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Reaper’s blast blew open the hatch and struck pillow blows against the two cybercommandos. Armor and sound cancellation reduced it to almost nothing. From the outside, though, it must have been quite a shock to those nearby.
As soon as the explosion passed, she leaped upward, catching the lip of the opening. The hatch cover itself had embedded itself in a nearby building, now gleaming under the harsh glare of industrial arc lamps. Several screaming people ran away from the blast.
One didn’t, and opened up with an AK on full automatic. Bullets ripped chunks out of the wall around the heavy steel lid, a natural enough mistake in the confusion: misidentifying the threat. Reaper heaved herself out of the manhole, somersaulted, and simultaneously pulled out the PW5 on her thigh. Its tiny Needleshock rounds put down the gunman and three other guards that were staggering to their feet.
Must have been a roving patrol. Just luck they were nearby: bad luck for them, good for me.
Behind her she heard Muzik follow her onto the cold new asphalt. Checking her HUD, she bolted in the direction of the laboratory and its heavily fortified computer system.
Her information, supplied no doubt by an insider, said that all the Septagon data was kept in two places only.
One copy was discreetly hidden in a Moscow bank safe deposit box, on a multi-terabyte hard drive no bigger than a game console. Updated weekly in case of disaster, it was Winthrop Jenkins’ personal insurance policy, unknown to others in the cyborg program.
Not unknown to the CIA. Reaper knew that defections to the U.S. and other free nations had increased an hundredfold since the Septagon coup. The cyborgs might be able to control the apparatus at the top, but the Russian people had never submitted to foreign domination, rising to defeat enemy after enemy that tried to invade them, ending with Napoleon and Hitler.
That data would be taken care of by a different team of unusual special operatives – a crew, if the truth ever be known, of former bank robbers that the U.S. government had scared straight and put to work for their country. Reaper mentally saluted them and wished them well.
The only other cache of data was here, data drives within an isolated vault. Fortunately for Reaper and Muzik, the ground of the town-turned-base was soggy, tundra-like, and thus basements had not been built for the new construction. In the quick conversion, Septagon had opted to fortify an existing building.
The building they sprinted for now.
PW5 pistol in one hand, PW20 .50 caliber heavy slugthrower in the other, Reaper led the charge. The handgun popped intermittently, one shot per human being she saw. Her HUD datalinked with the chip in her brain and the one in her mechanical eye to identify targets as they presented themselves, like a video game on the screen inside the faceplate.
Down two blocks and over one brought them within a street’s length of Building W, the lab. “Wish we could have come up closer,” Reaper remarked.
“Wishes, fishes. Up we go.”
She had almost emptied her pistol’s fifty-round capacity by that time, so she quickly changed magazines and replaced the weapon in its thigh holster. Then she looked up to the top of the two-story warehouse between them and their goal, and jumped.
Muzik followed her through the air as they arced up and over the brick parapet of the old building. They both alighted heavily, and Muzik had to pull a foot loose from a soft spot in the old wood of the roof. “Watch that; we could fall through.”
“Got it.” Sidling sideways, she followed a brace beneath the surface, visible in the IR as the material sagged slightly around it, and showed a different temperature as well. Moving forward, eventually she caught sight of the laboratory, with its five-meter fence and lights blazing like white suns. Her HUD spotted motion everywhere and marked two dozen targets. She saw a pair of light armored vehicles parked within view, BTR-90s she thought, and prioritized all her weapon fire. Then she put her EMP projector in her left hand and readied her PW20 in her right.
Glancing at the HUD ranging readout, Reaper said, “Set your thrusters for sixty-five meters, and aim for that left air intake. EMP the left BTR, I got the right, then pick off personnel.”
“Roger,” said Roger.
Old joke, new circumstances.
She jumped.
Compressed gas shot out of her boots as her feet left the parapet, giving Reaper the extra distance she needed to clear all the obstacles and land on the laboratory roof. It would have been nice to have more than one booster and one landing charge, but this ironman suit of hers was already overloaded with gadgetry.
Her HUD showed Muzik a fraction of a second behind her and off to her left. She fired her PW20 nine times in two seconds, letting her computer targeting system do all the work, while concentrating on the EMP cannon in her other hand. When she was as close as she was likely to get she triggered it straight into the turret of the BTR-90 armored vehicle.
All the lights on the vehicle exploded and the turret spun sideways, its electrically powered chain gun spitting shells into the night. She saw it cut down one of its own soldiers, then fall silent with a last lone pop. Smoke began to pour from its engine compartment and troops bailed out, frantically beating at flaming uniforms.
Someone yelled as she and Muzik were spotted in the air, and a burst of tracers reached into the sky far from their position.
Too much to hope, not to be seen.
