The police cruiser could be seen through the glass doors of the apartment building. It was parked immediately outside the entrance. Trixie could see Crazy Beard’s distinctive profile in the back seat closest to her, and Jimmy on the other side of him. There was only one officer present, and he stood a distance away on the opposite side of the car, his back turned to her.
Come on. Do I look like I’m stupid?
It was obviously a trap. Trixie knew how Adam felt about other singularities. He had destroyed an entire country to eliminate Akito-27. Jimmy was the means by which Adam had learned about her existence, and that made him an extremely valuable resource. He wouldn’t just be left out in the open unless there was a good reason for it.
Adam had cracked her invisibility device. That much she already knew. What was now obvious is that Adam didn’t expect her to know that. Again, he underestimated her.
She reached up and popped the device out of the side of her implant. There was a momentary dizziness that accompanied the removal of the attachment, but she ignored it. She tossed the object into her backpack. It was useless now, so she could have discarded it, but there was no reason to hand any of her technology over to Adam, working or not.
Trixie fished in her bag and located the other device. So many years of research spent in creating these defensive measures, and she was already being forced to use the last of them. It had only taken Adam a day to defeat the first. Hopefully the second would hold out longer. It was the last advantage she held.
She snapped it into place and arranged her hair and cap to cover the chip. She tightened the straps on her backpack, making sure it hugged her torso and stayed out of her way.
Adam may have cracked her signal, but he didn’t know that she had also cracked his. Trixie took a few deep breaths, then pushed open the doors and walked out of the building.
It was an unusually sunny day. There were pigeons on the sidewalk, bobbing their heads and hooting. Aside from them and the one police officer, there was no living being to be seen anywhere. The street was ominously quiet.
Trixie’s piercing gaze scanned the area, and she quickly made a list of likely hiding places. She then turned her attention to the lone officer. He was looking the other way, but he was stiff and tense. It was not the body language of a man who was at ease.
She slowly approached and noticed the officer shift uncomfortably. He continued to look away. Obviously, someone was feeding him information about what was happening. She didn’t need to look around to know that she was being watched.
Crazy Beard turned toward her and waved. Jimmy was looking at her, too, and was shouting. He sat uncomfortably, awkwardly leaning his body forward in front of Crazy Beard toward the window. His voice was muffled and she couldn’t hear what he was trying to say, although the urgency could clearly be read in his expression. He was probably trying to warn her.
With the grace of a panther, she took three long strides toward the car, launching herself in a slide over the hood rather than coming around the front. As she landed, she delivered a crushing blow with the bottom of her closed fist to the side of the officer’s face, which sent him tumbling forward into the street.
“Surprise,” she said.
A muscular-looking officer rushed out from behind a pole and pointed a gun at her. Her device intercepted the signal sent from the officer’s ARC to his weapon and stripped the authorization codes out of the string of data.
Engage safety, Trixie thought at the gun, passing along the appropriate administrative access keys required.
The officer pulled the trigger on his weapon, but nothing happened. His eyes widened in surprise, and Trixie’s foot caught him in the chest as she grabbed and held the end of his gun with her hand. He was sent flying backward and landed hard on his back, the air knocked out of his lungs.
Trixie flipped the gun around and caught the back end of it.
Release safety.
She fired a round at the first officer, who was just getting to his knees from the ground. There was a crackling sound of high-voltage electricity as he was hit with a stun round. The bullet was made up of thirty-one individual pellets, which broke apart and embedded themselves on the target on impact. Blue light arced between each of the pellets in a flash, and the man fell to his side.
“Nice,” Trixie said. Adam had developed some cool technology of his own. The fact that the gun was loaded with non-lethal ammunition confirmed her suspicions that he wanted to capture her rather than kill her. Putting an ARC in Jenna’s body and gaining access to her memories would be his most favorable outcome. That’s what she would be trying to do had their positions been reversed.
The second officer was gasping for breath after his hard landing and struggled to get up. She fired a second round at him, incapacitating him.
Jimmy’s face was plastered to the inside of the window. He wasn’t shouting anymore. He was looking at her with unabashed awe. She smiled and winked.
That’s when all hell broke loose, and an ocean of police officers converged upon her.
Four black-clad men burst from the front doors of the building. They wore helmets and held their rifles up at eye level. The man in the lead held what looked like an electroshock cannon. Others emerged from around the sides of the building, dressed in riot gear and running at her with clubs and shields. There were more pouring out of buildings across the street.
Jeremiah Jacobs and his team rushed out of the lobby and through the front doors.
Target has been engaged outside the building. Move! SWAT Captain Richards shouted through Jeremiah’s ARC.
A blond woman looked at him from next to where she stood at the police cruiser. Her countenance was fierce and without a shred of fear. It was the expression of a predator. Two officers lay sprawled on the ground on either side of her. She held a pistol in her hand at the ready.
“Gun!” he shouted. Other members of the team echoed the alert.
She came around the side of the car and rushed toward them. She was fast. Something about the way she moved was different. It was linear and perfectly direct. There was a smoothness and strength in her motion that he hadn’t seen before.
The officer next to him pointed his weapon and tried to fire, but nothing happened. The man knocked the side of it and tried pulling the trigger again. Still nothing. He went down in a flash of blue and white, the unmistakable sound and acrid smell of a stun round filled the air.
