09: Shock Factor
This is chapter nine (Part 2: Exhaustive Search), in which Elena confronts her pursuers
If it’s your first time here, check out the Table of Contents. You’ll probably want to start with the Prologue.
09: Shock Factor
She gets online for directions as she steps through the door of the hotel. The hover rail station is a dozen blocks away. The rail will take her all the way to the countryside. She finds a stop just a few miles away from BioFields, in what seems to be a tiny town. Amberfield. She can be there by noon if she leaves the capital fast.
She skipped dinner last night and could use a good breakfast, but she doesn’t want to waste any time. She grabs a pre-packaged breakfast from a vending machine and eats it while moving. It’s a NeoHarvest tasteless wrap allegedly containing all the nutrients one would need. The bright yellow packaging stands in stark contrast with the grayish meal inside. She could do much better on the sector’s breadbasket, but she wants to get to BioFields as soon as possible. Too many ways things could go wrong, have already gone wrong: maybe the asset never made it to Verdant; maybe he did, but left for the ring; maybe she is compromised and walking into a trap. She doesn’t like the uncertainty. The sooner she gets to the farm and sees the situation on the ground, the better. She thinks about the importance of balanced nutrition as she walks and chews the tasteless breakfast.
It’s early morning, the sun is shining as it’s starting its trek across a clear sky. There’s a warm breeze blowing through the avenue. It’s a wide street, with broad sidewalks and multiple lanes, but it’s mostly empty. Even at this early hour, when cities usually wake up with swarms of traffic, pedestrians, and drones, she barely sees anyone around. A red car zooms past her as she is finishing her breakfast, too fast for her to catch the make and model. Then nothing for a good minute. Then a blue hovercar, a luxury Lumea by Hoverworks, comes her way from the opposite side. She doesn’t care much about cars, but she recognizes the golden crown logo over its shiny grill. The new model does look good.
She turns to watch it go by and notices, out of the corner of her eye, she is being followed again. Same two as on the ring as far as she can tell at a glance. A glimpse of the short blond’s beard, the tall one with graying hair. It’s them. They’re a couple of blocks behind, but hard to miss on the empty sidewalk. She turns back, pretending she didn’t see anything. This is really bad. How did they get here so fast? Definitely not a couple of muggers. They’re after her. With what must be some powerful sponsors backing them, since they tracked her to Verdant so fast and were able to get here as soon as she did.
Old training kicks in. Time to take the initiative. She turns left into a side-street, walking slowly, making sure her followers can catch up. The side-street is narrow, a one-way, one-lane road and small sidewalks. Windowless nanocrete walls of high rises on both sides. She keeps going for a block, then takes a right, into an alley. Nobody around, which is exactly what she wants. The alley is empty except for a couple of large garbage pods.
As soon as she clears the corner, she breaks into a sprint. She runs past the pods, takes another right into a side-street as she slings her backpack around to pull out her combat gloves. It’s been a while since her last direct action, but the adrenaline rush she feels is familiar. She welcomes it as one would an old friend.
Time dilates. She notices detail – the light reflecting off a signpost, the graffiti on the wall (“They are among us”), a puddle on the ground. Back on the avenue now, she turns right again, circling all the way around the block, getting behind her followers. Combat gloves fastened, she activates them.
They come alive, buzzing on her sweating hands. Part of her tacticals package, which she is now very glad she received. She’s back on the side-street by the time they turn the corner into the alley. She goes full speed now, cushioned shoes making no sound on the sidewalk.
She was physical growing up – wrestling and such, but street fights are dirty. There are no rules, no ref to stop the fight. She knows two against one is not good odds, but the combat gloves and element of surprise give her a comfortable edge. She turns into the alley to see them standing, back to her, likely pondering her disappearance.
They start walking towards the garbage pods. She doesn’t hesitate, runs forward, slaps the back of the tall goon’s head. Remote deep implant hacking is hard, software fighting software, peeling layers of protection. The gloves do a hardware attack. Nanobots burrow in, bypass security at the physical layer, overload processing units, all in a matter of milliseconds. The guy goes down, eyes rolling, brain shorted, mouth foaming. He’ll be out for a good few hours.
The blond one manages to turn around. She uppercuts him in the groin, delivering 300 volts. He falls to the ground screaming. She slaps his face another 300 volts then reaches for his holstered gun. She picks it up, shoves it in his mouth, feeling teeth crack.
“Who the fuck are you?”
She can sense the goon soiling himself. She raises the hand not holding the gun, makes a fist. The glove sparkles.
“You better fucking start talking!”
The gun she is holding is unfamiliar – no idea if it’s for big game or a bug zapper. Medium-sized frame, comfortable grip, black paint. It has an aim-assist slot, but nothing mounted on it.
He mumbles something incoherent, spits out blood, then suddenly reaches for her graft. Big mistake. She is all instinct at this point. She weaves her head out of the way and in the same instant pulls the trigger, all before her conscious mind even registers any of it. The gun goes off with a loud report. The back of his head explodes, splattering skull, brains, and blond locks of hair all over the pavement. The remaining half of his head bounces up, deepthroating the gun, then falls back with a squelch. The bang echoes in the narrow alley.
