weren’t there. Only viewing them via the lenses of a camera would reveal the truth. Ray’s drone became the searching eye for invisible Specters in the mountains. Too bad its battery power had dipped to 15 percent.
Two yellow and orange bodies patrolled a snowy mountain path he saw via his pad’s screen. Ray gave the two the heads up, and they took an alternate route to the crash site. Another group appeared on the screen. The three buried themselves in the snow and waited for them to pass. They continued when they did.
Fighter ships roared into the area moments later, circling around the flaming wreckage at the crash site still a kilometer away. Ray checked his screen. The existence of the ships sent half a dozen figures running for cover. He had a feeling the three should do the same before the ships picked up their presence with IR scanners and they were bombed.
The three found cover in the bushes, close to the red-orange glow of the flames and smoke, turning the snow into what looked like liquid gold. The ships entered VLOT mode and hovered above the crash site, six of them from what Ray could count. Four fighters and two dropships according to the labels on his glasses.
“Yoshida’s personal army,” Ray whispered.
“Took ‘em long enough,” Theo snorted.
“Not really,” Ray muttered. “Their base got smashed, there’s Specters, and a hacker just as powerful as me who might have survived the crash. You don’t rush into that without spending time drawing up a battleplan.”
The dropships lowered, their landing thrusters kicking up snow and debris the closer they got to the surface. The four fighters remained hovering with cannons and missile launchers looking for targets that shouldn’t be there.
“We are too late,” Bashiir said.
“This might be a good thing,” Theo commented. “Those fighters are gonna shoot at anyone. It should make the Specters panic.”
Ray nodded. “And panicking Specters can’t ghostwalk.”
The three were creeping to the scene of the action now, weapons forward, eyes searching for anything that might be a threat, Federation, Alliance, or Yoshida. Nobody could be trusted when a top-secret prototype weapon was at stake. The presence of Specters thinned the closer they made it to the flames and smoke from fear of Yoshida’s PMCs. Either that or the Specters were planning an ambush, one Ray couldn’t see via the drone since he had it fly to the crash site. He was curious to see what Yoshida was looking for.
Ray’s pad’s screen went black. The drone’s feed got cut. He cursed as his hands slapped the pad, not that it’d change the situation. “Shit, the drone’s gone.”
The three looked up simultaneously, watching the quadcopter drone in the skies. Their heads lowered as it did, following it until it hit the ground with a loud thud. The drone was in pieces, buried in the snow. No sparks were flaring from it, that’d require power in the drone to start with.
“Was it shot down?” Bashiir asked.
“Wasn’t paying attention to the battery warnings,” Ray said and put his pad in his backpack. “We’re on our own now.”
The fighters remained hovering, and their thrusters roaring was frightening. And then one fighter’s thrusters stopped flaring, then resumed, then stopped. It swerved erratically, ascended like it was trying to reach orbit, spun around then nosedived. The explosive blast pushed everyone to their asses, knocked over a dozen trees, and spawned new flames. Ray couldn’t see what happened next, only heard the screams of PMCs and other fighters plugging to the ground. Multiple blasts added to the crash site’s flames and debris, shaking the world like an earthquake was in progress, and brightening the skies above and the snow below with gold light.
When the light show was over, and the smell of burned metal, wires, and wood entered Ray’s nose, he stood, dusting his body free of snow and slush. There were no aircraft in the skies. There were, however, four new craters in the area, and four new plumes of black smoke blotting out the clouds above. Correction, six craters in the distance. Ray’s glasses picked up the remains of the two dropships, and it looked like missiles struck them dead on.
“Damn, Ray,” Theo said as she stood next to him, watching the growing flames. “You didn’t have to kill them, bro.”
“That wasn’t me.” Ray lowered his phone, placing it in his pocket. He reached for the newly gained sniper rifle. “Someone else hacked them.”
He moved forward and scanned the area with his glasses, and then a second time with the electronic screen of the rifle’s scope. No vulnerable targets detected, and no movement on the rifle’s screen. It was just a mess of flaming debris and bodies of the dead. If there were others with vulnerable electronics, they had been out of range for Ray’s glasses to detect.
It made their slow approach to the crash site daunting.
Thirty-Seven
Estrella
The night ride to Anaheim Street was smooth and amusing. The colorful neon displays of the IW district were replaced with rows of palm trees and the occasional building that had been overtaken by the local gangs in the area. Many of them looked like the ones Estrella saw in the industrial district which wasn’t far from her location.
She drove her bike up and down the street, her optical scanners running quick facial scans of the people around. All scanned targets turned out to be humans with profiles that seemed legit. She zoomed past bars and rundown convenience stores, a couple of gun stores advertising a two for one sale on boxes of 9mm bullets, reminding passersby that gang activity was on the rise for the past month. Of course it was, the Bald Skulls had added to the gang numbers of the city.
Twenty-two minutes into her search and Estrella spotted two Jamaican men with long dangling dreadlocks enter a pool hall. She pulled her bike up to it, got off, and entered. The atmosphere of the pool hall wasn’t inviting; the place looked like a workshop garage converted into a bar with secondhand tables scratched to hell and back from years of bar fights and other happenings.
Tipsy men waddled away from the establishment’s door as red neon flashed above their rambling heads. She split her arm open and scrolled through her saved patterns menu for something more appropriate to wear other than her h
elmet and red biker suit. Black skater dress? No, the dress she wore at M’s party? Hell no. She settled for ripped black denim shorts, a loose-fitting crop top, and tossed in a pentagram choker as a reminder to those around that she was a witch, if the NC gauntlet didn’t give it away. Gray goo enveloped her form and turned into the selected attire.
She scanned the place, searching for the men as the drop-down menu of her nano printer options vanished. Her zoomed-in view of the place captured the glimpse of a man fitting the description she’d been searching for. He stood around a gathering of large men shooting a game of pool, white ganja mist clouding the ceiling. He was a tall, dark-skinned man with long black dreadlocks covering his shoulders, a lit spliff in his mouth, and gold chains dangling against his chest. He fist bumped the two Jamaicans she saw enter. It took a while, but her facial scans kicked in when the man’s face remained idle enough to get an accurate lock.
Name: Nelson Tucker
Age: 43
Species: Imaginary witch/warlock
Occupation: Alpha Pack gang leader
Notes: Unregistered IW with disabled GPS implant. Please report to the police immediately
Nelson had guts walking around with a profile like that. The locals were probably too intimated by his appearance and his gang to call the police. And Estrella was glad that was the case, she found her target, the man that would answer her question about the Bald Skulls’ activity in the area.
Her phone rang. Piper’s name was on the screen. She picked it up.
“Sup.”
Piper spoke, her alluring and mesmeric cloak-covered face shot Estrella a Mona Lisa smile. “Poolhall on Anaheim Street, Alpha Pack should be there.”
“I’m already there.”
“How did you know?”
“Saw them enter. How did you know?”
“My messenger reached out to me. They want to talk in person too, figured I’d give you the heads up on what they told me so far.”
Piper’s messenger knew. Nexus was breaking its month-long silence. And Ray’s contact, Obsidian, seemed to know things too. Estrella grew concerned about the increasing number of mysterious people showing up and somehow knew what was going on, yet they didn’t know who they were. Not hearing from Ray didn’t help calm her thoughts.
Specter Protocol Page 29
