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PRECOGNITION: Part 44

Posted by Ryan A. Span on 7 Jul 2015 in Locked, Precognition, STREET | 0 comments

     “Gina?” came a voice from very far away. Hands shook her by the shoulders, and she blinked out of the vision, out of Rat’s head. She was back in the City, her eyes rolling through the corners of the grungy pub where she’d stopped for a drink. They all used it sometimes; it was the only half-decent bar in the neighbourhood.
     “You okay? You looked kinda lost,” said Hawthorn, offering her a half-full cup from the table. Cold, stale sake. She drank it anyway and coughed a small thank-you at him. He patted her back and sat down on the other end of the booth.
     She’d been having these flashes for a while now, bits of other people’s lives playing out in front of her, hauntingly accurate yet fuzzy like dreams once she became herself again. First Rat, then Bomber. It no longer surprised her that she could do shit like this. All part of her ever-growing suite of amazing psychic powers.
     “How long have I been here?” she asked thickly. The smell of old smoke and sour alcohol pricked her nostrils. An ancient energy-saving lamp threw cold, bluish light on her surroundings. Concrete panelled in fake wood.
     “Beats me, I just got in a minute ago.” A tired-looking waitress dropped a tall glass of beer in front of Hawthorn, and he took a pull. “Have you seen Jacob around anywhere?”
     “No,” she said. Not since he walked out, hours ago, with a head full of painful new memories. By the time she thought to run after him, he was already gone.
     It was probably for the best. Bomber didn’t share pain, he wasn’t the type. He’d look for someplace to be alone while he sorted his head out, free of distractions and away from all the confusing input. He just needed some time.
     Hawthorn grunted. “Figures. I wanted to talk to him, but it can wait. How did your headshrinking session go?”
     “Too early to tell, really.” She found a wry smile from somewhere.
     The waitress dropped by again to deposit a fresh bowl of deep-fried seaweed sticks. Hawthorn tucked in straight away, and Gina ordered a fresh cup of sake while she had the chance. It arrived within moments. The bar was nearly empty, and Gina was one of the only customers still sober enough to order more alcohol.
     She’d probably have to stop drinking soon. One of her old medical implants filtered the blood flow to her reproductive system, to keep anything nasty out, but it could only handle so much. The thought was depressingly, frustratingly real. As much as she wanted to forget her pregnancy, the world conspired to keep reminding her. Like whenever she picked up a glass of anything stronger than water.
     “We’re doing well. I wanted to catch Jake with this, but I might as well tell you while you’re here,” Hawthorn said. “I got us a lead. Some of my people have been tracking down Gabriel’s airship since we lost sight of it. Turns out a docking registry was filed yesterday in one of the Hacker Nations, not far from here. You ever been to Laputa?”
     She sputtered into her sake cup. Wiping her chin with her sleeve, she said thickly, “Laputa? I–” She swallowed. “No. Not in person.”
     “Neither have I. Interesting place, I hear. Interesting opportunity. Tough nut to crack, but you know what Jacob’ll say when he hears about this.”
     “He’ll rush out there to storm the thing, and we’ll have to follow him.”
     He gave her a smile that was less forced than usual. “Listen, Gina . . . I know we haven’t exactly known each other a long time, but I’d like us to be friendly. Jacob has a lot of faith in you. He’s not always the best judge of character, but I figure he’s right on this one. You’re tougher than you look.”
     Amused, Gina chuckled, “I don’t look tough?”
     “You look like a Cosmos cover model, and they’ve been computer-generated perfect for the last fifty years.”
     “Don’t forget I can read your mind, too.”
     “I haven’t forgotten. If you’re looking for dirty fantasies, I’m sorry, you’re not my type.” An awkward grin came over him, and Gina reached out to pat his hand. She already knew there wasn’t a woman in the world who was Hawthorn’s type. “Look, I’m sure you can tell I rehearsed this little speech in front of a mirror, but also that I mean it. We didn’t meet under the best of circumstances. Hell, we’ve all been under a lot of stress lately, but I think you’re a good influence on Jacob.”
     Gina grinned back and took her hand away, slowly. “Major . . . Hawk,” she corrected herself, and stretched out a long pause, looking him dead in the eye. Then her voice sharpened to a knife edge. “Do you know you’ve mentioned Jacob six times since you sat down?”
     The air between them cooled instantly. Hawthorn’s face froze into an expression of tightly-restrained rage, and he pushed his chair back as he stood up. Trembling hands reached for his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.
     “I’ll see you at the house,” he spat on his way out the door.
     Gina raised her cup to his retreating back, laughing softly to herself, and tipped the last few drops of sake down her throat.

     Some people just rubbed her the wrong way, Gina thought, swaying drunkenly across deserted City streets. Some people were trouble, or going to be trouble sooner or later. Like Darius. Darius who died trying to help her, and she’d never know or understand why. Even a telepath couldn’t figure people out sometimes.
     Maybe that was the problem. The problem with Hawthorn. She couldn’t quite figure out his angle, his motivation, why he was here helping them. Too many emotions whirling around in his skull. Some of them conflicting, some of them just strange.
     Gina stumbled down one kerb and up another, catching herself on a signpost. Between the blocks of squat, rectangular buildings blotting out much of the sky, the horizon was lightening to faint purples and pinks. It made a weird counterpoint to the harsh white glare of the streetlights. She’d been out longer than she thought. But then, this was the first time . . . First time in a long while that she felt safe enough to get drunk.
     For once no one was chasing her, no one with a gun waiting around the corner. Even if there were, she wasn’t sure she could find it in herself to be afraid. She had so much power now. It was getting hard to keep her thoughts to herself. Right now she could feel the minds of a thousand other people around her, like ants crawling behind her eyeballs, their lives flashing into her whenever she lost focus for a second.
     Break, dinnertime, cold rice and chicken skin. Break, climbing on top of a hooker in a back-room brothel. Break, a crying boy with red belt marks down his back. Break, stalking a lone woman through the streets, getting ready to strike . . .
     Suddenly there was a group of men blocking the way ahead of her, and more behind, seven or eight of them in total. Copper-coloured faces decorated with scars and threatening smiles. They were all Chinese, no doubt from some kind of gang, but Gina didn’t recognise their colours. They weren’t from this part of the City or any other district she knew.
     She expected to feel fear, but when she looked into her heart she still didn’t find any. These clowns had no idea what they were messing with. She was Gina Hart, and there was nothing she couldn’t do.
     “We want Simon Caine,” said the man in front. He was dressed in a dark canvas jacket and a red headband. “You tell us where he is.” He flicked out a butterfly knife and started to clean his fingernails with the point. For a move he learned from some cheesy holovid, it actually looked quite threatening.
     “Um,” said Gina, willing herself to stop swaying. “No, I don’t think so.”
     “And that is the wrong answer,” he replied. He took a few steps closer, knife held out in front, grinning at Gina.
     She reached out with her mind and took control.
     Even drunk it was child’s play to worm inside his mind, to grab the brainstem and tickle its nerves into action. The gangster froze. His feet were rooted to the ground. Cold sweat broke out along his forehead as his fingers squeezed the knife hilt, and it turned in towards his throat until the blade was close enough to nick his five o’clock shadow.
     “I think you boys just made a huge fucking mistake,” Gina said sweetly. “Didn’t you?”
     They clustered together holding guns of all shapes and sizes. The biggest of them shouldered forward and thrust his oversized pistol towards Gina in trembling hands, roaring, “What did you do to him?!”
     “I suggest you put the artillery away before the lady tears you all to pieces,” came a voice from the corner. Everyone whirled around to look.
     Bomber stood haloed in the light of a blue neon sign, his hands in his pockets and his broad shoulders relaxed. “You got somethin’ you want to say to me, here I am.”
     “I have something to say to you.”
     Another man stepped out of the crowd. He had a long black moustache down to his chest, a big pink scar along one side of his face, and two mismatched eyes — one milky-white and blind, the other black as coal under the cold streetlight. Gina felt the slow stirring of a memory, a face that had changed since she’d last seen it but familiar all the same. “I know you,” she said, surprised. “The guard. The guard from the Emperor’s bunker.”
     “That was a long time ago. And you,” he rounded on Bomber, moustache whirling, “promised me the man who attacked us at the old compound. You promised me blood.”
     “I told you I’d call when the time was right.”
     “Blood doesn’t like to be kept waiting, Simon, and I have no intention of sitting on my thumbs until you get your shit together. There’s a debt to be paid.”
     “It ain’t Simon. Not anymore. Call me Bomber.”
     The man ambled forward, hands in his pocket, and came toe-to-toe with Bomber. Gina flogged her fuzzy brain to recall his name. Stoney, Bomber had called him a long time ago. Behind him, the knife slipped from the younger man’s throat and clattered down on the pavement. Gina’s attention had wandered away and her telepathic control of him faded away.
     “I really don’t care what you call yourself,” Stoney said calmly. True to his nickname, he had no expression at all, face blank as a slab of rock. “You don’t want to make an enemy of me, Simon. I know where you’re going, where you’ve been, where you sleep. It wasn’t easy to track you down, but here we are. Think about your vulnerabilities and remember our agreement.”
     Bomber clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder and gave him a frosty smile. “I tell you what, Stoney . . . Lose the road crew. You can come back with us and I’ll fill you in on the nature of the problem. That, or I can kill you and your bunch of goons in the space of about three seconds. Those are your options.”
     They stared at each other for a long time, potentially the two stiffest human beings on the planet, like carved stone images caught in some eternal battle of wills. Bomber seemed to thrive on these high-intensity show-downs. Gina figured it gave him some weird sense of moral superiority over the simple criminals he hung out with, as though he occupied higher ground. Of course she’d never suggest that Bomber had a bit of a stick up his arse. Not to his face.
     It was Stoney who broke the stalemate. He took a step back and waved at his escort to disappear. To men who were already on the edge of terror, it came as a welcome release. The guy with the knife simply bolted. Gina treasured a triumphant smile as she watched him run as fast as he could, panting and drenched in sweat. The others quickly scattered into the streets and left Bomber and Gina alone with their new friend.
     Stoney said, with a hint of bleak amusement, “I have a feeling this is a mistake, but you made me curious about who could give big bad Simon Caine so much difficulty. Who could defy the man who killed the Emperor, hmm?”
     “If I want someone dead, Stoney, there’s exactly nothing on this Earth that can stop me. Now shut up and listen.”
     Bomber slipped an arm under Gina’s shoulder to help support her, and together they walked back to the safehouse while Bomber calmly and rationally explained the situation, as much as that was possible when talking about super-powered telepaths and men who couldn’t be killed.