She blinks in disgust at the expanding pool of blood and chunks of brain tissue. Fuck. The remaining half of his head is staring at her with empty green eyes, red quickly filling the corneas. Why did you do that, you motherfucker? There goes being inconspicuous.
She picks his pockets. He’s wearing a black shirt, tactical pants, boots. Same as his colleague. She finds nothing but a digicard in his many pockets. She sticks it in her back pocket as she stands up to look around. The alley is empty. Nobody saw what just transpired. But she can’t stick around, someone must have heard that gun go off. As empty as the streets are, that blast reverberated for blocks. She looks at the knocked-out goon, then at the gun she is holding. She could probably buy herself some time, but she won’t just execute an unconscious person.
She picks a random direction and runs for a block. Stops to dry heave. Right after breakfast. Fuck. She continues running for another block. She sticks the gun in her waistband, covers the handle with her shirt. She feels the tip of the barrel moist against her thigh, tries not to think about it. She turns left, slows down to a jog. She checks behind her from time to time but nobody is following. She navigates the alley maze out to a main street, starts walking at her usual pace, catching her breath.
What a mess. She was hoping to get a few answers, knock the guy out. Instead, she blew his brains out. Adrenaline rush is dying down, and she realizes she’s heading the wrong direction. Turns back around towards the hover rail, sticking to big streets now, taking a wide path around the back alleys she came out of.
She wonders how soon the police will be after her. Or is the police force also mostly on the Gateway Ring by now? Even if operating with limited personnel, the mess she left in the alley will surely put this on top of their case pile. No witnesses as far as she can tell, but when the older goon wakes up, he can give them an accurate description. That is, if whoever is after her wants to hand this over to the police. Most likely, he’ll report back that they’ve been discovered. Next time, there won’t be just two amateurs after her.
What next? Too close to bail now. You know what’s next operator. No way out but through.
She reaches the rail stop half hour later than planned. Her back-alley stunt and the roundabout path she followed afterwards delayed her quite a bit, but luckily (for a change) she didn’t miss the rail. It’s running every two hours, and she’s there just on time to hurry in before the doors close.
She takes a window seat. Easy to do, since she’s alone in the car. At most a dozen people on the whole rail. The rail starts moving, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Empty or almost-empty streets zoom by. She takes a deep breath, slumps into her chair. Fuck.
Her mind is racing with implications. Why were they following her? To get to Doctor Linton? Does that mean they don’t know where he is and she is leading them to him? That would be bad. Were they just waiting for an opportunity to jump her, meaning they know where the doctor is? That would be worse.
She reaches into her back pocket and takes out the digicard for a closer look. She flicks it around to see both sides. All black, with a red circle on the front. She knows the logo. Eclipse Corps. That makes her feel slightly better. She has killed before. Plenty. But she is not a murderer, this went bad. She will never forget the scene she just enacted, brains exploding onto the pavement at her pull of the trigger. But Eclipse were there during her deployment on Forge. Working for Abyssal Mining. Killing corporate citizens, civilians. She has little sympathy for mercenaries.
She rummages through her backpack, pulls out an interface, connects the digicard, gets online.
Her NSRS makes this type of interaction awkward. Hardware like her digicard-reading interface is developed for embedded interaction. Her lower-bandwidth grafts require custom protocols. Some manufacturers don’t implement them at all, some do it as an afterthought. It’s usually a struggle to get the data flowing. Not this time. Her interface has decent graft support, but there’s no meaningful data to flow through. The content is encrypted beyond her portable compute capabilities. The interface clearly tells her that, and, to drive the point home, shows her several columns of indecipherable hieroglyphs.
What about metadata? If she can’t get to the content, maybe she can glean some information from there. A name, a location, a timestamp. She instructs the interface to shift focus. No luck. The metadata has been scrubbed clean. As far as the digicard knows, the information has been there since the beginning of time. She gets offline, sighs, puts the digicard back into her pocket.
The only piece of info she got out of it was the logo. Eclipse Corps. It will have to do. She sticks the interface back inside her backpack and stares blankly through the window at the city rolling by.
Sylvan Prime is a large city, tall glass buildings reaching for the sky at its center, with boulevards criss-crossing the downtown area. Sylvan Prime is a ghost town. A ghost metropolis. A car drives by from time to time, the rail passes a lone pedestrian or the rare couple once in a while, but the roads are mostly empty.
The buildings grow shorter as the rail travels through the outskirts of the city. Fewer people around, if that’s even possible. Elena feels she is finally starting to grasp just how bad things are in the sector. The Tauran war wasn’t just a minor disruption to normal operations. By the looks of it, the world is hanging by a thread. She wonders what it would take for things to return back to normal.
By the time they’re in farmland, the rail seems to be the only moving thing on the planet.
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