Trident's Forge, page 32
“Roger that.”
Lindqvist had volunteered, despite the fact that the need to stay linked to his gun through his plant meant his helmet couldn’t be lined with foil. Theresa had explained the risk, but it hadn’t deterred him in the least.
Theresa consulted her tablet and queried Hallstead’s plant location. She was in her living room. She dug a little further into the house’s systems and found a video was streaming to the wall display. “OK, she’s watching TV. Pavel, with me. Lindqvist, go around back and make sure she doesn’t try to escape when we ring the bell.”
The big man nodded and hustled down the alley. Korolev got out his stun-stick and walked quietly and purposefully at Theresa’s side up to the front door of the small, utilitarian house. It was a standard four room, single-story unit distinguishable from hundreds of others only by the numbers on its door frame. The house was clean, but Hallstead had made no attempts to decorate or otherwise individualize the exterior, to the point that its very plainness made it stand out.
Theresa and Korolev took positions on either side of the doorway. She didn’t want to risk requesting a warrant for the raid. Anyone who could hack the central network and rewrite plant source code could easily set up bots to alert them to something like a warrant and bolt before they ever arrived. Instead, they were here under the guise of a “welfare check,” hoping that Hallstead was careless enough to either leave evidence laying around, or tried to run, anything incriminating. But if the inside of her house was as orderly as the outside, and she managed to keep her cool, there wasn’t much Theresa would be able to do.
Well, nothing that would hold up in court and not get her fired. Not that she was in a mood to care.
Korolev nodded that he was ready to go. But even as Theresa punched her emergency override code into the door’s keypad, something felt wrong. She hit the “Enter” key and the lock clicked. Korolev swung the door open immediately and swept into the entry hallway. Theresa was half a step behind him, both of their stun-sticks held in the ready position. The first thing she noticed was a sharp, almost metallic smell she didn’t recognize.
“What’s that smell?” she whispered.
“Not sure. Cleaning solvent?”
“Ms Hallstead,” Theresa called. “We’ve had a report of strange sounds coming from your house. We’re here to check on you.” There was no answer. They turned the corner into the sparse living room. A faux leather couch took up most of the rear wall, the impression of an ass worn into its cushion on the left side. A cheap throw rug, scuffed acrylic coffee table, and a vase with plastic flowers filled out the rest of the room. Ass print aside, it looked like a demo unit. On the wall display, two women in strappy leather outfits pleasured each other with rather heavily modified power tools.
Korolev sniffed. “Our girl is a kinky one.”
“She’s supposed to be sitting right there.” Theresa pointed at the couch, waving her handheld.
“Check the bathroom?” Korolev asked.
The truth hit Theresa like a punch to the gut. Hallstead had a lift car to catch in less than thirty minutes. Who would be sitting on their couch watching porn thirty minutes before moving out of their house forever? “She hacked her plant locator. She was never here.”
“To the beanstalk?” Korolev asked.
“To the beanstalk, fast.”
They recalled Lindqvist and ran back to the cart. Korolev hopped behind the wheel and threw it into gear. “Head for the dock?”
“Yes,” Theresa crawled into the passenger seat. “No, wait.” She punched through a few screens on her handheld. “The ferry is already casting off.”
“Shit,” Korolev spat.
“No, that’s good. If Hallstead is on it, she’s got nowhere to run.”
“Unless she wants to swim a kilometer back to shore.”
“Exactly. Take us to the quadcopters. We might still beat the ferry to the anchor station.”
The cart’s suspension sagged under the fresh weight of Lindqvist. They took off for the airfield with a whine of electric motors. They were in luck. One of the small scout helicopters was still sitting on the flight line. Theresa jumped out of the cart even before Korolev had brought it to a full stop and ran for the cockpit. “C’mon Pavel. Lindqvist, take the cart and wait for us at the dock.”
The large man acknowledged the order and moved to the driver’s seat while she and Korolev strapped themselves into the copter’s harnesses. Neither of them were certified pilots, but fortunately, they didn’t need to be. Theresa simply punched in their destination and the autopilot system spun up the four rotors mounted to the corners and dusted off.