The others were getting dropped quickly, taken out with precision by the strange woman. She was too young to be able to fight like this. Something was not right. This was not natural.
He lifted his electroshock weapon and aimed it.
“We use the chiffonade cut when slicing thin items. It is very easy. Stack your ingredients, then roll them tightly into a cigar. Then cut perpendicular to the roll. Chiffonade means ‘little ribbons’ in French, and that is exactly what you should expect when you perform this technique.”
Jeremiah stood at a table in front of a stack of fragrant basil leaves. A white apron was tied around his waist, and he held a knife in his hand. An energetic, silver-haired woman with a distinctive accent spoke from the front of the room, cutting vegetables. A magnified view of her cutting board hovered in the air above her. Rows of tables were arranged in front and to the sides of her, and numerous would-be chefs were diligently rolling and cutting their ingredients.
Jeremiah looked around, confused. What happened? Was this a cooking class? Was he online?
Pain shot through his body, and he was suddenly back in front of Richmond Towers. The safety mechanism of his ARC had pulled him offline when his arm had broken. He was on the ground, looking up. A woman stood over him, her face flushed. The butt of her weapon came down in a blur, and he felt a hard shock to his head. Then darkness.
Trixie rushed back to the police car. She didn’t want to be separated from it by the mass of police that crashed over her.
After she had used the last of her ammunition, she threw the gun at an approaching officer dressed in riot gear. It spun through the air and sailed just over the top of his shield, catching him in the helmet and knocking him backward off his feet. The tide of officers around him stumbled as they tried not to step on their comrade.
An officer with a raised gun paused, his eyes glazing over as he logged onto an online shopping channel. Trixie broke his knee and used him as a shield against the other officers behind him.
ARCNet had been designed with a very open architecture. Everything talked to everything, and a wireless stream of communication was happening constantly at all times. As long as Trixie was able to sample long enough to capture an authorization code, such as from an officer to his weapon, or from officers to other officers, she was able to use those codes in reverse to mimic commands.
Trixie dodged a club and wrenched it free from the officer as he inadvertently logged onto a phone call with his mother. She hit him across the helmet, putting a crack in the visor. The man’s head twisted to the side as he fell.
Trixie most enjoyed sending the police officers to meet face-to-face with emergency 911 dispatch operators. It seemed to have the most poetic justice to it. But she didn’t like to be predictable in anything she did, so others found themselves auditing lectures on the fundamentals of corporate accounting or enrolled in ballet classes. The more heavyset officers tended to get sent to diet and nutrition channels.
No single officer had much of a chance to best her, especially with the liberal use she made of her mimicry device, but she was only one body against a hundred and slowly began to lose ground. She might be impossibly strong, but the exertion took a toll. Jenna’s body was getting tired and started to move slower than it had at the beginning. Each strike was less powerful than the previous, and Trixie found herself backing up against the onslaught rather than advancing through it. Her breath became ragged and forced.
The press of the officers increased in strength. They sensed her weakness, and it emboldened them. As Trixie dropped one person, two stepped up to replace him. Her back made contact with the side of the car, and she pushed her hand against an advancing riot shield, trying to hold it back. A club struck hard against her shoulder, and she fell to her knees.
Jimmy was shouting from inside the car. She couldn’t focus on the words. Was he calling her name? They were above and around her now, crushing in on her with their shields.
A boot kicked her in the side. Another club knocked her flat to the hard concrete. Pain shot across her arm and around her midsection. She rolled to avoid a heel stomp, trying to get back to her feet, trying to dodge. She couldn’t. There were too many of them.
The blows rained down upon her. She covered her head with her arm in a desperate attempt to protect herself.
Police Cruiser 088, disengage pedestrian safety systems. Disconnect from dispatch network. Route all functions to control of Sergeant Tony MacGuire. Trixie passed the authorization codes she had stolen to the car and felt a window in her consciousness open up. The car connected with her, its systems becoming her systems, its body becoming her body.
Cruiser 088 turned its front wheels at an angle and accelerated forward around Trixie’s prone body. It threw scores of officers aside, like a child knocking down a stack of blocks with the sweep of an angry arm.
The cruiser made doughnuts around Trixie, its front wheels locked at an angle, its back end sliding around and around. There was a loud squeal of wheels, and black skid marks were laid down in overlapping circles in the street. The smell of burnt rubber filled the air.
Police officers scrambled back, trying to get out of the way of the car. Those that were too slow were swatted clear by the swinging rear end. The rest formed a loose circle around the outside of the rotating car, which kept itself in a defensive orbit around the woman in the center.
Trixie found her footing and glared at the police, an almost feral growl lingering on her lips. The door of the cruiser opened by itself, and Trixie lunged forward into the opening. She sprawled over both front seats and fought to pull her legs in. The door closed, and she heard the thumps of bodies thrown over the hood as the car pierced through the ring of adversaries that had surrounded them.
She sat up and looked out the back window. Many officers lay on the ground, strewn about like debris after a tornado. Those that were still standing were rushing here and there, moving quickly. They would be after her soon.
Jimmy stared at her, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. Crazy Beard was smiling and laughing, his eyes twinkling.
“Hey,” Trixie said. “What have you guys been up to all morning?”