Hegemony (44 page)

Another exchange of laser fire flashed across the atrium, reflected flashes lighting up the transparent panels of the ceiling, and this time Zandy heard the hissing cracks as the laser pulses superheated the air and the simultaneous echoing bangs as solid matter exploded into vapor. People were screaming everywhere, and security alarms added their shrill warble to the cacophony.

Zandy crouched behind the stone planter, gripped her needler and tried to figure out what to do.

"Shit!" Ylayn gasped, as Gira's signal went dead. She had been mildly fond of the other woman, enough to consider trying to seduce her... but there was no time to dwell on it. The Coalition commandoes were reacting to the eruption of laser fire, and finally she had enough signals to correlate encryption solutions and launch her final penetration codes.

"Got them," Ylayn exclaimed a second later, as more laser fire flashed across the atrium-mall. She was plugged in to her pers-comp, and the tactical data being exchanged by the Coalition special operations team was
all hers
.

Almost as soon as she had the data, she was feeding it into the
Whisperknife's
infiltration team's tactical net. Now her people --her surviving people-- would know exactly who and where the enemy was. Not really fair, when your info-net was compromised, but then, neither was Gira being dead... and anyway, Ylayn had no particular affection for fair fights.

Ylayn watched over her link as one of the enemy commandoes ran by Hyuer, utterly unaware of him as anything other than a bystander, moving to take the Captain in a cross-fire. On Ylayn's tac-net he stood out clearly, flagged as a hostile. Hyuer calmly drew his laser and shot him, the high energy pulse slashing into his back. A spray of vaporized polycarbonate armor exploded outward from the man's back and he spun with a fast flowing grace that showed he was heavily augmented. Hyuer shot again, the pulse cutting into the man's exposed neck, almost severing his head from his shoulders in an explosion of vaporized blood. The body fell limply to the ground.

"Hyuer to team," came a quick subvocalization, "set your lasers to a narrow track; the bastards have armor... and thanks for the setup, Ylayn!"

Of all the things Pyer might have expected, seeing the supposed-to-be-dead void-runner captain and his crew was the very last one. Sheer shock had not quite managed to override training, and Pyer's draw and shot had been as fast as neuro-chemical augmentation could make it. He'd killed the pirate woman, but the damned void-runner captain seemed to be just as fast as Pyer was... or faster.

There was no time to wonder what was going on. He had to take out the targets and get out of here. Nothing else mattered
now
, and later there would be time to try to figure out what had gone wrong.

Chaos was spreading through the crowd, radiating outward like ripples in a pool of water. More and more people were screaming, or trying to push their way in different directions.

His data link was feeding him a tactical picture, and he watched as one of his men engaged the targets, trying for a kill before the chaos of the crowd reached him. Too slow! The female captain managed to reach cover, and the other daemon was only injured. He focused for a second into his data link, ordering the rest of his men to move in on the targets. They had to take them out quickly, before local security could complicate the situation.

Pyer knew that void-runner would be moving to get a firing angle past Pyer's cover. Training reflexively suppressed the desire to stand and take a shot; the enemy would have already internalized Pyer's position, before he started moving. The fucking pirate didn't matter anyway, except that he was making the job harder. Pyer rolled out from the cover of the heavy stone planter, coming up with a decorative column blocking his sight of the pirate. He had to move fast now. The laser fire had set off alarms, and local authorities would be inbound. Given the volume of laser fire, the locals would be sending in high threat security forces: SWAT teams or their functional equivalent. The only thing left to do was to ride the chaos that the sudden laser fire had unleashed, kill his targets and get out.

Freya crouched next to Muir. He looked stunned and bemused. The biosim avatar had reacted to the loss of its arm, his arm, by shutting down the flow of circulatory fluid to the damaged area and suppressing the pain signals the damage would have caused.

"Lost my needler," Muir said, almost apologetically.

"Right," Freya said, trying to suppress a hysterical giggle.

"Move!" Muir said, with sudden intensity.