They made the short flight out to the anchoring rig in silence, passing over the ferry as it slowly made its way from the natural harbor out into the open ocean a kilometer out. The planetside end of the Ark’s space elevator was mounted to an enormous floating platform with several sets of powerful thruster pods. Most of the time, they simply kept it stationary within the gentle outflow of current coming from the mouth of the river. But in the event a powerful enough hurricane threatened to damage the rig, they could move it many tens of kilometers out of the predicted path.
The quadcopter pitched backward slightly as it slowed for its final approach to the small landing pad on the far corner of the platform. The ten meter-wide, wafer-thin elevator tether reached straight and true to the heavens until it passed beyond the atmosphere, where it appeared to shrink to a one-dimensional line glowing white. In addition to providing a track for the lift cars plying up and down its length, it also served double duty, powering the cars via a photovoltaic coating only a few molecules thick, turning the entire tether into a solar array several tens of thousands of kilometers long.
“OK, what’s the plan?” Korolev asked as the quadrotor settled onto its skids.
Theresa unbuckled herself and threw open the cabin door. “We go to the loading dock and check everyone coming off the ferry until we catch her.”
“And if she resists?”
“Oh, please tell me we’re that lucky,” Theresa said with venom in her voice.
“Hey, chief,” Korolev grabbed her at the elbow, gently but firmly. “Remember our job here.”
She yanked her arm free. “You think I’ve forgotten?”
“I just want to see this done by the book so it sticks. I know how you feel right now, I want to crush skulls too, but I know you’d feel infinitely worse if this gets botched up and somebody walks on a technicality.”
“She killed Bryan, Pavel. I’m sure of it. You really think I’m going to let anyone walk away from this?” Her voice was flat, emotionless. It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. For a split second, Korolev faltered under her stare.
“I’d rather it not come to that. I don’t want my first act as chief to be arresting my grieving ex-boss on murder charges.”
Theresa forced herself to unclench. Her fists had balled up so tight, her nails left tiny crescents in the skin of her palms. She was obviously just one small step away from a psychotic break. She took a deep breath, expelling as much of her anger and fear as she could fit into the exhale.
“You’re right. By the book.”
“OK. Let’s go.”
“Pavel?” Theresa grabbed his arm. He stopped and looked at her. “You’re going to make an amazing chief.”
“Not too soon, I hope.”
“Oh no, not just yet. Let’s move.”
They sprinted across the platform, past the enormous, five-story tall lift car waiting in its cradle. Panting, they reached the landing dock just as the ferry’s ramp came down.
“Can I help you, constables?” asked the dock attendant standing by the gate waiting to check everyone in.
“What’s your name?” Theresa asked, genuinely unsure of the answer because of the foil inside her helmet blocking her link to the personnel database back at headquarters.
“Aliaabaadi,” she answered, her face trying and failing to hide her anxiety and confusion at the sudden appearance of the law.
“Well, Ms Aliaabaadi, we just need to speak to one of your passengers as they get off.”
“Oh, OK. What’s their name?”
“Hallstead. Yvonne Hallstead.”
The gate attendant punched the name into her tablet even as the passengers started to queue up to disembark.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see that name in the passenger manifest.”
But Theresa wasn’t listening. She was too busy scanning the faces in the crowd, recognition software in her plant comparing each to Hallstead’s profile that she’d saved to internal memory before putting on her helmet.
It pinged a match. Near the back, a hoodie covering the top of her head. Seventy-eight percent match.
“Thank you.” Theresa pushed past the attendant. “We’ll take it from here. Pavel, toward the back. In the gray hoodie.”
“I see her.”
“Go left. If she tries to run and gets past me, stop her.”
Korolev acknowledged the order and stepped out of view behind a support pillar, lying in wait like an ambush predator. He’d gotten somewhat better at not standing out over the last few years.