     Gina didn’t think she’d ever heard Bomber talk so much at one stretch. She was almost sober by the time he finished, nibbling away at some dry rice cakes and wishing there was more to drink.
     She looked blearily from face to face. Bomber was his usual intense self. Stoney looked thoughtful and stroked his moustache. Even Hawthorn was there, glaring at her from the corner. She returned his attention with a wide smile which never touched her eyes.
     “Interesting,” said Stoney, once he’d absorbed the whole story. “Until I saw the girl in action, I’d have called you all insane. Now I’m not so sure.”
     “You know I’m not the exaggeratin’ type,” Bomber replied.
     “Yes. Always straight to the point, unless it suits you to be otherwise.”
     At that moment Hawthorn came forward, clenched fists trembling, and he said, “If I can ask a question . . . What the Hell is this guy doing here, Jacob?! This is supposed to be a secure perimeter!”
     Bomber gave him a look of complete indifference. “Settle down, Hawk. We’re gettin’ to that.”
     “No, you listen to me! I’m sick and tired of getting sidelined. I’m the one putting my people into harm’s way, people who work on my orders, not yours. Without me this whole operation is dead in the water, so you damn well better start paying me some respect!”
     Through her telepathic senses, Gina could feel the confrontation shaping up in front of her, the impulse to establish male dominance. Then, suddenly, a different feeling twisted in her belly. Something weird and unfamiliar. As Bomber leaned back against the table, buying a moment to think, she knew he wasn’t going to rise to the bait this time. She sensed what would happen before he knew it himself.
     “Stoney’s here because he’s got connections. Connections that can open a lot of doors for us,” Bomber said. “You want respect, Hawk, that’s fine. But you’re gonna have to trust me. We’re still in this together.”
     The fighting mood bled out of the room, but Hawthorn’s anger remained, bubbling away under the silent surface. He said nothing while the conversation ground on around him.
     Stoney fished a cigarette out of a thin silver case in his pocket. The simple act of placing it between his lips caused the end to ignite, spewing blue smoke. He said, “You need me.”
     “With Jock gone and the Emperor dead, that leaves you as one of my only remaining underworld contacts in the City,” Bomber replied. “You can get things done in half the time it would take us. Arranging transport. Helping us stay off the radar. Gaining access to that airship.”
     “Mm.” He took a long drag off his cigarette. “I can get us into Laputa, but you must have seen the news. The place is in chaos. Shootings, bombings, all very unpleasant. Possibly dangerous. Certainly expensive.”
     Gina interjected, only slurring a little, “So it’s ‘us’ now, huh?”
     “My help comes with strings attached,” he rasped. “I have a vested interest in this operation.” His thumb stroked the scar tissue running up his cheek.
     The hidden meaning was plain to read from the swirling flow of his thoughts. Gina added, “You mean you can petition the Triad lord for a new eye if you get your honourable vengeance.”
     Stoney stared blankly at her. Then he barked out one syllable of laughter and said, “I guess you really are a telepath. Alright, how many bodies are we bringing along?”
     “A small team,” Bomber replied smoothly. “You, Gina, Major Hawthorn and myself. If we need a tech specialist we can hire one locally.”
     “It’ll take time to arrange, and I have responsibilities. Matters that need attending. At least a day.”
     Bomber looked a question at Hawthorn, who nodded reluctantly. “We can be ready by then.”
     “Then we’re done here.” Stubbing out his cigarette, Stoney stood up and picked up his jacket. “I’ll be in touch.”
     After Stoney said his farewells, Major Hawthorn disappeared and Bomber turned his attention to Gina. He wrapped her arm around his shoulders and half-walked, half-carried her upstairs. In this state her mind was almost easier to control than her body. He helped her into bed and draped the sheets over her, clothes and all.
     “Get some rest,” he told her. “You and my brain have another date in the morning.”
     “Oh. That’s nice,” she murmured, and then sleep took her.

     A telepath with a hangover was by far the most miserable creature in the animal kingdom. Gina tossed and turned in bed, pillow wrapped around her head, groaning weakly at people not to think so loud. She couldn’t muster the will or concentration to block out the world. It all kept coming in, the innermost secrets of everyone around her, in a big confused lump. She could barely pick her own thoughts out of the gloopy mess inside her head.
     “Are you awake?” asked a voice from beside her. She started, causing a stab of nauseating pain to lance down her brainstem. She blinked puffy eyes against the light until they focussed on Bomber. He sat on the bed beside her, staring at her with all his considerable attention.
     This was an unacceptable state of affairs. No matter how hard she glared at him, though, he wouldn’t seem to go away.
     Kneading her forehead with the tips of her fingers, she croaked, “How long have you been sitting there?”
     “About an hour. I didn’t wanna wake you.”
     “An hour?” she repeated, her voice still flat and dull. “That’s . . . That’s kind-of creepy, Bomber. Don’t you have anything to do?”
     He shrugged. “You may not have noticed, but you’re the only girl with psychic superpowers in this joint, which kind-of puts you in high demand. How soon can we get started?”
     “Christ, at least let me wake up.” Yawning, she pushed his shoulder to tell him to get out. It was barely a nudge; the state she was in, she struggled to summon the strength to lift her own limbs. All the muscles in her body throbbed with aching stiffness. “Just wait in the other room until I’m done, okay? Do something spiritual. Meditate. Make me some coffee.”
     He squeezed her hand and left, as requested. Gina meanwhile collected herself enough to get up and stumble into the shower cabin. It didn’t do much for her head, but the jets of hot, soapy water woke her up a bit as they stripped the sweat and dust from her skin. This model cabin sported a little alcove full of shampoo-applying head massagers, but she wasn’t really in the mood. A voice command turned the water off and the hot air blowers on. Seconds later she was dry and slightly more ready to face the day.
     Does he ever sleep? she wondered as she pulled on a long t-shirt, and went out to look for Bomber.
     The therapy room was already set up when she came in. A steaming cup of coffee waited for her on the window ledge. The curtains were drawn, all the candles lit, and a stick of incense burned in the corner — as far away from Bomber’s spot as possible while still being in the same room. Bomber himself sat cross-legged on a cushion looking up at her. All his thoughts vanished, except those about the blister of Spice clutched in his hand.
     Gina stopped and said, “Wow. You prepared it all?” She glanced around to make sure she wasn’t still asleep and dreaming. He’d done it to help her feel more comfortable. “I didn’t think you’d be so eager.”
     “I’ve gotta know the rest of it. If we failed to stop the Feds, I need to know why. I need to remember.” He gestured her to the cushion in front of him, and she knelt down.
     “Alright,” she said softly. A big gulp of coffee helped to bring her own thoughts in order. “Clear your head, and we’ll give it another try.”
     Together, they submerged themselves in Bomber’s memory, and Gina began to sift more information from the disorganised clusters at the edges of the block until an interesting thread pulled them in . . .

