On Impact, page 23
Wright sat inside the bar, posing as a customer. I’d volunteered, arguing that I’d spent the most time undercover, but Wright overruled it. If the assassin showed up, he may recognize me from Ritru-6 and that would blow our shot at following him or a Five Fangs back to where they were staying. We’d rather do that than capture and question one of them. It would make recovering the prototypes a lot easier.
That left me on my hoverbike and Ravi in Pierce’s LAV. Pierce hadn’t been thrilled about his vehicle being connected to a DECA operation, but Wright threw in a pile of the Department’s legal tender, and he agreed on the temporary loan.
We’d parked a few blocks from the bar. Close enough to get back in a hurry if Wright needed help, but far enough away to give us a decent perimeter to work with if Wright lost visuals on them.
“Possible match for Ophidian coming from the south. He’s on foot.” DeAjamae’s voice came over the comm line.
“Solo?” Wright asked quietly. He was belly-up to the bar nursing a beer. He’d left his comm open, and I heard the din of muffled conversations and music in the background. It sounded busier than the night before.
“Sending a drone on a perimeter sweep now.” DeAjamae paused. “I’m not seeing anyone else approaching.”
A moment later, Wright reported the man had entered the bar.
Minutes ticked by without further updates.
A warm breeze blew through the narrow slot of the alley I’d nestled myself into. It stank of mold, mildew, and rotting vegetation. Water from a light drizzle in the afternoon still clung to the mycelium bricks of the buildings, making them slick with algae.
I rechecked the system status of my hoverbike for the seventh time. Fuel reserves good. Battery charged. Felix had done a decent job with the repairs, although the body panel would need to be replaced.
No question, I would one thousand percent rather be on the other side of an op. Waiting and not knowing what was happening sucked space dust.
With a quick aerial scribe, I opened the link to DeAjamae’s surveillance drone. It was as small as a songbird and had four dragonfly-like wings. She set it to fly in a slow loop over the bar. By toggling between settings, I accessed the different lenses, including ones that showed night vision, thermal, and multiple magnification ranges.
I flipped to the long-range view and spotted a woman approaching. Zooming in, I saw she was in her early-to-mid forties dressed in a tank top and cargo pants, straight dark hair and a short, petite build. It was hard to make out much detail without redirecting the drone closer, but it wasn’t Adler. She entered the bar through the front door.
I zoomed the camera back out. The parking lot was filled with LAVs and a few hoverbikes. Most registered between a cool blue and warm yellow on the thermal lens, suggesting they’d been off for a while.
The drone flew through the westernmost point of its loop, and I spotted Ravi in the LAV. He’d parked behind an old coffee shop.
“Suspect is talking with a woman who just arrived,” Wright said over the comms. “She handed him a small bag. They’re arguing.”
The background noises were difficult to distinguish, but they increased in volume. Something crashed. Shouts. Cheering.
I wish we’d fitted Wright with a micro-cam, but DeAjamae hadn’t brought one.
“Assault in progress.” Tension laced his words.
“Keep your cover,” I said. “You can’t intervene.”
Sitting back while a crime took place—especially a violent one—was one of the toughest parts of undercover work.
“The woman is on the ground. Possible broken arm. Suspect exiting the front door. I’m following.”
I studied the drone feed as the suspect we assumed to be Ophidian left the building and walked south along the street.
DeAjamae took the drone off autopilot. “The woman is exiting the rear door. She’s leaving on foot. Do you want me to stick with her?”
“No,” Wright answered. “Stay with the suspect.”
Wright waited for the man to get a short lead, then slipped out of the bar during the commotion. He’d worn the darkest clothing he’d packed. If it weren’t for the thermal imaging, I’d have a difficult time picking him out against the dilapidated buildings.
I tightened the chin strap on my helmet, powered up the hoverbike, and connected to the controls via my Intell. It responded instantaneously, almost as if more to my thoughts than my commands. For as much trouble as the Intell gave me, I had to admit that the experience of flying with it—either the hoverbike or the Soteria—was as close to the real thing as I could imagine.