He gathered himself, not quite balanced without an arm, and threw himself sideways, across the open space between columns. The gunman was waiting, moving smoothly around the column he had taken cover behind. His laser tracked Muir.

Freya shot. Her first pulse strobe-lit the gunman, lifting the torn cloth of his cloak in a puff of vaporized carbon, but Freya couldn't tell if it had burned through the armor or not. Her second pulse missed over the gunman's shoulder, blasting a palm-sized crater in the wide column and sending superheated stone fragments into the gunman's armored back. Her third pulse caught the gunman in the chest again. Either it burned through the armor, or the armor had been ablated away by the needler darts and the first pulse, because the man dropped his laser and fell, screaming and clutching himself.

"Muir! Get to the uplink center!" she shouted, turning and scrambling in the direction of the uplink facility's wide, tinted glass doors.

Nas was moving through chaos and panic of the atrium-mall, dodging shrill bystanders, eyes and mind simultaneously open, with Ylayn's tactical overlay superimposed with what his own eyes saw. Multiple alarms shrieked, competing to make the most noise, punctuated by flashes and cracks of laser fire.

The tall man had gotten out of Nas' line of fire, but Nas could see exactly where all of the enemy were now. Even better, Ylayn was sending him the data as to where the bad guys thought
his
people were, as well as where they thought three "targets" were. The "targets'" probable locations were marked with the highest priority in enemy's system.

The "targets" intrigued Nas. Whoever they were, the Coalition commandoes were here to kill them... were willing to start a firefight in a public mall on a Hegemony planet to kill them. Enemy of my enemy, thought Nas. If these Coaly bastards wanted whoever it was dead so bad, then, as far as Nas was concerned, the "targets" were better off alive, if only to give that tall son-of-a-bitch grief.

And, by the sound of it, the "targets" were fighting back. None of his people were using needlers, and he doubted the Coaly commandoes were either, but the sharp crackle of needler fire had been distinct among the flashes and flat snap-cracks of laser fire. It might have just been a local cop, Nas thought, but...

One of the commandoes was moving towards the targets, weaving from cover to cover, almost in position. Nas changed his path to meet him. The man saw Nas, moving through the panicked crowd. The commando turned, and Nas dove towards cover, shooting as he did. All three of his pulses caught the man in the chest, the narrow-track lasers cutting through any armor the man might have had. The man jerked backwards as a gust of vaporized lung tissue erupted from his mouth, then fell. Nas rolled as he landed behind a column, then rolled again to his feet and was moving again.

Zandy crouched low behind a fused stone planter. She could see a spray of broad-leafed plants and a slender fern-like tree that spread its leaves wide above her. Past the decorative foliage, she could see people running or standing in panic. Incandescent bursts of light flashed and reflected from the glass panels of the atrium. Dozens, or maybe hundreds of people were shouting, screaming, and the screams were periodically punctuated with the sharp hiss-crack of laser fire.

"Zandy, come on!" came a shout from Freya. The other woman was shouting from the open sliding double-doors of the data center, beckoning Zandy to run towards her. Zandy tried to gather herself for the dash. It would be like an interceptor launch, she thought. No time to think about the danger, just time to act, fast.

Zandy got her legs under her, ready to run, needler held ready in a two-handed grip. Her biosim avatar was breathing hard, panting with nerves.

A laser flash illuminated Freya, tracking a micro-second of unbearable brightness across her right shoulder. Vaporized biosim tissue erupted outward in a sudden cloud, throwing Freya backwards and down.

Zandy turned desperately to look behind, where the laser pulse seemed to have come from. A mirror-visored man in a dark blue traveling cloak stood among the scattering crowd, perhaps fifteen meters distant.