Both came down with a burst of retro-thrust to slow them, otherwise they might have broken through at least the top surface of the roof. As soon as she gained steady footing, Reaper holstered her EMP cannon and ripped a large air intake cover off its mountings and discarded it to the side, revealing a second layer a meter down consisting of welded steel plating – in effect, an armored roof. She reached to her back-rack and extracted a self-opening thermite cutter frame. Popping its clamp, she let it expand its slinky-like shape until it formed a circle a meter across.
Dropping it, she let it settle on a featureless stretch of steel, then stepped back and crouched, facing away. “Ready?” she called over her comm, as Muzik should have done the same near him.
“Ready. Fire in the hole.”
Simultaneous white-hot eruptions of high-tech thermite shot burning debris into the air, and before it fell Reaper waded into the smoke and dropped to the steel armor plate with a heavy clang. In front of her she could see a precise round hole cut by the breaching frame.
“EMP grenade!” she yelled into her suitcomm, detaching one of the devices from her back-rack and tossing it armed down the hole.
The electromagnetic pulse would have little effect on normals, so she quickly sent two Needleshock grenades after it and then fired a burst from her PW20 for good measure. Then she dropped feet first down the hole, knees bent and trusting to her armor and cybernetics.
She stood up in hell.
Something had caught fire, some kind of volatile chemical. Her helmet automatically switched to a forced-air feed good for fifteen minutes, and then she had ten minutes of internal oxygen in a rechargeable pack next to her lungs. Once breathing ceased to be a worry, the heat made itself felt.
Reaper’s HUD was completely overwhelmed, her external sensors blinded, so she chose a direction and walked until she ran into a wall. Moving rapidly to her right, she found what she thought was a door and mule-kicked it.
Now she could see an opening, and she charged through it, finding herself in a room with stainless steel tables and refrigerator slabs: a morgue. Formaldehyde, she thought. I dropped right into a room full of embalming fluid, and ignited it with my own grenades.
She found her lower extremities still on fire from the liquid she had waded through. Unfortunately, her armored hands were not dexterous enough to operate the fire extinguishers she could see, so she told her suit to inject painkillers and ignored the flames. They would burn themselves out of fuel.
A door across the room opened and she raised her PW20, aiming a burst into the portal even before she could see a target. Apparently affected by the heat, the weapon fired three rounds and then jammed.
Cursing, she slung it again. She could try to clear it later. Instead, she charged the entrance. The first figure through had fallen, struck by at least one of her shots, but the next took the full brunt of her rush.
And bounced her back.
Shock blossomed within her psyche as she scrabbled on the tile floor and almost fell, knocking over a table. Her suit stabilizers, still set for flight, jetted gas to help keep her upright, but her vision was fixed on the figure that had sent her reeling.
Large for a man, his size was not the issue. An implacability filled his movements, and his face seemed plastic, mask-like. He moved fast, almost as fast as she.
Cyborg. Shadow Man.
Snarling, she brought her EMP cannon up and fired it even as he launched himself toward her. She felt the charge pass from her palm contacts through the conductors in her glove and into the weapon. A bright flash confirmed its discharge.
Her suit jets fired again as the heavy weight impacted her chest and drove her backward, but then the thing fell to the floor, face-down and senseless. Now it seemed like a manikin, a human robot that had been turned off.
She brought her armored foot down on its neck, stomping repeatedly until its reinforced spine had detached and its head lolled. Then she turned off the stabilizer jets, afraid they would betray her by interfering with some intended maneuver.
The whole exchange had taken only seconds, and the adrenaline surge sang through her body as she turned back to the doorway to confront another golem. This one held a heavy weapon, a short-barreled high-caliber slug-thrower of some sort, perhaps an automatic shotgun. It hammered fire toward her and she felt herself spun around by its impacts. Going with the momentum, she rolled down behind a heavy stainless steel table and came up lifting.
Three hundred kilos of stainless flew across the room to drive her enemy back, knocking his weapon off target even as he fired. Her impression was that these things did not have quite her speed, but were tougher in their natural state, with some kind of armor laminated into or onto their bodies themselves.
They might be stronger, too, and seemed to feel no pain.
Her fifteen-second countdown reached zero on her HUD, and she fired the EMP charge just as the thing roared to its feet. Lightning played across its surface, crawling along the steel table it held onto, and it staggered, but did not go still.
The metal grounded it, she thought, diverted some of the charge. While it remained weak and slow, she holstered the EMP cannon and grabbed the same table to lift it above her head, bringing its blade-like edge down on the center of the thing’s body with all her augmented strength.
The impact made a perceptible dent in the Shadow Man’s rib cage, but then it clamped on to the table with claw-like hands and refused to let go.
Fine, you can come with it, she thought, and swung the piece of furniture in a brutal arc that ended with both the table and the Shadow Man flung across the room and into the chamber of formaldehyde flames that still burned behind her.