     As the copter slowed down, he put his rifle to his shoulder and took up a position at the door. They cautiously hovered into the rubble-strewn wasteland on the outskirts of Lagos. Huts and houses lay in ruins all around them, blown to pieces or tumbled down through neglect. Grass and weeds turned the cracked, pitted asphalt practically green. Cars stood abandoned, rusting in the middle of the road. Bent, furtive people darted from shadow to shadow, never daring to look up at the train. The local fighters left aircraft alone for the most part, but Jacob ordered their altitude kept low anyway. The last thing they needed right now was to run into some warlord’s private SAM battery.
     “Nice place,” remarked one private, scanning the buildings through her sniper scope. “Wonder what the beachfront property’s like. I might move.”
     “Civil war’ll do that,” said Corporal Sweeney laconically.
     Tense minutes ticked away as they crept into the city proper. The streets were piled with debris from bombed-out buildings, except for shallow trenches for moving around in. Huge barricades blocked every intersection against vehicles. Even the massive pylons of the maglev track showed chips where bullets, shrapnel and any number of other things had nicked the dense concrete.
     “Stay on your toes,” Jacob reminded everyone. “The maglev station may be garrisoned. If anyone is plannin’ an ambush, expect it the second we hit dirt. Disembark and secure a corridor to the platform double-time. Remember, we’re only here to catch the train, but if you see anybody point a weapon at us, you drop ’em.”
     He selected three privates to take point as they descended into the station car park.
     The pilot shouted a countdown over the intercom, the time until they reached their drop height. At zero, the door slammed to the side with hydraulic force. Air rushed into the chamber and whipped at anything that wasn’t tied down, but Jacob didn’t even have to squint inside his helmet. The armour was sealed against the outside world. It had sensory simulators built in which mimicked the air moving over his skin, to make him aware of its speed and direction, but weak, muted, artificial.
     “Move!” roared Sweeney. The team jumped the remaining six metres to the ground. They landed, rolled, and came up with their rifles already scanning for targets.
     They didn’t find anything to shoot at. The point men moved ahead while Jacob and the others swept infrared sights across the gutted buildings. In case anyone was trying to be clever. The helicopter chuffed quietly back into the sky. The pilot would circle the area, standing by if they needed him.
     Sweeney spoke up again. “Sarge, I’m getting confirmed heat traces in these buildings. Could be residual, or animal, or humans in therm-block gear.”
     “Locals,” Jacob replied. “Probably been eyeballin’ us since we appeared in their sky. They may not want a shootout with armoured troops. Keep your guard up, but do not fire unless fired upon.”
     Suddenly the leader of the point team whispered over the radio. “Sir, we have contact. Looks like we’re expected.”
     Throwing a few hand signals to his men, Jacob ordered a rapid advance through the ruined arch between the station exterior and the train platforms. They climbed across the rubble in twos while keeping a constant watch on the thermal traces. If Jacob gave the order, those traces would disappear instantly. Their high-tech rifle rounds would punch through this old concrete without even slowing down.
     They entered the wide open space of the platform hall. The remains of a broken, bullet-pocked roof still hung bitterly on, perching precariously on rusted mounts. Huge, convex sheets of cracked plexiglass dangled almost to the floor. Dust covered every surface, but an even thicker layer clung to the maglev dock, where an array of giant electromagnets waited to brake or accelerate another train carriage along the rails.
     Only one man stood on the maglev platform. He wore a patchwork uniform coloured green and blue, with a black cap only slightly darker than his skin, and carried a short bullpup rifle pointed at the floor. He made sure to display the weapon in plain sight so everyone could see how advanced it was, a shiny new piece fresh off the assembly line. It was a statement. Don’t underestimate us.
     “Who commands you?” the man shouted to the shimmering, camouflaged ghosts in front of him.
     Jacob came forward, though he kept his camo cranked up to maximum. “I’m in charge here. What exactly do you command?”
     “This station, for my Lord Hawasweka. Fifty men with armour-piercing weapons. No one uses this train without his approval.”
     “Buddy,” said Jacob, smiling, “I frankly do not care who you are or who you kowtow to, and I ain’t got time to negotiate, so let me skip the formalities.” He glanced over to the pair of maglev carriages, waiting under a makeshift canopy of armoured plating. “This is the fastest land route to Kagaso refinery. You’re gonna let us take that maglev, and tell no one we were here, and nobody has to die. Catch my drift?”
     The man stood silent and without fear, secure in the strength of his position. “Go now, while you have the chance,” he scoffed.
     Jacob swore under his breath. Nobody ever wanted to do things the easy way. He switched his camouflage off, which turned his suit military green from head to toe, sergeant’s stripes and a SOCOM badge blazing on his shoulders in black and gold. He tapped them with two fingers. “You know what this means? I’ll translate. It means I got full local authority and a whole airfield of strategic bombers at my beck and call. The reality is, even if you and yours could slow us down, I have an airstrike up my sleeve that will level this whole fuckin’ block. Sure, we might lose the train, but it’s no use to me anyway with you in front of it makin’ my life difficult.”
     “You . . .” The guard hesitated. “You are bluffing.”
     “Corporal,” Jacob bellowed, “get support on the horn. Tell them to initiate Charlie Foxtrot. Bunker charges, full spread.”
     “Yes, Sir!” Sweeney responded all too eagerly. Reaching up to the side of her helmet, she started fiddling with the radio controls as if preparing to make a call.
     That finally did the trick. The man’s expression was sickly pale as he gestured for everyone to put their weapons down. “For God’s sake, I have a wife and children! Take the damn train if it means so much to you!”
     “That’s great,” murmured Jacob. “That’s really great. And I just know you’re gonna get along fine with the two guys I’m leavin’ behind to guard this end of the line. They’ll make sure nobody cuts power to the tracks or anything stupid like that. Don’t worry, they’re real fun.”
     The man’s sinking expression was the best entertainment Jacob had had all week. He grabbed him firmly by the shoulder while the two rear-guard troopers rushed to secure the control room.
     A tremendous bass hum buzzed through the platform as the generators for the magnetic track spun up, and in minutes Jacob’s squad was aboard, accelerating toward the refinery at six hundred miles an hour.

     The refinery complex grew on the horizon while the afternoon faded into evening. Four huge, funnel-shaped cooling towers squatted above the jungle like man-made mushrooms. Beside them was the whole process of human industry; pipes, chimneys, factories, warehouses. It all looked remarkably peaceful. He would never have guessed that, underneath this complex, there was a stockpile of fissile material big enough to turn a land mass the size of Scandinavia to radioactive glass.
     The maglev sped on with nary a bump or a jar. Lacking an on-board engine or any moving parts, the train produced no sound except the eerie whisper of air passing over the roof. No tilts, no shakes, no ups or downs, just a smooth slide to their destination. It was so quiet, the squad instinctively kept their voices down, as if chattering at normal volume would somehow break the spell.
     Jacob remembered riding on an old diesel train once, when he was a boy. It thumped and juddered down the iron rails, banking hard to keep its weight on top of the rusty track. You couldn’t open the windows, but he’d found an air intake and stood under it so that his hair whipped back in the cold stream and the smell of exhaust and engine oil washed over him. Holding on tight to the handrails, he could pretend he was riding on the back of some giant monster, hurtling wrathfully towards an unsuspecting town.
     This time there was none of that. To his mind it lacked something; an appropriate sense of drama to the situation. There ought to be a backing track of Wagnerian opera, at least.
     Their destination came into sight down a long vegetation-free corridor. A small United Nations flag fluttered above the refinery station. Once, plant workers would’ve been queueing up for their daily commute to and from Lagos, but those days were long gone. Most of the remaining staff now lived close by under the protection of UN peacekeepers, and the station was deserted.
     Jacob told Corporal Fahlan to radio ahead and announce them. They were expected, but they might as well be polite.
     Sweeney’s voice crackled into his helmet through the command channel. She muttered, “Twenty blue helmets and us against God-knows-what. I still wish we had more intel, Sarge.”
     “This is what we trained for, Corp,” he said gently. “Losing ain’t an option, not when there’s weapons-grade nuke fuel at stake. We follow our orders and we make our stand.”
     “Yes, Sarge. Sorry, Sarge.”
     The train moaned softly as it reached the edge of Kagaso. Magnetic brakes decelerated them hard, and Jacob hung on to a handrail until his organs came to rest again. The hydraulic doors pushed open onto the concrete plain of an industrial site, a clean and clinical island in the middle of the Nigerian jungle.
     A bored-looking corporate hazard officer ignored them as they disembarked. He perched lazily in a booth guarding the refinery entrance, next to a row of full-body scanners and decontamination showers. None of them looked used in recent months.
     Lieutenant Cornell, the commander of the UN peacekeeper garrison, waited on the other side of the fence. Jacob saluted and turned his helmet transparent so they could talk face-to-face. The Lieutenant greeted him with a nod and an outstretched hand.
     “Cornell, Australian Defence Force,” he said, “and you must be Sergeant Dusther. Welcome to the arse end of nowhere. I’m surprised you got through, local warlords usually hoard these trains like gold dust.”
     “I can be very persuasive when I need to. Sir, were you briefed about the situation?”
     “Only the basics. I was told to expect you, that you’d take on a consultancy role, and that I should take your tactical advice very seriously.” He flashed a rueful smile. “Which is another way of saying I’ll wear the stripes while you call the shots. Something ugly must be coming our way.”
     Jacob bobbed a curt nod. “Intel could be wrong, Sir, but . . . We should be so lucky.”
     “The only operative question in my mind is exactly how FUBAR our situation really is.” Motioning for Jacob to join him, Cornell started off towards the central reactor building. “We can start by showing you around, let you eyeball the site and our assets. I have orders to cooperate and comply with any reasonable requests. Frankly, though, we’re just a token force. I do my best, but twenty guys can’t police three hundred corporate workers and managers. If they want to smuggle material out of here, they can, and we might never even know it’s gone.”
     “I don’t think the guys we’re expecting are interested in a small-scale smugglin’ operation. In the short term, have you got billets for us?”
     “My sergeant will be here in two minutes to sort you out some space. Water’s not a problem, we got a Volkov filter that’ll purify pretty much anything. Food . . . Well, there’s emergency rations and not much else.”
     “That’s fine, Sir. We don’t plan on stayin’ long.”
     “Right.” Cornell stared off toward the treeline and frowned. “I’d say it’s a pleasure, Sergeant, but something tells me I’m going to wish I’d never met you.”
     “I just shovel what the brass squeezes out, Sir,” Jacob replied, put at ease by the Lieutenant’s easy manner and sharp perspective. He doffed his helmet to taste the air before entering the big concrete cube. It was hot, muggy and smelled of stagnant water — more than a little bit like home.
     He let out his breath and added, “Let’s go win this thing.”