I rose a meter into the air, careful to watch my sightlines. The short building didn’t give me much room to maneuver before losing my cover.
“Singh, I’m going to follow three blocks over to the west.”
“Copy that,” Ravi replied. “I’ll loop around from the east. Same three block buffer.”
I eased out of the alley, ignoring the pinprick of pain growing behind my eyes. High above and to my right, I found DeAjamae’s drone, but only because I knew where to look. The live feed from it ran in the upper right-hand corner of my vision. Below it, I pulled up the fragmented map of the city we’d cobbled together and overlaid my geomarker signal to it.
My fingers trembled as I swung the hoverbike onto the pedestrian street. I eased the throttle back to bring the bike up to a jogging speed. There were almost no other vehicles around, and I didn’t want to come roaring down the street and draw unnecessary attention.
Ophidian kept a brisk walk for five blocks. I watched Wright trail behind him, keeping about a block and a half between them and sticking close to the shadows. Ravi and I kept pace a block behind Wright, three streets to either side of him. Several times, Wright broke into a jog to keep up to Ophidian.
The sixth block contained a blocky building with tall, ivy-covered pillars in the front. A bank or financial institution judging by the architecture. Ophidian cut across the front steps and onto the smaller cross street toward Ravi.
“He’s running,” DeAjamae said.
Wright sprinted for the bank. “Did he spot me?”
“I don’t think so. He’s not trying to hide. He’s just running fast. Really fast.”
“Point taken.” Wright passed the bank, taking the steps three at a time. By the time he made it onto the cross street, he’d fallen behind another block.
The drone struggled to keep them both in view. DeAjamae stuck with the suspect. Even with his long legs and genetic advantage, Wright became nothing more than a dark smudge on the image growing smaller by the second.
“He’s too fast,” Wright said, breathing hard. “He must have … bionic … legs. Singh … you’re up.”
“Copy that,” Ravi said.
I overshot the cross street and turned left two blocks past it to maintain a parallel path.
Seconds later, Ravi’s LAV nosed out onto the street. He flew low for four blocks, then climbed altitude until he reached a normal flying height. Any farther and it would have been suspicious. LAVs were terrible options for following someone on foot. Luckily, Ophidian didn’t seem to pay him attention and kept running on a straight path.
I cut over and picked up the tail. It gave Ravi time to swing back around. It would be better if there was more traffic. Or any, for that matter.
At least I didn’t have to creep along at a walking pace. A glance at my hoverbike’s readouts confirmed we were flying sixty kilometers an hour, and Ophidian showed no signs of slowing. His strides ate up the ground in a kind of swinging side-to-side movement as his powerful legs launched him inhumanly far with each step. No question they were bionic.
Ravi and I leap frogged behind Ophidian, trading off the lead, then rushing ahead to pick it back up.
We entered a residential district of Newtown, although most of the houses loomed empty and dark. Some bore the ugly snake symbol of the Five Fangs Gang painted on their outer walls.
The jungle encroached on that section of town. Tall, moss-laden trees sprouted inside and around the crumbling buildings. Overgrown lawns and broken fences lined both sides of the street. Yards were strewn with electrical boxes, climate control systems, and water reclamation units, their guts ripped open and stripped of usable materials. There were few reasons someone would be flying low through the city, and it became difficult to follow without being conspicuous. I slowed, dropping back another half block.
I zoomed out on the map. The road ended at a walled-in wooded area not far ahead. It had been a park, but now it was a tangle of trees and bramble. He’d have to turn north or south at the junction. Hopefully, he’d go north, and Ravi would pick up the tail again. It would look suspicious if I picked it up again too soon.
“Leahy?”
“I see it, Sinclair. Break off now and turn south. Be prepared to reengage if he turns your way. I’ll follow with the drone while you lose eyes.”