Then she slammed that door, dropped its locking handle and set another heavy table against it, then another, to let it burn.
By this time another fifteen seconds had passed, so she drew the EMP cannon and headed for the door, wondering just how many of these damned things roamed their factory. Once in the corridor, she turned left, hopefully in Muzik’s direction. Better to stay near him for mutual support. She had defeated two of the cyborgs because of the specialized EMP weapon, but God help her if it ever failed to work.
Bullets ripped from a cross-corridor as she passed, but she ignored their impacts. Her armor should be proof against rounds up to standard 7.62, and anything heavier she hoped to avoid, or at least survive to complete her mission. Right now she had one objective, and it wasn’t shooting red shirts.
A burst of static on her HUD told her that an EMP had just been triggered, and her shielded systems showed the energy came from up ahead, through the doorway at the end of the passageway. Speeding up, she aimed a front kick at the lock plate and broke it at that point. The door itself flew through 180 degrees and its knob embedded itself in the wall to the side, holding it fast.
Inside, she saw one enemy cyborg down and another throw Muzik across the room to impact on a slab-sided steel door. OBJECTIVE MATCH flashed on her HUD and she realized this was the entrance to the computer vault.
But she had bigger problems.
Now that Roger was out of the line of fire, she aimed and triggered her EMP, but nothing happened. Glancing down at the weapon, she realized a rifle bullet had torn through its outer casing and rendered its mechanism inoperative.
She had no time to think as the Shadow Man accelerated toward her with freight-train speed. Bending her knees, she fell backward even as the thing reached for her, and she lifted the sole of her foot as her shoulders hit the floor, kicking upward. This did not damage it, but sent the cyborg sailing over her to embed itself in the room’s wall, buying her a moment’s time. Rolling to her feet, she stripped off her left-hand gauntlet and slapped her bare palm on the metal skin of the enemy cyborg’s leg.
Nothing happened.
Fifteen seconds, she thought angrily. I triggered the EMP, expending the charge, but the weapon did not function, and I lost track.
That was all Reaper had time to think as the thing kicked out at her, but it still flailed half-inside the wall, so she added her right hand to its leg, pulled and rotated as a man swings a small child in fun.
Only this time, the cyborg wasn’t going to enjoy it.
She aimed to slam its head into a heavy lab bench, but it got its arms up in front and instead grabbed tight onto the furniture. Now she merely had hold of a leg, while it had an anchor point. It began to kick.
It’s stronger and tougher than I am, Reaper reminded herself. Seven seconds remained on her HUD countdown, which was about five seconds longer than she would be able to hold on.
She let go. Her right hand dipped down and grasped the PW20, which she thumbed to full auto even as she performed a clearing procedure and reloaded with a fresh magazine, the motions fast and machinelike from endless practice. When she pulled the trigger, thirty heavy Shock rounds smacked into the cyborg, center mass, sparking discharges as the thing scrambled to its feet. The barrage staggered it backward and it swayed, disoriented and damaged from the .50 caliber electrical bursts.
Quick-swapping the magazine, she got the weapon lined up and pulled the trigger again even as the Shadow Man’s hand closed on its barrel and twisted. Between two cybernetic limbs, the PW20 bent first, specifically the barrel, and after the first shot it jammed again. Reaper let it go.
The cyborg immediately swung the weapon like a club, but Reaper ducked and lashed out with her foot to sweep the thing’s ankle. This damaged neither fighter but did knock the Shadow Man to his knees and cause him to drop the PW20. In turn he shot forward like a wrestler, hands questing for a hold.
If ever he gets me in his grip, I’m done, she thought. Her advantages included speed, armor and weaponry, while his were strength and the ability to take punishment. Controlling his reaching arms, she gripped the naked metal skin near his articulated wrist joint and let the raw electrical charge explode through her palm contacts.
The cyborg stiffened to rigidity, glowing eyes winking out. Not certain how long the thing would remain disabled, she quickly took a grip on its skull by plunging her fingers deep into its eye sockets. She could feel the human tissue give behind the mechanical eyes as she pushed them into its organic brain. Then, with the purchase the orbits gave her, she set a knee against its neck and, with a roar of effort, ripped its head off.
Gasping in her helmet, she whirled, checking the room for further threats. Movement in the corridor alerted her to more enemies coming. The only firearm she had left was her PW5 pistol, which she pointed as she crouched, popping off single shots at the human guards working their way toward her. Ripples of automatic fire came back at her, ricocheting around the room and striking her armor in several places. One plucked at her ungloved left hand, and when she looked down, her little finger had lost most of its flesh, showing nothing but gleaming laminated bone. Automatic pain control ensured she felt little of the damage.