PRECOGNITION: Part 43

Posted by Ryan A. Span on 30 Jun 2015 in Locked, Precognition, STREET | 0 comments

     The Chrome Rat kept her hands deep in her pockets as she walked. She glanced sideways at the Laputan trooper on the corner, noticed how his finger never left the trigger of his sonic pulse gun. Every major crossing was patrolled by soldiers nowadays, ever since the attack on the Fifteen. Of course they were only formality, a bit of street theatre for the benefit of the locals. Robots and automatic cameras handled shit like surveillance and security. The uniforms just sent a message, reminding everyone of the colours of their flag.
     And of what would happen if anyone got on the government’s bad side.
     She stopped to stare out a window. From here, two hundred stories up one of Laputa’s starscrapers, she had a good view of the huge arcologies which surrounded her on every side. They glittered like mirrors in the daylight. Beside her, a hologram of a public newscaster swayed from side to side, voice echoing tinnily from a wall speaker.
     “The motion will be voted on in emergency session later today,” the woman said, “where a majority of National leaders are expected to approve the integration bill, either whole or in part, effectively centralising Nations-wide government under a single authority. Quoted upon leaving hospital, President Arend of the Netherlands said, ‘We must put up a united response to last week’s devastating attack. This is the first step.’
     “The King of Laputa, ‘Kensei’ Kagehisa, has already been put forward as a candidate to lead the reforms. It is currently not known whether he intends to step down as King if the motion carries. For more on this story, we’re joined by political analyst Rupat Singh.”
     Rat shook her head and resumed her slow circuit of the tower. The walk hadn’t helped to clear her mind. All she’d done since she left Harmony’s hideout was brood. She couldn’t stop worrying about Jock, the insufferable arsehole, caught up in this mess just like her. She’d tried to contact him through every channel she could think of. His phone was dead. Messages via GlobeNet, both subtle and obvious, went unread.
     The thought of him dead in a ditch somewhere made her heart ache in a funny way. A lot of new emotions had wormed their way into her life over the last few months, until everything seemed too big and too complicated to deal with. She’d started out a petty thief with grand dreams, pretending to be a boy to be accepted in hacker circles, and terminally single by necessity. Now . . . Hell, where to begin?
     The only thing she could be sure of right now was the war. A quiet war, a hacker’s war, one that everybody claimed they weren’t fighting. Sooner or later, though, something was gonna blow up.
     Lost in thought, she almost didn’t notice the large holoprojection unit before it smashed down onto the walkway next to her. She started, and threw up an arm to ward off the shrapnel of tiny screws and shards of glass. Thankfully nothing got through her jacket.
     Panic gave way to anger. Rat started to scream something furious, her legs shaking with adrenaline, but she stopped when she spotted a team of light infantry battlesuits on the mezzanine above her. More of Kensei’s troops. They weren’t paying attention to her, thank God; instead they ran around pointing their guns at a row of kneeling people, carelessly ripping equipment out of an office front whose power had been cut. Only the physical sign still worked to identify the place.
     It said, in between decorative lightning bolts, Prime Time News. Known critics of the government, and friends of Harmony. Kensei was making a move.
     “Shit,” Rat hissed through her teeth. This needed to reach the right ears, fast. She forced a calm walk, as if nothing was the matter, while heading straight for the nearest bank of elevators.
     “Hey, you there!” someone shouted from behind her. “Wait a moment!”
     “Shit,” she said. She froze, fists clenched in her pockets, trying not to tremble. “Look, I didn’t see anything!”
     One of the troopers jumped the railing and landed nimbly twelve feet down. He approached Rat with long, confident strides, keeping his weapon at his side. He grabbed her hands, shoved them on top of her head and turned her towards the windows. She couldn’t even see his eyes through the mirrored visor on his helmet, just the lower half of his inexpressive face.
     “Name,” he demanded as flashed a handheld retinal scanner at her eyes, then continued to frisk her for weapons.
     “Alex Park. Look, I don’t want any trouble–“
     “Mr. Park. One moment.”
     He uploaded the scan to the central database, then waited for a response. A second later the scanner bleeped. It was not a friendly bleep.
     “Miss Park, pardon me,” he murmured, studying the hologram as it scrolled through her private information. “Interesting. We have a detention order out on you, Miss Park. You’re to surrender yourself and be taken to Cloud City immediately.”
     Rat was trying furiously to think of a witty response when she saw the ball of fire in front of her. It moved up the southern elevator shaft of the arcology just outside the window, barely a hundred metres away, blowing out windows as it went and blasting chunks of hot metal in every direction. When it reached the top, the heavy elevator carriages smashed through the ceiling and careened into the air between buildings, tumbling end over end until one cratered the ground and the other ploughed into the starscraper in which Rat was standing. The tower shook, steel screeching like a wounded beast, and the explosion shockwave rattled its windows so loud it left a ringing in Rat’s ears.
     Screaming. She heard screaming — not in pain, not really terror, but the panicky shouts of soldiers who’ve had a nasty surprise. The Laputan trooper beside her had disappeared. The whole squad ran around behind her like headless chickens, warbling repeated questions into their radios. They seemed to forget all about her and her ‘detention order’.
     So now she had a choice. Let herself be arrested and see what Kensei had in store for her, or get the Hell out of dodge.
     The next moment her feet pounded against the floor, dashing headlong to get out of sight, to reach the relative safety of Harmony’s hideout. She didn’t slow down or even breathe until she was down in the utility corridor, locking the hidden hatch shut above her.

     It took a while to come down from the unwelcome rush. Rat found a nice corner to collapse and breathe until her heart stopped racing. Even from down in the corridor, she could hear the activity going on in the hideout proper, where it was all hands on deck for the press war against Kensei and his regime.
     Still, they made Rat feel welcome as long as she made herself useful. She was one of the girls, united in their goal. It was actually pretty nice.
     Her pulse gradually slowed to normal, and her wobbly legs managed to support her as she got up. She had news, big news. She hurried the rest of the way into the windowless room.
     The place had been remodelled a little since the first time Rat had seen it. The bunk beds now clogged up the corridors in favour of a holoprojector crammed into one end of the room, blasting out a wall of simultaneous newscasts. Another ageing VR rig stood next to it, hooked up to a row of brand new data runs dangling from fresh holes in the ceiling. Heavy-fucking-duty data runs; the cables were as big around as Rat’s thigh.
     And of course there were women. Every piece of hardware had somebody at the controls, running it at full capacity. The efficiency of the operation was a little chilling. Harmony clearly had more manpower than money, but she used it well, and these women were motivated to get the job done. Nobody batted so much as an eyelid at the tactics they were using.
     Rat had managed to put together a decent picture of what was going on. Portable drives here changed hands as fast as credit chips on the Street of Eyes, since it was the cheapest secure way to transfer data at short distances. Every now and again someone would ask Rat to ferry one and, given half an opportunity, Rat had a tendency to snoop.
     One drive she’d inspected contained the minutes from several of Kensei’s cabinet meetings. Another was filled with personal — very personal — information about Laputa’s foremost politicians, members of Kensei’s inner circle as well as the opposition. Scandals, carefully kept secrets, everything, along with annotations from one of Harmony’s paralegals about how to put them to use.
     It even contained an entry on Jock, though a short one, and beyond his general involvement with the Emperor of Shanghai it seemed Harmony didn’t really know much about him. There were some pictures, though, freeze-frames of hotel video prior to the attack. Several entries and exits from Jock’s room, a few magnifications of faces. Jock was there. So was Kensei, and so was Rat.
     She’d swallowed hard and rapidly deleted everything with her face on it from the drive. Access records suggested that nobody at Harmony’s knew what they had, but it would only take one curious person looking at those pictures to land Rat in the shit. She didn’t want anyone compromising her newfound place among these women.
     Now she staggered through into the back and came face to face with Harmony herself, on her way out. She caught Rat just in time to stop a collision. “Whoa, Alex! What’s going on?”
     “Two-Gamma Arcology,” Rat said, her voice trembling even more than her knees. “They . . . They blew it up.”
     “We know, it just hit the news. I was about to go and–“
     “You don’t understand, Harm,” she interrupted. “I was there. I saw it happen.”
     The mood changed instantly. Harmony pulled her in and seated her at an empty workstation, dropping to her haunches in front of Rat, and gave her hands a reassuring squeeze. Harmony looked very serious, and for a second Rat could’ve mistaken her for the mother she no longer had.
     “Alex,” she said softly, “I want you to tell me everything that happened. Everything. Can you do that?”
     Rat nodded. Another concerned girl came and offered her a cup of water, which she sipped. In a weird way she enjoyed the attention, the feeling like she mattered here.
     So Rat spilled her guts about everything she could remember, leaving out only the part about the detention order, the part that could incriminate her as a spy. Stuff that Harmony really didn’t need to know.

