Neural Wraith, page 29
“Down!” Rosa screamed.
Nick almost got whiplash as he was launched into the ground by the doll.
Then an explosion shattered the air. The air itself seemed to crumple around him. Debris and dust rained down. Rosa’s grip weakened after an instant, and the gunfire had slowed down.
“Fuck,” he shouted, trying to get back up and moving. His legs felt weak.
He could see where the van had been. A blackened mess of scrap and burning parts had replaced it. Both Mark 1s had been thrown clear. The explosion had torn them apart, ripping their bodies in two around the damage they’d suffered earlier.
“Escape this way,” Rosa said, still next to Nick. She pointed along the side of the building.
But she wasn’t moving herself. Instead, she fired at the assailants. The other Mark 1s fired at a distant target that resolved into another van. G2s poured out of the back of the van, carrying heavy shotguns. The Mark 1s switched targets, but their SMGs weren’t intended to fight dolls.
One of the Mark 1s blew apart as the sniper let loose again, but the dolls didn’t even flinch. They took apart one of the cyborg attackers.
Nick heard screaming and cursing in foreign languages. French or German, maybe? The accents were hard to place.
“Now,” Rosa repeated.
For an instant, Nick’s body told him to fight. Blood pumped through his body like it hadn’t for years. He remembered some of the scuffles he’d gotten into as a teenager, and how many times he’d wanted to fight back. Of the firearms training he’d received in Alcatraz, while working with the thugs that kept the peace there.
Then his brain kicked in and told him that four of the city’s militarized police dolls had just been obliterated within seconds. The worst fight that Nick had been in had been when some juiced up asshole had tried to break a mainframe Nick had been working on. Just firing his pistol had been enough back then.
Today? These cyborgs were still charging them down with multiple dead, and the Archangels relentlessly pouring lead into them.
Nick ducked around the side of the building. Rosa and Juliet followed. Meta lingered behind them, providing covering fire.
They cleared the corner and saw a clean run to the street. A wall blocked off the neighboring property, and going the other way took them closer to the attackers.
The real problem was that they needed to run past the entire length of the emergency services building. Potentially while under gunfire.
Nick just started running. He heard Rosa’s and Juliet’s rifles discharge while he did so, but they remained close to him at all times.
A crash sounded behind him. He just kept running.
Then Juliet grabbed him, and he felt the world move. His legs didn’t touch the ground while she covered most of the distance to the street within seconds.
Only to be brought down by the crack of the sniper. Nick gasped as he slammed into the ground and rolled. Rosa’s hands closed onto him before he even had a chance to get up.
“Juliet—” he began to say.
“Escape is the priority,” Rosa said.
Nick raised his head. Then his hand snapped to his gun. He didn’t fumble it this time, but didn’t get the chance to draw it. Meta poured lead in their direction, attempting to take out the enemy that Nick was focused on.
“Behind!” he snapped.
Rosa pushed Nick back and spun faster than he blinked. A giant of a man slammed into her. His blue hoodie had been reduced to shreds, revealing an entirely chrome exoskeleton. His arms were entirely cybernetic, and he wore a bulky helmet reminiscent of the NLF—only this one was armored.
His arms slammed into Rosa’s, knocking her weapon aside. She didn’t make a noise as she tore off his left hand.
The cyborg roared and threw a punch with his right. She caught it, only to realize that was a mistake. The shotgun blast turned her arm into spare parts.
Then she was hefted into the air. The cyborg gripped her with his remaining hand, which was large enough to wrap around half her torso. He screamed a foreign obscenity at her. Nick heard metal creak.
But he hadn’t been slacking. His hand gripped his Lawman tightly. The biometrics recognized him and let him draw it. Nick raised it.
The hand cannon felt like a ton of steel in his hand. Heavy and difficult to hold. Nick swore that time seemed to slow down as his muscles pounded and he struggled to aim the damn thing. Every lesson he had received about using this thing seemed impossible to remember.
But his target was also the size of a bus and only a few feet away. Nick leveled his handgun at the bastard, aiming for center of mass. He pulled the trigger.
The gun roared. Nick barely felt a thing as the kinetic dampeners in the firearm suppressed the recoil and kept the gun straight.
A hole appeared in the cyborg’s torso, where the anti-armor round had blown clean through his armor, body, and cybernetics in one shot. Rie had chosen the gun well.
Rosa fell to the ground only a moment before the huge cyborg.
Nick pulled himself to his feet after a couple of tries, his entire body shaking. “Rosa?”
“Escape,” she said. The center of her torso had been compressed so that she couldn’t move her legs. “Interceptors should be here soon.”
Was that why they were going down this way? Reinforcements were supposedly coming? But if the network was down, how did they know? Was that just wishful thinking? Nick turned the way they’d come, hand gripping his gun.
Meta was sprinting toward him, but two more cyborgs followed, pouring blood as they went.
Nick raised his gun.
That was a mistake. A cyborg spotted him and focused his rifle on Nick without even slowing.
Nick swore that his life flashed before his eyes.
Then Meta slammed into him. Cursing could be heard from the cyborgs.