Keep cool, girl. You can’t arrest her. You’ve got no warrant. You just want to have a friendly little chat with the woman who killed your husband. By the book. Theresa pushed gently through the crowd as they passed by to be processed and released to the lift car. They mostly ignored her or regarded her with curious or annoyed glances. All of them, except for Hallstead. The moment she spotted her pushing backward through the line and recognized her uniform, she locked eyes with Theresa and frowned.
For her part, Theresa smirked and made her way toward her with greater speed. “Ms Hallstead!” she called, waving a hand. She took a big step back and griped the strap on her backpack tighter. Then Hallstead’s eyes went a little unfocused the way people often did when they were sorting through their plant OS. Her left eye winced almost imperceptibly, a common tic when a command was executed.
Theresa knew exactly which command Hallstead had tried to execute. Her eye twitched again, again. When Theresa continued to walk toward her, she stepped back into a bulkhead and went pale. And now she knew exactly what to say.
“Why, Ms Hallstead. I’m surprised to see you here. You almost gave me a heart attack.” Theresa piled the emphasis on the last two words so her meaning was unmistakable. Hallstead’s pointy brown eyes went wide.
“How? How did you…”
Theresa tapped the side of her helmet. “Mad-hatter, motherfucker. And now, you and I are going to have a little talk.”
Hallstead’s disbelief quickly slid into terror. “But, you can’t–”
Theresa cranked up the pressure. She needed her to break. To say or do something incriminating. “See, you really fucked up. I didn’t even come down here with a warrant to arrest you. Didn’t want to risk alerting any agents you have trolling the network. If you’d have kept your cool, you could’ve breezed right past me and waltzed right onto that lift car and four days later, you’d be suckling up to your master’s teat on the Ark, eating fresh pond fish in whatever penthouse they set you up in for killing Administrator Valmassoi, Captain Mahama… My. Husband. You were so, so close…”
“But, I didn’t. They–”
“They what, Yvonne?”
Literally backed into a corner, Hallstead’s terror snapped into panicked action. With surprising speed and power, the small woman shoved Theresa off balance, sending her toppling backward. Her arms pinwheeled trying to keep her on her feet, but Hallstead was already on top of her.
Stupid, sloppy, Theresa thought as the scrawny programmer pressed her attack. But while her desperation gave her a certain animal viciousness, she lacked finesse and discipline. Theresa had been training and rolling with alpha constables for as long as she could remember. She was used to sparring with people twice Hallstead’s size and possessing an order of magnitude more competence. One of her whirling arms gripped her left wrist, and in the blink of an eye, Theresa rotated her mass around their mutual balance point and redirected Hallstead’s momentum in a more productive direction. Productive for Theresa’s purposes, that is. Hallstead flew face first into the bulkhead with the wet thump of a ripe melon wrapped in a towel.
To her credit, or maybe just owing to adrenaline, Hallstead shook off the hit and scrambled back up to her feet, but not before Theresa had leveled her stun-stick at her forehead. She pressed the stud on the silver pen-sized stick and waited for Hallstead’s limbs to go into convulsions.
Nothing happened.
Now it was Theresa’s turn to be surprised. She pressed it again with an identical lack of results.
Hallstead didn’t wait around for her to figure out why her stick wasn’t working. Instead, she jumped to her feet, grabbed the backpack she’d dropped, and ran up the exit ramp.
Oh no you don’t. Theresa gave chase, but Hallstead grabbed the other passengers as she ran and shoved them into her path, slowing her down. She reached the top of the ramp first and broke into a flat run across the platform, headed for the lift car.
“Pavel!” Theresa shouted, springing the trap. The younger constable stepped out from his cover, cutting off Hallstead’s line of flight. The programmer skidded to a stop, the soles of her shoes screeching against the grated metal deck plates. Hallstead tried her little cardiac arrest trick at the same time Korolev tried to hit her with the stun-stick. Neither worked, much to the surprise of both of them. Now Theresa knew it wasn’t something wrong with her stick.
“She’s blocked the sticks somehow, Pavel.”