     The whole operations room listened while Rat told her story. Most of it, anyway. Hearing about the surprise raid on Prime Time News caused a ripple of shock, worry, people rushing to get confirmation. Her momentary encounter with the Royal Guard earned sympathy and a few pats on the back. Then she described the explosion in as much detail as she could remember, and the frowns on Harmony and her aides deepened by the second.
     “You’re sure the fire moved up from the ground floor?” Harmony asked, voice flat and hard. “Absolutely sure?” When Rat nodded, she shared a long look with one of her personal aides, Karen. Karen was a pretty blonde woman whose narrow, steel-blue eyes contained all the warmth and pleasantness of a frontal lobotomy.
     “This has got ‘Banshee’ written all over it,” Karen said. She had a pronounced Irish lilt, very similar to Banshee’s, and her voice projected an iron sense of authority. “I should get down there. I can analyse the damage better in person.”
     Rat blinked. “Are you crazy? The place’ll be crawling with Guards inside of five minutes!”
     A paper-thin smile curled Karen’s lips. “If our friend really is responsible, they’re going to have their hands full. They won’t even notice I’m there.”
     She squeezed Harmony on the shoulder and went, no ceremony, no goodbyes. Rat wasn’t sorry to see the back of her. There were plenty of pleasant women in Harmony’s company, but Karen wasn’t one of them.
     Frustration showed in the set of Harmony’s mouth, and Rat could almost hear the gears crunching in her head. Taking another sip of water, Rat waited for her train of thought to arrive at its destination.
     Harmony threw an arm across the holographic newsfeed, which caused it to rewind and replay some poorly-angled footage of the explosion, shot from a security camera on one of the nearby starscrapers. The zoom function had been pushed to its limit; it showed individual shards of glass as the windows blew out one by one, slicing the air in detailed slow-motion.
     “Something bugging you?” Rat asked into the pregnant silence.
     “Somebody just murdered about four hundred of my people. Yeah, you could say something’s bugging me.” Acid dripped from her words, out before she could even think about moderating her tone. She patted Rat on the arm as a gentle apology. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. I knew Banshee was planning something, but this . . .”
     Cold shivers crawled through Rat’s bones, but on the outside she turned it into a laconic shrug, not wanting to look weak. It took a bit of effort to keep her voice level. “The guy’s got more loose screws than a machine shop, and ice-water for blood. You can’t predict someone like that.”
     “Banshee’s a lizard,” Harmony agreed thoughtfully, “but he’s a practical kind of lizard. I mean, Two-Gamma’s like every other arcology in Laputa, he could’ve picked it by throwing a fucking dart. But then why go to the trouble of putting his bomb way the Hell down the building, far away from all the traffic and access points? Why bomb it at all? It doesn’t add up. I’d be tempted to call it a diversion.”
     The way Harmony looked at her told her it was a test, a question whose answer she already knew. She ventured, “Unless . . . Unless there was something in it for him.”
     Harmony nodded. “Something he wanted, maybe. Inside the arcology, or under it.”
     Underground. Rat’s mind immediately conjured up images of a different building elsewhere in Laputa, a long lift ride down to a complex which didn’t show up on any official map, so secure that even its owner couldn’t walk in unannounced. Kensei once told her there were three data vaults in Laputa, and only a handful of people knew where they were. He let her in on a big secret by taking her to one. In a way, it showed a lot of trust.
     “It’s a data vault,” Rat said. “Gotta be.”
     “Banshee’s probably there right now, downloading everything he can get his grubby hands on.”
     Rat kept her mouth carefully shut. Alarm bells rang in her head, warning against the impulse to blurt out a confession. She could give Harmony the location of the vault she visited, but not without making people wonder where she got the information. That couldn’t happen. She had to think hard, come up with something to say, anything that wouldn’t–
     “Come on,” the older woman said, and grabbed Rat by the arm on her way out the door. “We’re gonna go make that Irish fuck an offer he can’t refuse.”

     A huge spider-web of maglev tracks stretched between the towers and arcologies of Laputa hundreds of metres above the ground, suspended from the buildings by thin carbon cables and struts that looked too flimsy to support even their own weight. None of which helped Rat. She held on to the handrails with a death grip, knuckles white, and forced herself to look at the ceiling. Her eyes kept being drawn to the panoramic windows, though. To the dizzying drop that waited just outside the little plastic bubble of the maglev train.
     The only way she survived in Laputa was by convincing her brain to accept everything as ground level and every window as some kind of holo-screen. Sometimes it was easier than others.
     She whimpered softly to herself until they arrived at Two-Delta station. Holding tight to Harmony’s hand, she shuffled through the crowd of people towards the southern exit, along with just about everybody else. Excited chatter filled the corridors. From what Rat could understand, half the people here were rubberneckers trying to get a glimpse of the carnage.
     “I hear you can get the best view from the western stairwell,” said one man, travelling with the flow of bodies. “It’s got glass all the way up.”
     His neighbour piped up, “But from that angle Orleans Tower is right in the way of the view. I’m going to the northern stairwell.”
     Rat looked a question at Harmony, but she wasn’t paying attention. The first chance she got she dove into an express elevator and hit the lowest number on the board. A big red zero lit up the destination display, blinking slowly while the doors began to close. Two clever, quick-thinking people ducked into the elevator a split second before it sealed. Two women in baggy clothes wearing hard, knowing smiles.
     “Believe it or not,” Harmony explained over the rising hum of the magnetic lift system, “the quickest way to get there is through the streets, on foot. I have a key that’ll unlock the service exit. Let’s hope our friends are still there.” She speared the two newcomers with a look from under her hood. “Did you bring weapons?”
     “You know we’d never let you down,” said the woman on the left, in a hauntingly familiar Irish accent. She peeled a holomask from her face and changed from a complete stranger into someone Rat recognised — Karen. She unzipped the top half of her jacket and pulled out a shiny black submachine gun, handing it to Harmony along with a handful of magazines. The other woman shoved a shiny metal pistol into Rat’s hands, then shook a long, police-style shotgun out of her sleeve. It made a dangerous click as she snapped a magazine in place.
     “And the rest of your team?”
     “Moving into position. We got snipers in the western and northern stairwells, and two more in Orleans Tower and Two-Beta. Guard-issue weapons.” She grinned. “We were right. The blast pattern’s more like a breaching charge than a terror bombing. Banshee’s down there, and he’s going to have to come out sooner or later.”
     “Good work. Be discreet, I don’t want any of the shells traced back to us.”
     Still staring at the gun, Rat’s brain began to catch up to what was being said around her, and she looked up with a gasp. “What? You’re gonna kill them?”
     “That’s the plan,” Harmony murmured. She worked the slide on her SMG with an ominous click. “Whatever Banshee’s taken from that data vault, I want it. It definitely can’t fall back into Kensei’s hands.”
     The carriage arrived at the ground floor with a loud beep. They revealed a forest of huge concrete pillars sandwiching tinted glass shops and company lobbies, though most of the entrances were a few floors up. Cheap residential rooms led off down the left, while Harmony went for a service corridor on the other side, off-limits to civilians. There was nothing in it except pipework, wiring, and a tight squeeze to the dusty windowless door outside.
     Laputa’s streets crowded in around them when they emerged under the dark, cloudy sky. The bulk of Two-Delta arcology blocked what little sunlight made it through the grey blanket, and the rest was lost in the thick black smoke rolling down the street. They pushed through with nothing but a pair of electric torches to navigate by.