“Copy that.”
As I leaned into the corner, a wave of dizziness washed through me. I listed to the side, then overcompensated in the other direction when I felt my body falling. My hoverbike wobbled, bucking at the sudden uneven distribution of weight.
“Not now,” I said under my breath and came to a full stop while my world righted itself. Pressure built around my head, like a clamp tightening between my temples.
“Can you repeat that?” DeAjamae asked. “I see you stopped.”
“Nothing. Mechanical issue.” Not a complete lie. “It’s fine.”
I gunned it for the next three blocks to make up the time I’d lost, then turned left to reach the potential intercept position before Ophidian. Once there, I landed beneath a tree with long, drooping branches and killed all the lights on my bike. If he came my way, I would follow in dark mode.
With a twitch of a finger, I pulled the drone feed to the center of my vision and enlarged it. He neared the end of the road. I watched for any sign of which direction he would take. We were almost at the edge of the city. Wherever he was holing up must be close.
Ophidian ran straight for the two-meter wall. Without slowing a beat, he leaped over it, legs pinwheeling in the air.
“Fuck me sideways,” DeAjamae cursed through the comms.
Ophidian winked from the camera’s view as he ran beneath the thick foliage. He popped in and out as he dodged between trees. Within seconds, he all but disappeared.
DeAjamae dropped the drone below the canopy. My stomach flip-flopped as the feed twisted from an overhead bird’s-eye view to a swooping and swerving street-level perspective. She closed the distance to decrease the chance of losing Ophidian. The little drone dipped and wove around branches. Its proximity alert alarms flashed bright red. It wasn’t designed for this type of acrobatic flying.
My choices weren’t great. I could fly over the park, but it would be a dead giveaway that we were following him and eliminate the possibility of him leading us back to his hideout. We’d have to capture him and hope we could break him into telling us where the other prototypes were. I didn’t care for the odds of us being able to do that. The other option was to go around and pick up his trail wherever he exited. There was a risk we’d lose him, though.
I scanned the map for the fastest way to the opposite side of the park. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great one. The roads devolved into a tangled warren of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and circular drives. Through-streets weren’t all that important when you weren’t strolling between stores and you could zip up to a skylane overhead.
I opened the Minotaur program Lourde had developed for my Intell. He’d intended to offer it as part of a black-market espionage suite of capabilities. While designed to work off blueprints of buildings and space stations, it would still run if I fed the map of Newtown into it. It could chart a course around the park far faster than I could on my own. The only downside was that it used a tremendous amount of processing power.
No time to worry about that now. I’d just have to deal with any side effects as they arose.
“Not seeing a clear path through those trees,” Ravi said.
“Go around the north end,” Wright ordered. He no longer sounded out of breath, but frustration laced his words. “Sinclair—”
“Taking the south side.”
The Minotaur program opened. I loaded our map and linked the live feed from the drone to it. It was sophisticated enough to match the terrain from the feed to the graphics of the map even without access to a city net. The next part was where Minotaur proved its worth.
I latched a marker to the moving image of Ophidian and asked it to plot out the fastest route to interception, accounting for Ophidian’s speed, direction, obstacles, and anticipated course changes. Seconds passed while it calculated, and the spot in my brain where the neural impulse chip sat grew warm. I cracked my neck, trying to relieve the uncomfortable sensation.
A pulsing dot appeared on the map, crossing the park at an alarming rate. A yellow line shot out from my location, around the park, to a point deep within a cluster of houses.
I rolled back on the throttle, throwing up a cloud of dust and gravel in my wake. Minotaur took me on a zigzag course through the maze of city streets. I flew too fast to follow my progress on the original map. Instead, I relied solely on the three-dimensional rendering Minotaur fed to my optic nerve. My senses, thought process, comms, connection to the drone—even my hoverbike—all worked together in a flawless symphony of technological design.