“Don’t shoot the fucking asset!” one screamed in English. The accent sounded South African.
Behind Nick, more gunfire roared forth. Four Mark 1s charged toward him from police interceptors that hadn’t been there seconds earlier. They carried heavy rifles that split the air with every shot. The cyborgs ducked for cover. G2s emerged in the distance, ready to join the firefight.
“We are leaving,” Meta said.
“But Rosa—”
“Can be rebuilt. You cannot be.” Meta grabbed his arm and dragged him to the interceptors.
The Mark 1s charged past without saying a word. The bullets they spewed at their assailants were the only greeting. Nick had to admit they were a good one.
Right as they reached the interceptors, that terrifying crack split the air again. One interceptor visibly moved as a hole appeared in it. Nick didn’t know what the sniper had shot, but he didn’t want to find out.
“The other one,” Meta said, not missing a beat.
The doors of both cars were already open. Nick jumped into the closest seat. Meta leaped over the vehicle and slipped into the other seat in a single motion.
He wished he could be that cool.
Then he saw that the entire dash looked different. The display had lit up with countless images and numbers. A pair of strange devices had deployed from beneath the dash—Nick realized they looked like old video game controllers, but with more buttons and strange toggles.
Meta hit one of those buttons and the doors closed. Her hands closed around the handles of the controller.
Then the interceptor rocketed away from the scene. For the first time in his life, Nick was inside a manually driven vehicle.
If this counted as one. Somehow, an Archangel driving a car didn’t feel the same as a random human.
The streets were eerily empty. People stood on the streets, sometimes besides robot taxis flashing emergency signals. Arguments appeared to be breaking out. Nick spotted a few Liberators, but they were surrounded by furious crowds of people.
Meta’s eyes remained focused on the road, but she said, “The network attack appears to be broad-based. Our wireless and neural backup systems failed to make contact with fellow officers, other than those in the immediate vicinity.”
Nick almost hit his head out of annoyance at himself. “Of course. You can communicate with each other wirelessly, even if the network is down. That’s how you knew where the interceptors would appear.”
“Yes.”
“Then why were all the Mark 1s talking aloud earlier?” he asked.
“A consensus was reached that orders and decisions should be communicated verbally around you, in order to minimize confusion. This was decided upon reflection on your words today, and the incident at the warehouse,” she explained.
Well, he’d already changed police policy. Apparently coding new directive wasn’t always required.
“So where are we going?” he asked. “To get reinforcements?”
“It is assumed that the entire district is suffering an outage. There are likely jammers deployed which are affecting wireless transmissions as well, save for the shortest range ones. I am driving as fast and far as possible from the scene, so that we can renew neural contact ASAP.”
A chill ran down Nick’s spine. “Wait, you’re not driving down a predictable route, are you? The fastest route that covers as much ground as possible?”
Meta’s head spun to look at him, but only for an instant. Her mind seemed to pick up on the problem, as she immediately spun the controller and tried to change the direction she was driving.
But too late. Another of those huge, armored vans roared out from one of the empty streets.
Nick barely had a moment to brace before it slammed into the interceptor and sent them flying into a wall.
CHAPTER 23
The interceptor crashed into the wall of a nearby shop. The momentum nearly flipped it, but the van crashed into it again, attempting to crush the interceptor like scrap.
The few nearby pedestrians scattered. Nick braced himself, aware that the safest place to be right now was the armored police vehicle. Meta had been knocked around by the impact, and wasn’t moving. She slumped below the dash.
After a few long seconds, the van pulled back. The internal speakers of the interceptor relayed the voices from the outside.
“Get the asset!” another South African voice shouted, although it was different to the last one.
A pair of men in baggy civilian clothes approached them, both holding shotguns far too large for human use. They approached either side of the vehicle.
Nick gripped his Lawman, but was all too aware that using it would be his death.
Maybe he should have asked Meta for that firearms training sooner.
Both attackers stood outside Meta’s door, pointing their shotguns at her window. They tried to peer in, but the mirror tint prevented them. Cursing entered the cabin through the speakers.
Meta didn’t move an inch, and Nick worried that the impact had somehow damaged her. Or had she taken a bullet earlier and ran out of juice?
One of the men turned away and shouted something at the van.
In that moment, Meta suddenly snapped forward and hit a button. Her door snapped open and out. The men stumbled backward as they were struck in the face by the heavy door, a clear sign they weren’t as heavily enhanced as the giant had been.
Then Meta shot upright, her SMG in one hand and a Liberator handgun in the other. She blew apart each of the attackers with a separate gun. Her rounds struck their faces with perfect precision.
“Move,” she said, leaping out of the vehicle.
Nick didn’t waste any time. He crawled out Meta’s side of the car. Her hand pulled him to his feet.
Nobody had exited the van, but there had to be more in there. Meta didn’t waste time on it, though. She grabbed Nick and pushed him toward a nearby alleyway.
Before he made it, more gunfire broke out. Meta crashed into him and tried to pull him along. But she didn’t have the same strength as earlier.
“You’re damaged,” he said, noticing the gaping hole in her leg. Many more dents and marks covered her entire chassis, and her police uniform had been torn apart.