     Rat held her weapon like a live rattlesnake, caught between the rush of power and a serious case of the panic shakes. Things had become way too real in the last few seconds. Shit, she thought, her small fingers fumbling with the grip. Shit, shit, shit . . .
     Following without thinking, she circled the huge steel and glass bulk of Orleans Tower and finally came face to face with the smouldering ruin of Two-Gamma’s south side. Twisted steel and rubble sagged down into a part of the building that no longer existed. Fires still flickered somewhere in those black-scarred depths. Harmony and her friends stretched bandanas over their noses against the smoke, and Rat did the same with a pulled-up shirt as they dove into cover.
     A blast of wind washed over them and made Rat shield her eyes. She barely heard the Royal Guard dropship swoop down over her head, rotors slicing the air with a Dopplering hiss. It skimmed low over the ground towards Two-Gamma and deposited a small team of lightly-armoured troopers along the street, then pulled up again to disappear among the towering arcologies and starscrapers. The troopers gave no sign that they knew or cared about the four civilians huddled together behind them. They rushed the big hole in the ground where the southern elevator shaft used to be, weapons up and ready to fire.
     I shouldn’t be here, said a soft but insistent voice at the back of Rat’s mind. This is not me. I don’t do fighting. I don’t do guns. I should not be here.
     Harmony gave her a reassuring pat on the arm as if she could her thoughts. She reached into a pocket and produced what looked like a mobile phone, heavily modified with the biggest antenna Rat had ever seen, which crackled to life at the touch of a button. Everyone crowded in to listen to the noise.
     “Echo Team advancing,” said the tinny loudspeaker. “Bunker entrance is wreckage, no hostile presence. Elevator shaft has been blown open and drilled with rappelling lines. Black hats must still be down there. Will proceed.”
     Rat gawked. “You cracked their radio encryption?”
     “Oh yeah,” whispered Harmony, very pleased with herself. “We set up a real-time decoder and they haven’t got a clue. Information warfare’s what we do.”
     The faint rattle of automatic gunfire echoed down the street as well as across the radio. The voice cut in again, “Exchanging small arms fire down the shaft. Somebody’s here, all right. Corporal, hand me that launcher, I have–“
     “Holographic alarm!” shouted another voice in the background. “New contacts down the entire shaft! Lieutenant, it’s mined!”
     “Shit! Okay, up, everyone up! Go go–“
     The ground rumbled. For a single heart-stopping second it was like someone ran a jackhammer next to Rat’s head, a series of sharp raps echoing on the radio for a long time afterwards. The last signal before the transmission went dead was a breathless moan from some trooper who no longer had much of a set of lungs to scream with.
     Harmony closed the phone and stared hard-eyed at the rubble around the base of the arcology. “Meat for the grinder. Meant to make Banshee think he’s got a minute to escape before the Guard can regroup. They’ll have another team waiting in the wings.”
     “Poor bastards,” said Karen. She slapped a magazine into her assault rifle, then peered up over the concrete tendril that served them as cover, extending from Orleans Tower like a petrified tree root. “Let’s move in closer. The smoke should hide us, just stay out of any chaff patches. Get it in your eyes and they’ll be shredded to Hell. Get it in your lungs and you’ll be shaking hands with St. Peter.”
     “Who?” asked Rat, but she never got an answer. She had to rush to keep up, dashing across the open ground to the next tendril, the last one that would give them any cover from the direction of Two-Gamma.
     This time they got their heads all the way down. Only Karen looked out, squinting through her rifle scope. She held up a closed fist for attention. “I see bodies coming out of the shaft. Get ready. Let them thin each other out, then I’ll give the call.”
     Rat couldn’t help but look. Eyes stinging from the smoke, blinking away moisture, she watched a number of human silhouettes milling around in the wreckage. A distant sound percolated through the crackle of fires and the soft hiss of the wind, something Rat couldn’t quite put her finger on, intruding on the edge of her hearing. It went on for seconds until a sudden flash of realisation turned her head upwards.
     Eight suits of Federation-style battle armour plummeted down from the arcology roof. They landed within the space of a second, slamming craters into the tarmac like a burst from some huge machine gun, sending up huge clouds of shrapnel and dust. Blank metal faces turned towards the enemy, and Rat buried her head in her arms as all Hell broke loose.

     The noise was too intense for Rat to process, much less describe. The Laputan battlesuits cut loose with rapid-fire machine guns and filled the world with their awful, high-pitched rattle. Explosions followed, the hiss of rocket propellant, big clouds of dust and shrapnel everywhere. Chunks of pulverised concrete rained down on Rat’s head. Hot sparks landed in her hair, and she did her best to shake them out.
     Somewhere in the chaos, she heard Karen screaming, “Go, go, go!”
     Her heart stopped. The signal for the snipers. She couldn’t stop the impulse to look, glancing out to watch Banshee’s final moments through the dust, his face obscured by a gas mask but unmistakable by his stature and body language. Still very much the High King of Ireland.
     He’d obviously anticipated the Royal Guard’s attack. His people were hunkered down under thick cover, firing huge anti-tank rifles and armour-piercing rockets, and they knew how to use their equipment. Three of the Guards were down on the ground, and another stood slumped in the middle of the battlefield, a dead man held up only the shell of his suit.
     Too bad it wasn’t going to be enough. Blood painted the walls where Banshee’s team hid, and the intensity of fire dropped as more of the Irish were cut to ribbons. Then it was just Banshee and two other men against four Guards. And he certainly hadn’t counted on Harmony’s snipers.
     Their bullets travelled so fast they left silver trails in the air, like tiny bolts of lightning. For an instant, glowing lines connected the surrounding buildings with the helmets of each of the Guards. Four flashes of light and heat, four brain-spattered craters drilled in through the armour. The hulking suits stopped in place, catatonic without a living operator. And Banshee . . .
     He dropped down to an instinctive crouch, and for a second Rat thought he might’ve been shot. Then he stood up, hesitantly, not sure what to make of this new development. His free hand probed his torso for bulletholes. It didn’t find any. He frowned, confused but alive, and wrapped his fingers around the little gold crucifix hanging from his neck.
     “Take up secondary positions,” Karen whispered into her radio. “Watch the rooftops for enemy snipers.”
     Rat blurted, “I thought you were gonna kill him!”
     “There’s still time.” Flashing her icy smile, Karen jerked her head towards the wreckage. “Let’s go.”
     Karen and Harmony strode forward through the dust, and Rat kept pace. Banshee aimed his weapon, but when Harmony stopped to throw her hood back, he began to laugh. Loud, harsh humour in his voice.
     “Razorblade,” he called. “Are you my guardian fucking angel now?”
     “Sure. Don’t you see my little wings and halo?” She grinned without warmth. “I’m here to talk, not fight. Can I trust you not to shoot me for long enough to hear me out?”
     “I know you’re not here to fight, or you’d be dead already, with or without your little sharpshooters. Look down.”
     Holograms began to flicker all around their feet. Four smooth white domes appeared out of the road surface, covered in dozens of little pits where the launch tubes were hidden. Anti-tank mines. That was what the firefight had been for, Rat suddenly realised — Banshee’s people hadn’t been doomed at all. They were just packing their enemies into the killzone.
     Banshee twirled the little radio detonator between his fingers. “Pulling the same trick twice works more often than you’d think.”
     Not a hint of fear showed in Harmony’s expression. She crossed her arms lightly and said, “Then I guess you have to ask yourself how you feel about ‘mutually assured destruction,’ or ‘the enemy of my enemy.’ Personally, I suggest we take your escape route before Kensei’s goons come back and make us all dead.”
     He took a moment to weigh his options. Then he gave a tiny nod, and waved at his remaining people to secure the way. The women joined him walking single file, and Banshee marched at Harmony’s shoulder, talking quietly while Rat did her damnedest to eavesdrop.

PRECOGNITION: Part 42

Posted by Ryan A. Span on 23 Jun 2015 in Locked, Precognition, STREET | 1 comment

     “I’m not doing it, Bomber,” Gina Hart said flatly, chest heaving as the argument lost steam. They stood facing each other across the sparsely-furnished living room of their safehouse. Major Hawthorn sat on a table off to one side, playing around on a sheet of electronic paper and pretending not to listen. It would’ve been more convincing if he hadn’t been there the entire time.
     Gina felt her anger simmer down to a slow burn before the stoic, implacable look in Bomber’s eyes. She still wasn’t ready to budge. “I refuse, and that’s final. Next time you ask me, the answer’s still no. I won’t fucking do it.”
     “Just think about it, okay?” Hawthorn interjected, and regretted it. She speared him with a look that said, in no uncertain terms, Stay the Hell out of this.
     It was a new experience for Gina to be in charge among a group of military types. Bomber and Hawthorn were both used to giving orders, but they needed her more than she needed them. They relied on her telepathic abilities and her connection to Gabriel. So, gradually, Gina’s force of personality took over. Now she held the reins for a change, and she wasn’t about to let them go.
     Too bad the boys kept wanting to take risks she really didn’t care for.
     Bomber came forward and took her hands. “Gina, please. No one else can do this.”
     She lowered her eyes and clenched her jaw, hissing, “I’m not Gabriel. If your memory block blows up again, I won’t have a fucking clue what to do. You could be left braindead, or worse!”
     “That’s a chance I’m prepared to take,” he said in tones like hammered iron. “They lobotomised me, Gina. Treated me like some fuckin’ puppet whose mind could be rearranged for convenience. I can feel the memories there, and I keep getting dreams, flashbacks, but none of it makes sense. It’s like my head’s gonna burst.”
     To a telepath, it was obvious what he was going through. The memory block in his head had been his constant companion for fourteen years until Gabriel triggered the panic button. The self-destruct sequence had been stopped and the block had been shored up, but it suffered cracks. Deep ones. It was crumbling bit by bit, spilling chunks of memory at random into Bomber’s mind. She didn’t know what it would do if she knocked it down the rest of the way.
     She said, “I can’t be responsible for what might happen to you . . .”
     “You don’t have a choice. None of us do. Whatever Colonel Obrin has been hiding, it’s in here,” he tapped a finger against the side of his head, “and it needs to come out.”
     Gina grimaced and turned away from him, leaning on the table for support. A shiver rushed through her when Bomber’s arms locked gently around her waist. “You never listen, do you?” she sighed, and folded her fingers over his hands.
     “Guess I don’t hear as well I used to,” he said, smiled, nestled his forehead in her rich red hair. “He won’t let this drop, you know. Gabriel. He won’t let you stay with me, and the way things stand right now, I won’t be able to stop him. What use am I when I can’t even raise a gun at him?”
     Finally, biting her lip, Gina gave in like she knew she would. She couldn’t keep saying no. She was going to try to fix up one man she loved so he could go off to fight the other.
     “Alright.” She shut her eyes even tighter against the throbbing ache in her chest. “Tonight. We’ll do it tonight.”
     His voice rang with relief. “I . . . Thanks, babe.”
     “Don’t,” she snapped. “I’m not doing you a favour, Bomber. It’s not gonna solve anything.”
     Bomber didn’t respond to that, just kissed her on the nape of her neck and let go. Reluctantly, he left to give her some space. Hawthorn followed at his heels and shut the door behind them.
     Sinking onto the inflatable couch, Gina let her frustrations flow out with a sigh. These last few days with Bomber had been happy ones. Gabriel left her alone. The ragged scar inside her, where he’d torn a piece out of her mind, had started to scab over. It still throbbed like an aching tooth, but her growing mental strength and discipline let her ignore it for the most part. Now if she could just stop dwelling on what happened at the airfield . . .
     She should’ve done something when Gabriel was there in front of her, said something, but she couldn’t. The sight of him left her paralysed and white-faced with dread. Her only thought in that moment was of the little child in her womb, hers and Gabriel’s. One moment of weakness changed her life forever. What drove her even more insane was not knowing for sure if he knew. She thought she was an open book, that one glance would’ve told him everything, but he hadn’t read her mind. She would’ve known if he did.
     All he said was, “Keep in touch.”
     She had to wonder if he’d intended this. Was it random chance out of a genuine moment — the one percent out of a hundred that went through her contraception implant — or part of some twisted master plan? Maybe that was painting him as too diabolical, though. She couldn’t imagine how the baby would fit into things. Not for Gabriel, and definitely not for her.
     Did she really want a child with him? Did she want one at all?
     I am not mommy material, she thought acidly. You hear that, Gabriel? Fuck you. This is your fault, I shouldn’t be in this position.
     Then she rushed to the bathroom to empty her stomach again, morning sickness gonging violently through her body.