Dodging behind a lab bench, she worked her away around to where Muzik crouched, shaking his head. “Roger! You all right?” she asked.
“Will be,” he mumbled. “Need a couple minutes. Hit me in the head, and I think I bruised my spine. I’ve got shooting sensations all along my extremities.”
“Hang in there,” Reaper said, rising up to engage the guards. “Where’s your PW20?”
“Thing took it away. Broke,” he replied. “AK over there.” He pointed toward a corner, and a Russian-made assault rifle in the dead hands of a fallen guard.
Dropping back down, Reaper crab-walked over to pull the AK from the dead man’s hands, taking his ammo pouches as well. Stamping ruthlessly onto her conscience, she fired three magazines on full automatic at the guards in quick succession. Her only concession to lethality was to aim low, hoping the ricochets off the hard floor would be less deadly.
The Russian guards were, after all, only human.
Once they had been driven back, Reaper pulled an electronic lock pick the size of a pack of cigarettes from a slot within her armor, checking it first. Fortunately undamaged, soon she had it slotted into the card-reader-and-number-pad lock on the large steel door, where she pushed a button on its side. A red light lit up to let her know it was doing its work. In five seconds, the telltale turned green.
“Got it,” she told Muzik. “Can you cover me?”
“Think so,” he grunted, rolling to his knees behind the lab bench. Taking the AK and the remaining magazines from Reaper, he rose up to rest his elbows on the black plastic, the rifle pointed toward the open door. “Go,” he rasped.
Dashing into the opened vault, she was surprised to see two techs cringing behind computer desks. The lockdown must have gone into effect without letting them out. She popped each one with the PW5 and let them flop on the floor in electric convulsions. Then she started looking for hard drives.
As small as such things could be anymore, she had to hope her quarry was recognizable and wasn’t hidden or disguised. If it had been her she would have set up several decoys, but then again, they certainly didn’t expect anyone to get this far.
Of course her EMP grenade and her last breaching charge would between them probably fry or destroy all the chips in the room, but she didn’t want to gamble. As she searched the room, she mentally kicked herself for shooting the techs. Perhaps one of them would have talked.
Instead, she grabbed everything that looked like a data drive and stuffed it into an outer pouch, and then kicked all the computers to smithereens. Stuttering AK fire from the outer room reminded her that the whole base was probably converging on their position. She’d have to accept the slight possibility that the data would survive if they were to get out alive. It wasn’t worth dying for.
First she threw the somnolent techs out of the vault, then she set the breaching charge on the middle of the floor. Exiting the room, she took out an EMP grenade and tossed it back into the enclosed space, slamming the heavy door on it. The electromagnetic pulse should wipe all magnetic media, and would also set off the blasting cap embedded in the block of plastique for a one-two punch.
Once she felt the blast through the closed door, she moved away to take up a position at the entrance to the outer room. Firing a shot at a dimly seen target down the corridor’s angle, she asked, “You good to move? Because we gotta go.”
“Yeah,” Muzik said heavily as he got to his feet. He handed her the AK as he moved from behind the table. “My targeting and HUD’s all screwed up. Take this. I’ll follow you.”
“Right. Going for an egress breach.” Her HUD had mapped everything it had seen so far, and plotted a path toward the nearest outer wall.
Reaper led them along a different route, AK in her left hand, PW5 in her right. More than once enemy bullets slammed into her armor, but it was easily tough enough to handle such conventional rounds. The Russian propensity for keeping the old Kalashnikov standbys in service was their salvation.
After shooting more than a dozen guards with Needleshock, she ran out of the specialized ammo. Holstering the pistol, she stomped down corridors with the AK firing single shots, precisely aimed by her HUD caret. Seldom did she need more than one round to put a target down.
At what the HUD predicted was an outer wall she handed the AK to Muzik. “Hold the door. I’m going to break through.” They’d only had one cutting frame each, so she was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.
A few powerful kicks broke the inner paneling and then burst the ancient brick of its construction. Harsh white light shone through, but she did not wait to survey their escape route. She had to hope they could penetrate whatever cordon had been set up, by dint of surprise. “Let’s go!” she barked, charging outward unarmed.
Unarmed with a ranged weapon, anyway. Backed up by cybernetic nerves and augmented muscles, the laminated bones of her fists and feet made them into pile drivers, especially armored as three of the limbs were. With Muzik to cover her, she sprinted in a curving path even as she took stock of what they faced.
An inoperative BTR-90 armored vehicle provided cover to a couple of soldiers, their weapons spouting muzzle flame as bullets quested for her augmented flesh. Serpentine, she jinked and dodged, then leaped. One armored boot slammed into the enemy’s AK, smashing it to pieces and breaking the bones of the man’s hands and arms that held it. As she scrambled for purchase atop the tank-like vehicle, she reached out and snatched the barrel of the other weapon, twisting it like a plastic hose.