The man saw her; the visored head turned incrementally to face her and the hand holding the laser tracked towards her with smooth speed. Zandy threw herself down, interposing one of the mall's foliage-filled stone planters between herself and the gunman. She hit the ground crouching on her knees and one elbow, and holding her needler up over her head, firing a long blind burst in the direction of the gunman. The weapon stuttered and vibrated in her hand as it sprayed out a stream of high velocity projectiles. Some of her darts struck the tree in the other planter, blasting leaves and branches apart in a rapid-fire burst of small explosions. Other darts, sent high by Zandy's angle of fire, detonated against the atrium ceiling at the far end of the mall, shattering the clear panels in a shower of falling crystal. Zandy held the trigger down, hoping that any bystanders were down behind cover, till the weapon sent an "empty" signal into her data feed. She switched to the needler's stun-dart magazine and fired another long burst, scampering back into better cover as she did so.

The weapon sent a second, final "empty" signal.

Shit, just expended all my ordinance in one go, Zandy thought; fucking dumb thing to do. God, I hope I didn't hit any civilians. The thoughts were almost ridiculously calm, in contrast with the near-panic that seemed to be driving her actions. If the gunman moved in, she supposed she could throw the empty needler at him.

It was odd, she thought, that she was probably going to die here, in a biosim avatar. Somehow she had been certain that her last moments would have been in an interceptor body.

She shook her head, the suddenly focused on the sight in front of her; the body of one of the gunmen, the one Freya had shot, lying just a couple of meters away, with a laser pistol in his outstretched hand.

What the fuck... nothing to lose, Zandy thought, and lunged for the weapon. Her hand closed on it just as a laser pulse flashed into the paving stones next to her, blasting out a gout of superheated fragments with a painfully sharp CRAACK!

An instant later, a rapid sequence of laser flashes seared the air above her. Pulses struck cover and exploded in bursts of flash-vaporization off to her left and her right.

Zandy rolled back towards her cover, expecting the searing heat of a laser pulse. Nothing. Her arms and face stung where tiny fragments of hot stone had hit her, but she didn't think the damage was serious. Now that she was moving, fighting, she found that the temptation to hide was gone; this was a fight, and the urge to act, to be unpredictable and aggressive, was almost overwhelming. In an interceptor she would have known what to do. Here, she had to guess and hope.

Zandy gripped her new-found laser and found the safety override, switching the weapon to fully manual mode; there was no time to try to interface it into her data feeds. Holding the pistol ready, she poked her head up, trying to find the gunman. For an instant she saw him as he dove behind one of the wide columns that were spaced along the length of the mall. Several laser pulses struck the column in bursts of searing brightness, blasting out clouds of vaporized stone. Someone was shooting at the gunman, Zandy realized.

Freya tried to get back on her feet, but the biosim body wasn't responding properly. There was no pain, but her right arm wouldn't move and her breathing had a horrible-sounding rasp to it. The smell of burned carbon was very strong. At least burned biosim didn't smell like burned flesh, Freya thought.

Zandy's needler fire had driven the gunman who'd just shot her back into cover, but Freya didn't think he'd been hit. She couldn't see where the interceptor pilot had gone, past the haze of vaporized debris and smoke blasted out by multiple laser pulses. The air held a strong tang of ozone.

Muir reached out with his remaining arm to try to help her up. "Come on, Captain," he said, "almost there."

Freya looked up at him, suddenly almost overcome by a feeling of weakness. "Get... moving, Muir," she rasped out. "I'm... still functional, I think... and... either way... at least one of us... has to get back to the ship... no matter what."

"What about Zandy?" he asked, peering into the haze and smoke that clouded the mall outside the open doors of the uplink center. Somewhere in the mall, a laser flashed again.

"No... time, Muir," Freya said. "Get... to the uplink and... get out of here."

"Come on," Muir said, pulling Freya to her feet. His face was set with a wry smile.

"Look at the bright side, Captain," he said. "We'd have to leave these avatars behind anyway. This way, we got as much use out of them as..."

Muir's face went cold, his eyes focusing over Freya's shoulder. Freya tried to look back, leaning on Muir as she did. A man in a reflective visor and drab travel cloak stood in the door of the uplink center, aiming a laser pistol at her.