     She took her time setting up the candles, curtains and cushions, assembling each piece of the scene just the way Onounu used to do. Like a proper ceremony. It gave her something to focus on, a way to calm and concentrate her thoughts. She lit her candles one by one until the room was bathed in a soft flickering glow. A stick of cinnamon-scented incense provided the final touch.
     Kneeling on a cushion, she breathed deep and let her mind loose. The world washed away into ripples of mental energy. The bustle of the City at night. She touched the thoughts and emotions of a thousand other people packed like sardines into their huge street-spanning flat blocks.
     It was easy to pick out the unique ripples Bomber made as he waited downstairs, and those of Hawthorn’s people in the basement. She felt the neighbours, who never suspected a thing. People doing what they did, dealing with their worries, living their lives. It cheered Gina up in some unquantifiable way. It was nice to know that normal human existence was still possible in the middle of all this insanity.
     Hawthorn himself was nowhere to be found. She’d banned him from the premises for tonight, with good reason. That man had been all over the place since their failure at Colonel Obrin’s base. He tried to bottle up his emotions all stoic-like, like Bomber, but he simply didn’t have the knack. Beneath that carefully-tended military exterior he was bouncing off the fucking walls. Gina didn’t need the distraction.
     She touched the flat pool that was Bomber’s mind. Empty, like a TV without a signal. He could sit there switched off for hours, thinking about nothing, but alert and ready to explode into action at a moment’s notice. It was such an unnatural state that it made her skin crawl.
     Shuddering, she made herself push through the sensation and gave him a swift kick in the frontal lobes.
     Get up here, she told him. You don’t want to be late for your own party.
     Neurons began to fire again, the dusty mechanisms of his conscious mind grinding back to life like a long-dormant computer, and Bomber soon returned to normal operating parameters. His boots creaked on the old wooden floors as he stood up.
     Gina’s heart throbbed faster, higher in her chest. She’d expected to be afraid, but now that she was committed, fear was the last thing on her mind. Whatever happened, she could handle it. She had the power. It was dangerous and unpredictable, but it was hers.
     Bomber said nothing when he slipped through the bead curtain, barely rustling the wood-effect plastic. His eyes swept the scene like a target gallery. He recognised the recreation of Onounu’s study and, understanding his part, sat down cross-legged in the place Gina had been a few weeks ago. The thick, fragrant smoke made his eyes water.
     “Try to relax,” she told him, though it was a bit like telling a nervous greyhound not to chase after rabbits, and handed him two tablets of Spice. “You can relax, can’t you?”
     The tease seemed to work. Breathing deep, Bomber pushed some of the tension out of his shoulders and let his mouth fall open. It made him look different, smaller somehow, like a relatively normal human being. He tossed the pills down his throat and swallowed them dry.
     Gina nodded approval. She dropped her voice to a slow, husky lilt. “Now, think back, way back. I want you to concentrate on two particular memories from your past. One, the first experience you have from your pilot training. Two, the last thing that happened before you joined the Army.”
     “That was a long time ago, Gina . . .”
     “I’m a telepath. Trust me.”
     Reluctantly he closed his eyes and began to dig deep. Gina rode the memories with him, watched places and people flit past, faces blurred and emotions gone dull with the passing of years. She’d shared enough of Bomber’s flashbacks to recognise the airbase; she’d been Bomber for a few minutes, taking his flight certification test for the first time. That gave her a landmark to navigate by as they went further back in time.
     And as Bomber dredged up the old, disused chunk of history she’d asked for, it pulled them both in like a magnet.

     It was a bright day. The sun beat down on a stretch of Florida so humid that his hands left trails in the air when he moved them. The metal Army bus rolled along hour after hour, picking up more and more recruits as it went along, slowly cooking them all in their own sweat. It swung up in a ponderous arc through the Carolinas, too far inland to benefit from the Atlantic breeze, but he stared out passively despite the heat. Not far to go now.
     The base didn’t look like much from a distance, a lump of concrete and corrugated steel squatting on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, and he didn’t really pay it much attention even when the bus rolled through the gates. His eyes were on the sky. There were helicopters circling overhead, big chunky training machines like the ones he’d probably be flying in a few weeks’ time. Once they let him out of the simulators.
     He’d always dreamed of flying, but his grades at school failed to convince either commercial companies or the US Air Force. He’d just about given up on that dream before he enlisted. Now the Army Aviation Branch was giving him a chance when no one else would, and he was going to make it count.
     Someone beside him said something that made the others laugh, but he barely registered it. The buzzing copters held his attention until the driver threw on the handbrake and herded everyone off the bus.
     
     Sudden break, rewind.
     
     He stood outside, watching the creek bubble down the thickly-forested valley. Mississippi wasn’t far short of jungle this time of year, but his ancestors had worked hard to keep one side of the valley clear to farm their tobacco. All that remained of those days were the river and the big timber farmhouse, meeting at the end of a thin stretch of paved road that led back to civilisation. He’d already boarded up the windows and locked the doors. Now all he had to do to was leave.
     A musty smell permeated everything, the smell of vegetation and wet earth. Underneath it was the faint plastic tang of his brand-new dress uniform. It still felt strange. It was one of those things people did, though, when they wanted to run away from everything. You either signed on a merchant ship or you joined the military, and he hated boats.
     He checked his watch again. So far, they were three minutes late, and he had to wonder why they’d told him to wait at home. Sending a car to pick you up from your own doorstep didn’t seem like the regular way of doing things. Not that he was an expert . . . The black Lincoln town car finally crested the hill, seeming real enough, and pretty soon he could see the guys driving it. Two buzzcuts in Marine dress blues. Another odd thing. Why Marines?
     They stopped and got out with a curt salute, took his kitbag and flung it into the back. Then they invited him to take the back seat and he bent down to get in.
     He barely felt the needle pushing into his carotid artery, and by then it was much too late to struggle. Consciousness spun away from him.
     
     And suddenly she found it. It had no visual aspect, but to Gina’s third eye the hypnotic lock felt slippery, shadowy, squatting between chunks of memory that felt both real and manufactured at the same time. A lot of work had been done here. However, the edges of the lock were starting to fade, and she sensed the years that had been kept hidden from Bomber for so long. A few were close enough to the surface that she could almost touch them, might be able to pry them out with just a small push . . .
     “Wait a second,” said Bomber, confused. “I don’t remember bein’ hit with a needle. That wasn’t there before.”
     “Hush, I’m gonna try to trigger another flashback,” she whispered back. “Don’t force anything. Let the memories flow naturally into your mind.”
     She reached in and . . .
     
     He was in a well-lit concrete room, somewhere underground, and a moustachioed man stood surveying the platoon moments before the briefing. He clapped his hands to get people’s attention, though it wasn’t easy to take his mind off the fresh red inflammations spread across his body, where the implants had gone in. Everything itched.
     “You’ll be on antibiotics for a few days until your body adjusts to the new chemical balance,” said the man. “The implants you’ve received are largely experimental, and I’m not at liberty tell you much. Suffice it to say that you will be getting flyers explaining everything you need to know about the care and usage of all your enhancements. Be careful with them, and that means with yourself.
     “My name is Obrin,” he continued, gesturing at his Colonel’s stripes, “and I’m your Commanding Officer for this assignment. I’ll be managing your training and fielding any questions that can’t be answered by your squad leaders. I’m sure we’ll all get to know each other pretty well.”
     One of the women raised her hand. “Pardon, Sir, but what exactly is this assignment?”
     “That’s as classified as classified can be, Private,” Obrin replied smoothly. “In a nutshell, we are prototyping the next generation of infantry technology, in every sense of the term. Training, equipment and implantation. Due to the level of secrecy involved, virtually all your training will take place in a simulator. Off-base passes are restricted until further notice.”
     He expected some sounds of unhappiness at that, but they didn’t materialise. He began to understand. This platoon was probably hand-picked because of their lack of ties to the outside world. Nobody to miss them, nobody to care.
     