The man made the natural mistake of pulling the trigger, or perhaps her wrenching grab had mashed his finger down on it. The tough Kalashnikov loading and firing mechanism did its job only too well; not one but two rounds smashed into the barrel blockage, and the swelling gas burst the stamped metal apart along its seams, shredding the man’s face with shrapnel.
He would probably live, but unless he got infected with Plague, he wasn’t going to be pretty anymore.
Reaper turned back to see Muzik following at a more deliberate pace, firing his weapon on semi-automatic, single shots. Several more infantry blazed away at her compatriot, slamming full automatic fire into his armor. He staggered but did not fall.
The two cybercommandos’ survivability seemed amazing, but even as she leaped from the top of the BTR, she remembered the North Hollywood shootout of 1997. A standard case study for tactical police, two bank robbers in full body armor using military-style automatic weapons had fought dozens of lightly armed cops for more than twenty minutes, being struck hundreds of times by pistol and shotgun rounds before finally succumbing.
Reaper’s and Muzik’s capabilities were at least two orders of magnitude greater, lacking only firepower. As long as their armor fended off the rifle bullets, the enemy would need heavy machineguns or RPGs to take them down.
Unfortunately, she knew that eventually someone would come up with such weapons.
Accelerating to over fifty kilometers per hour within five strides, she launched herself flat like a linebacker, knocking two soldiers senseless even as her hands closed on one of the weapons. This time she did not twist its barrel, but set it down gently on the asphalt and quickly stripped the fallen men’s ammo-laden belts off. Loading the AK with a fresh thirty-round magazine, she ran back toward Muzik. Once she had him located, she hosed down the source of enemy muzzle flashes with profligate bursts of ammo, driving back the guards.
Handing him one of the ammo-pouch belts, Reaper checked her HUD and followed the flashing pip, trusting Muzik to come along. She could hear his harsh breathing as it triggered the voice-activated comm, telling her that he had been badly injured. Between Eden Plague and nano, he should be doing better. Perhaps his suit’s nutrient pump had been damaged, or maybe a bullet had penetrated his armor and was lodged somewhere in his body, inhibiting the healing.
“Roger, turn on your oxygen,” she instructed him as they jogged down a darkened street. Their pursuers had lost track of them for the moment, but people and vehicles still raced around like a kicked-over anthill and they could be discovered at any moment. Fortunately the nearest emplaced breaching charges were just ahead.
“I might need it to swim down,” he mumbled heavily.
“You have ten minutes internal for that. Use the suit’s O2. You’re fading. Give yourself a stim.”
“Already did,” he responded. “Run out.”
Reaper swore under her breath. If he had exhausted his stims, he must be already juiced to the maximum. Something was seriously wrong, and she had to hope that the oxygen would revive him and help him make it to the sub. Once there, she was fairly certain he’d live.
“Here we are.” She grabbed his arm as he almost lumbered past her. They stood near a blank wall on the side of a street. “Back up.” She wrapped her arms around him, holding him upright as he swayed. “Three, two, one, fire in the hole.” She triggered the charge they had set on the ceiling of the drainage tunnel below.
Gravel and asphalt fountained into the air just as a truck rounded the corner at the end of the block in front of them. The explosion threw a cloud of dust that rolled over the two commandos, and Reaper held on to Muzik’s arm as she strode forward, her sonar showing her where the hole in the ground was.
“Grip the stock of that AK. I’ll lower you down,” she said, and he locked both hands around the weapon’s tough wooden butt. Not caring if she damaged the mechanism this time, she took hold of its barrel and guided her partner until he stepped out into the air above the hole.
He took a little hop and Reaper lowered all two hundred kilos of him down into the darkness. Eventually she lay flat on the street in the midst of the dust cloud as unaimed rounds sparked here and there around her. Her right arm extended downward into the hole as far as she could reach. His weight still dangled, so she told him, “Letting go,” waited one full second, and then released her grip.
She heard a clunk and a grunt from his comm. “Clear,” he said, so she rolled forward into the hole and twisted around, scrabbling against the sides until she found herself feet-first, then jumped.
Five or six meters down she struck concrete slimy with algae and detritus, and fell to her knees. Her own AK seemed undamaged.
“Let’s go, soldier. Home stretch, just a few hundred meters.” She wrapped her arm around his waist and he threw his over her shoulders, and so they shambled. Any minute now the reaction forces would find the hole in the street and follow.
If they were clever, they might race ahead and try to block their outlet. She tried to increase their pace.
Muzik mumbled something, then his legs went out from under him. Barely conscious, it was clear he couldn’t go on under his own power, so she clamped her hand on the top of his back plate between his shoulders and started to drag him. Taking her own advice, she told her suit to feed her pure oxygen and triggered her first stim of the night.