“You need to get to safety,” she said, hobbling along faster than he could move despite her damage. “More of them will converge on this location. I estimate that their jamming cannot be completely effective at this range.”
“Based on what?” he asked, looking behind him with his gun out.
They were ducking and weaving through the backstreets of a district he knew next to nothing about. Meta had a built-in navigation system, but he sure as hell didn’t.
Without her, he was utterly fucked.
“The signal interference is weakening. I expect that they are focusing on known frequencies. It is likely that devices operating on non-standard frequencies are already operational,” she said, her head constantly moving as she monitored their surroundings.
“So what does that mean?” he asked. “We just keep walking like this?”
“Yes. I have generated a randomized walk that will trade off speed with complexity, in an attempt to elude our pursuers. More Mark 1s are likely to enter our range soon, and we can escape,” she said. “Unless your phone is capable of frequencies we are incapable of.”
Nick pulled out his phone. It was completely useless.
The shadow of a smirk on Meta’s face suggested she had been teasing him. Despite the situation, she managed to be light-hearted.
Then again, he supposed that this wasn’t that dangerous to her. Nick still had difficulty processing what had happened, but reminded himself that all of those Archangels could be transferred into replacement bodies. The department kept a ton of them in storage.
They kept moving through the alleys for several more minutes. The area was very commercial, and full of shops, small warehouses, repair yards, and small tenements for the local workers. They crossed the street a few times.
Their only company were the malfunctioning dolls of the many businesses out here. Some of the older models didn’t need a neural connection, but basically any vaguely modern model expected to validate directives using a neural link.
Meta pulled Nick to a stop. Her eyes focused on a wall, and he knew that she could sense something he couldn’t. Her fingers hovered over his lips.
Slowly, voices approached. One was very familiar, due to the South African accent.
The alley they were in didn’t leave them anywhere to go, and their pursuers were rapidly approaching. Nick looked around for somewhere to go.
“There,” he whispered.
Meta stared at the tiny warehouse he was looking at. Then she ran toward it and shattered the lock, before gesturing Nick inside.
“Hey!” the South African shouted. “Found ‘em.”
Meta sprayed bullets from her SMG in his direction, while Nick ran around the side. He found an open loading bay, but the warehouse was far too small for his liking. A handful of G2s stood just inside, their mouths ajar and eyes vacant.
The entire building was filled with loaded pallets of paint cans, spray cans, bags of concrete mix, and similar supplies. Skylights illuminated the warehouse. The place looked like a dead end, in more ways than one.
“We can’t hide here,” Nick said.
Meta ignored him and pulled him inside. Her eyes darted back and forth, looking for an exit. Nick hoped they found one.
He didn’t miss that the G2s suddenly stiffened, before returning to their vacant state.
Gunfire blew apart a pallet of paint cans, spilling vibrant purple liquid all over the concrete floor. Nick looked back and saw a trio of cyborgs, accompanied by nearly a dozen G2s.
The cyborgs carried huge rifles, while the G2s had their familiar shotguns.
“You can stop running, you know. We’re not here to hurt you, Wraith,” the South African said, while pointing his rifle at Nick.
The warehouse G2s abruptly straightened. Their own shotguns focused on the closest cyborg, and they fired taser rounds into his face.
To no effect, other than eliciting a scream of pain. The enemy G2s viciously gunned down the others.
“Nice trick. This sort of shit is why we cut off your access to our dolls,” the South African said. “We should introduce ourselves. That’s what prospective business partners do, isn’t it? Call me Dallas.”
Nick ducked behind a pallet full of concreting supplies. Meta glared at him, but given there weren’t any exits, save for any they made themselves, there wasn’t anywhere else to go.
But if he was stuck here, his brain told him to let this idiot talk.
“Dallas? Something tells me you’re not American,” Nick shouted back. His hands felt clammy on his gun, but he refused to let it go.
“I certainly feel American waving all these guns around in a city that can’t stand them. I’ve heard this place was bad, but experience it is something else,” Dallas said. “Police in your mind, entire population jacked into some crazy metanet, and the criminals only shoot each other in designated zones. What kind of city has regulated crime? The fuck kind of oxymoron is that?”
Dallas sounded like a frustrated man. Nick told himself not to do anything too rash.
“Can’t help you with this shithole, I’m afraid,” Nick said. “I sure hope your business wasn’t anything like a revolution.”
“Oh, fuck no. We’re not interested in the dumb shit those NFL fuckers were. What kind of terrorist group names themselves after a sport, anyway?”
Nick paused, trying to process what he’d heard.
“They’re the NLF. Neural Liberation Front,” Nick said, enunciating each syllable clearing.
“The Neuron Liberation Front,” Meta corrected.
“Both names are fucking stupid,” Dallas said.
One of his partners said something in another language, and Dallas replied in the same language. Nick couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but he suspected Meta could.
Dallas sighed, loud enough that Nick heard him across the building. “Look, our business is simple. Our… original business partner is trying to renegotiate our contract. That’s predictable in the mercenary business, if a bit shit in this place. What I want is off this rock.”