Korolev grunted and ran straight at Hallstead, but a sudden electric whine and a rush of movement stopped him as a small quadcopter drone swooped down in from of his face and shocked him with a miniature electric prod.
“Ow!” Korolev shouted as his forearm shot up to swat away the mechanical interloper, but it deftly dodged the strike, then hit him again. It was an artificial hawk, Theresa realized, one of a small fleet that kept the anchor platform and other important installations clear of the local bird analogues. Hallstead must have hacked it and convinced the stupid thing that Korolev was a bird in need of scaring off. The little shit was certainly full of surprises.
“It’s over, Yvonne,” Theresa shouted. “You’re under arrest on two counts of assaulting a constable and one count of being a little bitch.”
“Little bitch, am I?” Hallstead unshouldered her backpack and held it at arm’s length.
“Aah! Drop it!”
“Gladly.” She dropped the bag to her feet and gave it a contemptuous little kick. It came to rest about a meter away. Theresa took a long step toward it. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Theresa paused. “Why’s that?”
“Because it’s my little insurance policy. It’s a bomb. A very powerful bomb. Which I can trigger with a thought.”
Theresa’s breath froze in her throat. “How powerful?”
“Well, I’m no demolitions expert, but it should be enough to wipe the deck clean, maybe even cut the ribbon, if I packed enough shrapnel. Your foil hat won’t save you from this one. What do you say, chief? Want to risk it?”
By then, the rest of the passengers were falling over each other to get back down the gangplank to the ferry. Theresa, however, didn’t dare move a muscle. What Hallstead was talking about wasn’t just the death of everyone on the rig. With the tether cut, Shambhala would be cut off from the Ark’s power and food supplies. She wasn’t threatening Theresa with death. Hallstead was threatening the entire colony with starvation.
“That’s what I thought.” Hallstead casually strode over to the pack and heaved it back onto her shoulder. “I’ll just hold onto this for safekeeping, as long as there are no objections? No? Good. Now, here’s what’s going to happen, chief. You and your friend here are going to stand perfectly still, doing nothing more ambitious than breathing, while I walk up to the lift car and–”
It was at that moment that Korolev interrupted what was developing into a very promising speech.
With his left arm numbed by the repeated prods of the faux-hawk, Korolev charged at Hallstead’s gloating form and dropped a shoulder into the small of her back, just below the dangling backpack. The scrawny coder’s head and arms snapped backwards even as Korolev’s momentum shot her torso forwards with a shock, driving both of them toward the platform’s safety railing.
Theresa realized Korolev’s plan and hurried to join in. She sprinted at Hallstead and threw all of her weight into a fist aimed squarely at her solar plexus. It connected. Hallstead’s body whiplashed forward, doubling over on itself as she struggled to recapture the wind Theresa had just knocked clean out of her, which brought her forehead into contact with Theresa’s.
Together, Korolev and Theresa grabbed Hallstead by the shirt, hoisted her limp body into the air, and pitched her and her bomb over the railings with a heave. Doing her best impersonation of a Wilhelm scream, Hallstead belly-flopped into the water ten meters below.
“Did you think to waterproof that bomb, asshole?” Korolev shouted down to the woman now struggling to tread water.
“By the book, huh?” Theresa said conversationally. “I don’t remember reading that in the book.”
“It probably got cut in the rewrites,” Korolev answered.
“Still, they should put it back in. Maybe they can add it to the movie.”
“We should be so lucky.”
Below them, Hallstead was busy shedding her backpack before the weight dragged her down to the bottom.
“Should we fish her out?” Korolev asked.
“In a minute. She looks like she could use the exercise.”
“Taking over Bryan’s job as athletic director now, too?”
“Someone has to,” Theresa said, her voice sharp as the jagged end of a broken bottle.
Thirty-Two
Kexx’s arms burned under Benson’s constant weight tugging at the rope tied around zer waist. The humans were short, but so, so heavy for their size. Zer shoulder, still punctured by fullhands of tiny teeth marks from the caleb attack, strained migtily from the load.