With this blast of artificial energy, she ran down the big pipes, the slime on the rounded bottom an aid this time as she dragged Muzik along like a rag doll. In only a minute or two she approached the large outflow grate.
Dropping her burden, she sidled up to the barrier and looked through its bars, not seeing anything. With time of the essence, she kicked the rusty locking pin, breaking it so the hinged grill swung outward. The motion detectors had undoubtedly told the enemy they were in the tunnels anyway. Triggering the perimeter alarm wouldn’t matter much.
Racing back, she picked Muzik up bodily like a tossed dwarf and charged forward to fling him ten meters out into the water. Unexpectedly, a hail of bullets splattered the lake’s surface before he sank out of sight. Then the fire shifted to the tunnel mouth, tearing chips out of the inner edges of the concrete.
She felt a sting and looked at her left hand, and noticed she’d completely lost her little finger somewhere along the way. If that was the worst of her wounds, she’d feel fortunate. Then she noticed she couldn’t move any of the digits. Something had struck her just right. Perhaps a bullet was lodged in the nerve in her carpal tunnel.
Reaper realized she was drifting a bit mentally, always a danger with the stims when combined with the adrenaline of combat and inevitable fatigue. Forcing herself to focus, she backed up, then took a run and dove flat into the water.
Bullets slapped the surface around her, some punching her in the back before she sank. Her sonar fed her HUD images as she drifted downward, and a moment later she stood on the bottom next to her motionless comrade.
Snatching him up, she trudged along the muddy lake bottom toward the submersible. It seemed to take forever, though it must have been less than five minutes. Fish investigated her now and again, and she had to walk around what appeared to be a jumble of World-War-Two-era T-34 tanks, either dumped into the lake or perhaps abandoned there before the water rose.
Finally she reached the little vehicle. As she triggered the one-time sequence that allowed them to ingress without surfacing, she heard engines in the water. Looking upward showed her nothing with her eyes, but her HUD displayed a predicted location based on sonic triangulation. Somewhere above, a boat already hunted for them, and where there was one, there would soon be several, and probably aircraft as well.
The submersible flooded its inner compartment, which allowed her to open the portal on top. Dragging Muzik upward, she placed him atop the thing and then climbed in, pulling him in after and laying him on the narrow bench-like bunk in the rear. Then she dogged the hatch and hit the water evacuation button.
Compressed air shoved wet lake out one-way valves, in less than a minute leaving them dripping and cold. Reaper removed Muzik’s helmet, placing her ear next to his pale lips. He still breathed, and she started praying under her breath. She’d gotten out of the habit lately but now seemed a good time to start again.
Stripping his clamshell cuirass, she checked his torso for damage. It wasn’t hard to find. An AK round had sneaked through a gap and traveled between the hard armor and his skinsuit, shattering the armor’s implanted nutrient pump. With nothing to feed the Plague and nano, all the stims he shot up had done little but help his metabolism spin its wheels until it started to come apart.
Opening a compartment by her head, she pulled out a preset IV and threaded it into his jugular. Its memory plastic would gently squeeze its entire contents into him without her assistance, and that was the limit of her ability to help him in the close confines of the sub.
Lifting her faceplate, she took the time to wrap her left hand in a bandage, being careful not to even think about triggering the electrical charge. Reaper had no idea what shape the mechanism was in. Pulling up her internals menu in her eye, she scrolled through systems until she found that one, and shut it off.
That task finished, she squeezed into the pilot’s seat and powered up the sub. In a moment the screens came on and she lifted off the bottom, carefully turning toward the west and the opposite shoreline. She kept near the lake floor as her passive sonar recorded the sounds of screws in the water hunting, hunting.
An hour later the distinctive sound of active sonar pings struck the hull, and she damned the efficiency of the Russian military machine. Now they no longer merely had to worry about running out of battery power, but also about being detected. She quickly grounded the boat and shut down all but the essentials.
“Sonobouy,” Reaper heard Muzik say from behind her. She turned to look, seeing him blinking at the low ceiling.
“Roger. Glad you’re awake. Thought you were going to nap the whole way, and it didn’t seem fair.”
Muzik chuckled, then coughed. “Concussion, I think. Nano doesn’t pass the meninges, and Eden Plague heals the brain very slowly. Damned cyborg punched me and I swear I saw stars.”
Reaper clambered to sit facing backward, her knees on the outside of his feet as he lay. “What do you know about sonobouys?” she asked.
“Not much. Just that they can be dropped by helicopter. No idea if they can see us sitting here.” The pings still struck the hull like a metronome. It was disconcerting.
“Well the longer we sit, the more the batteries run down. Eventually we’ll have to move.”
“Yeah. Can you see anything on the passive sonar?”
“Just a few powerboats racing here and there.”