DeAjamae brought the drone back up to normal tracking height as Ophidian made another giant leap over a second fence. “Suspect exited the park. Running southeast along the perimeter. How in the void is he keeping up this pace?”
The clamping pressure around my skull from the Intell continued to grow. It felt like a ratcheting band circled my head while someone cranked the strap tighter and tighter with each passing minute.
Ravi cut a diagonal path toward Ophidian following a shallow drainage canal that ran between subdivisions until it intersected with the curving street around the park. He turned onto it, right behind Ophidian’s running form.
Ophidian must have heard the LAV, because he darted between the next two houses and increased his speed to seventy kilometers per hour.
“He made me!” Ravi said.
“Move in to apprehend him,” Wright said. “He won’t lead us back now.”
“Yes, sir.” Ravi and my voices echoed over each other through the comms.
Minotaur adjusted to Ophidian’s new course. The yellow line designating my route shifted to cut through the crumbling remains of a row of townhouses, its central unit long since collapsed.
“He’s turned into the courtyard of an apartment complex,” DeAjamae said. “There’s no other outlet. This might be it. Going in closer in case he enters the building.”
I reached a straight stretch and switched my focus to the drone feed. “Thirty seconds out.”
The drone followed Ophidian through a small arched entrance and into the circular courtyard. A marble fountain stood in the center. It had a carved globe of Valla that would have had water cascading over it into the pool below.
Ophidian used his bionic legs to vault himself to the top of the fountain. He pushed off, flipping his body one hundred and eighty degrees. The force of his movement cracked the globe like an asteroid crashing into the planet.
“Son of a bee sting!” DeAjamae cursed into the comms and jerked the drone backward.
It was too late. Ophidian snatched the drone in midair. The feed blurred with its rapid descent, then went black.
“Oh, for fuck. Asshole.” Command codes scrolled across the black viewscreen that used to show drone feed. “It’s out. We’ve lost the void-damn drone. I can’t track him from the sky.”
The target dot in my Minotaur program burst apart. A deafening roar filled my ears, much like what I imagined the mythical Minotaur would have sounded like. Lourde had built negative reinforcement measures into the program for any failures. At least outside of his training simulators, I wouldn’t also receive the accompanying electrical shocks.
I jerked my left hand to close the program. The three-dimensional image built by Minotaur collapsed. I blinked away the distortion as my real-world surroundings reasserted themselves into my view. It forced me to reduce my speed by almost half.
Ravi reached the target area before me. He left his comms open as he landed his LAV and jumped out with his blaster drawn. “Halt! Department of Enforcement of Criminal Affairs. Put your hands above your head!”
I arrived at the courtyard in time to see Ophidian hurl the mangled drone at Ravi. It flew like a tiny rocket and only missed hitting Ravi because he ducked behind the LAV’s door. The drone crashed into the door, leaving a dent the size of my head. Pierce wouldn’t be happy about that.
Ravi got off two shots with his blaster, but Ophidian had used the distraction to get behind the cracked globe fountain.
I swung wide to come at him from a different angle. The circular courtyard held little in the way of cover for any of us.
Ophidian’s right leg swelled. The fabric of his pants ripped apart at the seam. No, not just his pants. The artificial skin beneath split, as well.
He reached inside the cavity of his thigh and removed a blaster. Quicker than I could react, he pointed the barrel at me and fired.
I braked hard, spinning my hoverbike in a dizzying circle on its front end. The energy bolt missed my shoulder by centimeters, a streak of neon-blue electricity glowing bright against the dark sky. Two more bolts followed. Those were aimed at my head. I ducked, using the body of the hoverbike for cover, and pulled my blaster out from the holster at my hip.
The high-pitched whine reassured me it was charged, but I glanced at the dial to confirm it was on a medium setting. He was no use to us dead.
“Give it up, Ophidian!” I called down. I was close enough to see the surprise on his face. “Yeah, we know who you are.”