     The briefing faded away, replaced by a series of quick flashes like a film cutting randomly backwards and forwards through time.
     He was running through a thick forest with a rifle in his hands. He woke up in a tank of fluid, and as his helmet came off he remembered that it was all virtual reality. His scalp tingled where the electrodes had zapped their signals into his brain. Then he sat relaxing in the rec room, watching TV, and pondered how none of the channels ever showed the news.
     Then . . .

     “This week’s meeting is going to be a little different than the ones you’ve gotten used to,” the Colonel said, standing at the little metal podium that was the only accession to furniture in the meeting room. “All of you have done turns as squad leaders during the last few months of training. Some of you have excelled at these roles, and performance has been noticed by command. I have here a list of names of people who have done particularly well, and I’m going to read them to you.”
     Obrin produced a writing pad and held it out in front of him, staring at its contents like a schoolteacher in front of his class. If he’d had glasses he would have adjusted them.
     “Mary Sweeney. Mark E. Smith. Iwetel Fahlan. Michael Fairbanks. Garos Mladowic. Victoria MacDonald. All named are hereby promoted to Corporal. Congratulations.”
     Surprise. Confusion. Noise rippled through the assembled soldiers, hissed questions and exclamations. Was this a joke? Could it really be that easy, no paperwork, nothing? It remained in whispers, though; they could be put on report for raising their voices out of turn.
     The Colonel went on as if nothing happened. “Caroline Yang. Tim Dujardin. Jacob Dusther. You are now Sergeants for the platoon. Your permanent team divisions will be posted on the rec room door in two hours, from which you may appoint squad leaders as you will. There will be no opportunities for transfer and no exchanging of team members.”
     This time, dead silence dropped into their midst. Mouths hung open but didn’t speak. They’d all been there in the sims, under and alongside their newly-minted NCOs, and nobody could deny that some people had a talent for command. It was just that not everyone agreed exactly where the talent lay.
     Jacob Dusther looked around, but the news didn’t really sink in until the group was dismissed, filing back to the barracks under a cloud of mixed feelings. A kind of distance emerged almost naturally between ranks and officers, and Jacob soon found himself alone at the front of the crowd, driven together with the other sergeants and corporals by the flow of bodies.
     Then they reached the barracks, and found their new bunking arrangements.
     The entire hall had been restructured, cramping in three tiny private rooms walled off with plastic sheeting and lockable doors — mounted with plaques bearing the new sergeants’ names. The corporals, too, could look forward to more spacious beds closer to the door, while everyone else had been downgraded from two-tier bunk beds to three. That wasn’t going to go down well.
     “This is a joke, right?” said Sweeney. The tiny blonde woman looked like an angry mother bear as she let her eyes pan across the room. “Tell me this is a joke.”
     Fahlan shook his head. “It’s military psychology. Privilege of rank, they’re setting us apart from the other troops. Somebody’ll get upped to lieutenant soon.” He rested a hand each on Jacob and Yang’s shoulders. “Better you than me, guys. Have fun with the angry mob.”
     
     “Jesus, my head,” Bomber groaned, his concentration shattered. He kept his eyes screwed shut as he massaged his temples. Gina snapped back to her body and, recovering from the sudden shift, touched his arm for comfort. It seemed to help. She could feel the chaos in his brain, as hundreds of twittering neurons pulsed out signals which conflicted and contradicted each other. There wasn’t much more she could do for him.
     Bomber swallowed thickly. “It’s so weird . . . I don’t know these people, but I do. I ain’t there, but I am. It’s not me.”
     “It’s like you said. They changed you, altered your memory and even your thought patterns. You became a different person the minute they put that shit in your brain.”
     “Keep goin’,” he said through the pain. “We can get more, I know it!”
     “Then you’d better focus, Bomber,” Gina retorted. “You gotta dig deep.”
     He nodded, pushed himself back upright and set his jaw in bitter determination. Closing his eyes, he dove back into the past, and Gina followed on his metaphorical heels.

     There was a flash of scenery going past, a car, a woman talking. She said, “I think the Army did something to you, Simon. If I’m right, two years of memories have gone missing inside that head of yours, and you’ve been conditioned to never realise they were even gone.”
     The woman disappeared but the sense of motion remained. He shuffled into a silent room with the other two sergeants, and sat down in front of a projection that meant nothing to him. The stripes on his shoulder seemed to itch even now, months after his promotion. As ridiculous as it seemed he had to stop his hands from moving to scratch it. He made himself wait patiently and occupied the time with wild guesses about the images on the screen. As far as Jacob could tell, they might’ve been anything from piss-poor satellite imagery to gruesome photos of chopped-up ocelot intestines. He really wasn’t sure what he was supposed to learn from it.
     Finally, Colonel Obrin appeared carrying a tray of styrofoam coffee cups, and personally handed them out to everyone. Then he dismissed the confused-looking private standing guard inside the door. Jacob stared at the steaming cup in his hands, and tentatively began to sip.
     The Colonel’s reasoning became a little clearer when they got a look at his face. There were deep blue bags under his eyes, and the veins on his throat stood out like purple lightning, elevated blood pressure caused by military stimulants. He didn’t even speak before his own cup was dry.
     “We got a problem,” he began, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “This unit was supposed to be training only, experimental, under the radar. However, the needs of the country seem to have superseded our directives.”
     The sergeants sat and waited attentively. On the inside, Jacob wondered what the Hell could be going on.
     “In a nutshell, people, our unit has been ordered to attach to SOCOM and step up to active status. I’ve been fighting this for weeks, but it’s out of my hands now. The decision’s been made. There’s been hints of a terror plot which needs more of a response than SOCOM alone can provide.”
     “SOCOM, Sir?” Jacob wondered aloud. “I know we’re supposed to be next-gen infantry, but is there really anything we can add that they ain’t already got?”
     Obrin let out a deep sigh, his shoulders slumping. “I’m going to tell you some things that you’re not supposed to know, Sergeant. You understand the importance of keeping your mouth shut about anything that goes on in this room, yes?” His eyes searched everybody, and they all nodded, Yang and Dujardin and Jacob Dusther. “Good. You see . . . Round about every decade or so, the Army starts up a new super-soldier program. Lots of money gets thrown at it. The eggheads play around with the idea for a while, and then come back and say they can’t do it. Then it goes quiet for five or six years before they hire the same bunch to do it all over again.
     “Only this time, circumstances were a little different. This time they gave the project to me. My team has been developing technology like nothing that’s ever come before, and this unit is carrying the prototypes. You are the proof of concept. That’s why I think it’s a fucking terrible call to put you at risk like this, but orders are orders.”
     Suddenly, Yang leaned forward and said, coolly, “We can handle any mission, Sir. We’ll show SOCOM a thing or two. Just give us the low-down.”
     The ghost of a smile creased the corners of Obrin’s mouth. He moved to his map and pointed to an area that snapped into focus as a satellite map of the west coast of Africa. “As we know, much of Africa is still dependent on fossil fuels and old-style nuclear fission for power. Uranium piles remain common and there are several uranium mines and refineries still operating in Nigeria and Namibia.” He tapped the appropriate countries with a fingernail. “We’ve received word of a planned raid on these refineries by a previously-unknown terrorist organisation, so secretive that nobody in intelligence suspected they were out there. We don’t even know their name yet.
     “On a good day, the refineries contain about three ICBMs worth of enriched uranium and waste. On a bad day, they’ll also be storing some plutonium they make on the sly, in contravention of nuclear disarmament. Intel says our aggressors already have detonators, delivery systems, everything they need to make a working bomb. What they intend to use it for is . . . Well, I guess you’d describe it as a coup attempt.”
     “You’re joking, right, Sir?” Tim Dujardin laughed nervously. Reading the Colonel’s body language, though, Jacob wasn’t so sure about that. Dujardin pressed on, “A foreign entity seizing power here? Respectfully, Sir, nobody’s had a chance since the Soviets.”
     The Colonel gave him a stern look. “It doesn’t matter what you think or whether I agree with you, soldier. SOCOM doesn’t agree with you and, more importantly, the President of the United States doesn’t agree with you. That’s why we’re launching an interception with your unit as the head of the spear.”
     In that instant, a stab of cold panic hit Jacob’s bloodstream. He would’ve blurted something out if the Colonel hadn’t interrupted him.
     “You have three hours,” rumbled the Colonel, bushy eyebrows dipped into a frown. “Equipment and transport’s being arranged. Get your people briefed, and make damn sure there are no mistakes.”
     
     Gina pulled them out of the memory, reeling. Her heart hammered in her chest and a trembling hand covered her mouth. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “Holy shit. He . . . He was talking about the Federation, wasn’t he?”
     The look in Bomber’s eyes could have cut steel. His mind had gone calm again, flat and sharp as a knife, and his blood pumped cold in his veins as he swayed back upright.
     “We can’t be sure of that,” he said. He didn’t sound as if he believed it. “But if it’s true, that means we failed. I failed.”
     Gina was still lost in open-mouthed horror when Bomber swept through the curtain and left the room under a blanket of terrible silence.