“Nothing coming toward us? Or are they taking up positions around us?”
She looked over her shoulder at the displays. “Nope.”
“Then they can’t see us here.” Muzik closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to sleep some more...” His head lolled and he began to snore.
Good sign, she thought. Checking the batteries, she saw they had about eleven hours if they just sat there, four hours of propulsion at their most efficient speed. After that, they would have to risk the snorkel, or abandon the craft and swim. They had no scuba gear, though, and even with their advantages, swimming thirty or forty kilometers didn’t seem practical.
So in the classic tension-drenched style of submariners everywhere, they had to hope and pray they could creep out from under the hunters and slip away.
* * *
An encrypted landline rang next to Scott Stone’s head. Awake instantly, he plucked it from its cradle between two large fingers and held it to his ear. “Professor,” he said.
“It’s me,” Winthrop Jenkins’ hoarse voice bleated from the line. “Salmi Base just got hit. Some kind of commando raid, a dozen or more. I got forty or fifty casualties and the main computer vault has been compromised.” Stone could hear gunfire and helicopters in the background.
“They wanted the data. What about the backup?”
“I don’t know. I have my hands full here. Alert the rest, lock everything down. You know the drill.”
“I wrote the drill. I’ll be on my cell.” With that, Stone hung up and pulled on his clothes, listening to the creaks and groans of the old mansion. Unlike the other ministers, the Prime Minister had to be kept in his traditional residence. To do otherwise would be to look weak in the eyes of the people and the world, perhaps even invite a coup. To make up for it, there were three cyborg minders and a cordon of fanatical Spetsnaz for security.
Stone called the number that dialed straight into the internal radio of Kratz, the Shadow on duty. “Kratz, this is Stone. Alert status one. Wake up Melcher and lock the mansion down. Get the civilians into the panic room. I have to go to the Bank.”
“Acknowledged,” came the synthesized voice. Now he could be confident that the Prime Minister and his family would be hustled into their safety vault in case some kind of attack was imminent. If necessary, they could be evacuated through the new tunnel system he’d had built during the last few months.
Picking up the landline again, he dialed his counterparts in Skolkovo and Barvikha one after another, receiving no answer each time. Then he tried to contact them directly through the cell network to their internal radios. Both returned “unable to connect” messages.
That told him all he needed to know. Someone – the Americans, the South Africans, maybe the Australians, had made their move. Probably the latter, he thought. I told Winthrop not to sell that Aussie bitch a Shadow, because it would just lead back to us. Well, asshole, guess what just happened? And they call us Psychos.
Time to cut his losses. If the Salmi base had been hit and the program wrecked, and the Cabinet enclaves taken, one Prime Minster would not a government make. He had to move fast, on his own, which was just fine. A wise man always had fallback positions and options, and he was nothing if not very smart.
He contemplated destroying his phone, but decided to hold on to it for the moment. Easy enough to crush it when the time came. Then he stuffed his getaway packet with his extra passports and money in a cargo pocket and hustled down the stairs.
In the front of the house, he hopped into one of the Mercedes parked there, slowing next to the Spetsnaz guards as they hurried to open the gate. “Alert status one,” he called as he roared past, for all the good it would probably do. One never knew; perhaps his concerns were overblown and everything would be back to normal in the morning.
Through sparse traffic he wove, his foot mashed to the floor, hitting at least one hundred fifty KPH along some of the straightaways before slowing to take corners at seventy. Four miles to the bank, one of Moscow’s oldest and most secure, the location of their backup data and, therefore, one enormous bargaining chip. If his instinct was right, it was the nexus of risk and opportunity tonight.
For Professor Scott Stone, anyway.
Pulling up at a side entrance, he parked and immediately charged the portal. A heavy steel pull-down barrier covered the door proper. He reached down with both hands and lifted, grunting.
With a screech of metal it tore away, frame and all. Tossing it aside, he then attacked the metal door, kicking it several times until it bent enough for him to get a grip on. Ten seconds later that lay on the sidewalk as well, and he ran inside.
At this point the bank’s alarms should have been sounding, proclaiming its violation loudly to the world, but there was nothing. Switching to low-light and infrared vision, he bolted down the corridor toward the stairs to the vault, his head swiveling left and right as he looked for anything out of place. At the top of the steps he froze, staring downward.
A flickering glow showed faintly from the bottom, two flights below. Then he heard a movement from off to his left. Looking over, he saw two bound figures lying on the marble floor: security guards, apparently captured and wrapped in tape. He could see their eyes strain into the darkness in his direction, but without his enhancements all they saw was a shadow.
He chuckled to himself. Better than a Shadow, actually. He’d never wanted the metal skin, the external armor, the glowing eyes to terrify the sheep; he was far too pretty for that. But he’d availed himself of all the other improvements the program had come up with, all except for the brain chips, and he’d made sure he stayed conscious for everything. There’d be no deadman charges or mind control for the Professor. His fate would remain his own.
Stone slipped lightly down the steps far more quietly than someone of his size and weight should have been able to, and held at the bottom. Slowly, he peered around the corner, then eased back before the lookout ten feet away noticed him. He’d had on NVGs but the goggles looked like older monocular models with a narrow field of view. The man would have been better served just taking them off and letting his eyes adjust to the night.
It wouldn’t matter, though, for him. The only question for Stone was whether he could take the man down before he alerted the rest of his comrades.
Then he paused for a moment, thinking.
No bank alarm meant whoever this was had disabled it. Presumably they were professional enough to have also rendered the silent alarm to the police inoperative as well. The flickering he could see meant some kind of cutting torch, perhaps a thermic lance hot enough to crack the vault.
He could take them all now, stopping their heist and preserving the data. But for whom? If Winthrop’s whole artificial edifice was even now being toppled, the information would eventually be found, falling into the hands of whomever controlled Russia in the near future.
By waiting until they opened the vault, however, he could seize the data himself. If Winthrop fended off his attackers, he would be hailed as having preserved their strange little empire. If on the other hand things came crashing down, he would have that bargaining chip he wanted, something that could fit in a pocket that was nevertheless worth millions, if not billions, to the right buyer.
Or, as a last resort, it could be a peace offering.
Yes, that seemed the prudent course.
So he waited.
Seventeen minutes later the cracking glow disappeared. Dialing up his hearing and slowing his breathing to almost nothing, he waited for the distinctive clunking of the vault door opening. A pleased murmur of voices confirmed it, so before the congratulatory backslapping died down he restarted his respiration, took three deep breaths, and hurled himself around the corner.
His clothesline blow snapped the lookout’s neck as he charged forward. In front of him he saw three men and a tangle of equipment next to a three-foot-thick door standing wide open. They hardly had time to react before he had crushed each of their chests with hammer blows of his fists, leaving them flopping on the floor and choking on their own blood.
Dashing into the vault, Stone raced along the rows of safe deposit boxes until he deciphered the numerical system. He knew the box’s number, but had never been here, and so wasted precious seconds until he found it. Now one of the modifications he had asked for came in handy.
Activating a combination of muscles in his hand, he extruded short ferrocrystal claws from his fingertips. He’d always been a comic book fan, and given his own size and long golden locks, Sabretooth had been his model and favorite.
In this case the razor-sharp, diamond-hard nano-grown substance allowed him to slice open the numbered face of the box to get at the hinged metal rectangle inside. In a moment the two cigarette-packet-sized hard drives went into his pockets.
Stone heard something, and turned to see the thick door closing. Throwing himself forward, he managed to catch the heavy counterweighted portal and stop its forward momentum. Shoving hard, he reversed its direction and then slammed it back against its stops.
Dashing outside, he found the remains of a man smashed between the multi-ton door and its equally heavy wall. Stone gave the man credit for an excellent try; had he been able to shut the vault door and perhaps weld it closed, not even his cybernetic strength would have saved him from being trapped until the authorities opened it again, probably with enough firepower to cause him a great deal of pain.
Sirens warbled in the distance, encouraging him to shunt aside his racing thoughts and put as much distance as possible between himself and the bank. Two minutes later he slowed, walking along a dim alleyway as emergency vehicles and police raced past. They would find an interesting scene. He’d rigged the thermic lance to blow its own fuel tanks just about...now.
His enhanced hearing easily picked up the muffled blast and the sound of a hundred windows shattering half a mile away. Moments later, the sounds of sirens multiplied exponentially as the city’s various security and safety forces came fully awake. Several separate police and paramilitary organizations, as well as district fire and rescue, scrambled or went on alert.
Fortunately he reached Rue Podkolokolny before they started setting up cordons and checkpoints. He stepped through the front gate of the Australian Embassy compound and walked up to the security booth straddling the inner fence. Behind the thick glass, the uniformed man eyed Stone with a certain amount of trepidation. Pressing the voice-transmission button he asked, “May I help you, sir?”
“I am here to claim asylum in the Free Community of Australia,” he replied. “I am in possession of certain information that will be of great interest to your government.”
The guard nodded, lifting his finger off the push-to-talk key and picking up a phone handset. A moment later, several men rushed past him to close the outer gate while two others let him through the inner one.
“Professor Stone?” The one addressing him was short and slight, with Asian features and a diffident manner. “My name is Calopus Nguyen, and I am the senior military attaché to this embassy. Please come in. I believe our interests may soon come into alignment.”
Stone smiled. “Nguyen, huh?” He wondered how much he was going to have to pay for his rehabilitation.
