Inescapable (34 page)

‘He’s chasing
you,’ Marie said.

‘Good,’ Fox
replied, twisting left and keeping on running. She needed to make a
flight of stairs which was around a hundred metres away, but she
was going to have to do twice that to make sure he never got a
clean shot.

‘That was
amazing! You shot his missile out of the air!’

‘ABF round.
Technology is wonderful.’ Fox jinked right around a lingerie shop
and heard the glass frontage shatter as bullets tore into it.

‘Annular blast
fragmentation?’ Sam’s voice. ‘Jackson got something like that into
a ten-mil shell?’

Fox risked a
twenty-metre sprint to the next turn and could almost feel the
bullets lining up on her spine. She risked a glance as she turned
and saw the trail of vapour from the missile launch. She snap-fired
back and knew he would have nailed her if he’d used the minigun
instead of the launcher.

‘She did it
again!’

‘Got lucky. Not
taking another risk like that. Almost at the stairwell, Sam.’
Turning hard right and then almost an immediate left, she had a
straight run for the emergency door at the end. No more than eight
metres and she hit it at a dead run, bolting through and starting
immediately for the stairs down. She was going to have to make it
down twelve levels, twenty-four flights, and not get shot on the
way. She was on the next landing down when the emergency door was
blown off its hinges.

‘I am Nemesis.
Adrasteia.’

‘Yeah, great,’
Fox yelled back up the stairs as she ran down, ‘but what’s your
real name?’

There was a
fraction of a second’s pause. ‘Adrasteia. There is no escape.’

‘No one’s
called Adrasteia. Who are you?’ She was taking the steps as fast as
she could, watching back up for him. He would be slower in the
heavy armour and carrying the pod, but if he could get an angle
where he could see her, she was in trouble. She hugged the wall and
moved as fast as she could.

‘I am Nemesis.
I am S-Sullivan. No.’

‘Robert
Sullivan?’ Senior Officer Robert Sullivan was in her list of cops
from precinct 19. No notes: it seemed like she had never met the
man aside from in passing. The brief data she had on him suggested
he had been a cop for nineteen years and he was still in uniform,
which took a desire to stay on the street or a lack of any real
talent.

‘Bastards,’
Sullivan said, his voice distorted by the speakers. ‘Bastards
sitting there in their homes, breaking the law. That’s what they
do. All of them, breaking the rules. Cheating. And they get away
with it because we’re too soft.’

Fox kept quiet
and ran. He was ranting and she doubted he was paying much
attention to where she was. Two floors left and he was still
blabbing on about cheaters and frauds, but there was something she
needed to know. ‘Did you hear the voice, Sullivan? Did the voice
make you do this?’

‘He stopped,’
Marie said. ‘He just stopped on the steps.’

Fox stopped,
her hand on the door to the lobby level. ‘Sullivan?’

‘What do you
know about Adrasteia?’ The tone was flat, almost as if the AI Fox
was now sure was guiding this man was speaking.

‘Is that what
it calls itself? It’s an AI. It drives you nuts, makes you kill.
Peter Doran, Wallace Deedle, and back, all the way back to Earnesto
Pallo. Don’t make me kill you, Sullivan. Don’t let it win. It’s
fucked and it knows it. The building network is locked and I’ve
jammed your comms. It can’t get away this time.’ Fox slipped her
hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out a new magazine. With a
click, the gun dropped the current one into her hand and she
swapped its replacement in. An indicator appeared in-vision:
Warning. HEMP warheads loaded
. ‘If I have to, I’ll take you
down, but I’d rather you let me get you some help.’

Bullets
clattered down the stairwell and Fox ducked through into a side
corridor that led out onto the lobby. She needed to run twenty
metres to get into that space, however.

‘He’s right
behind you, Fox,’ Marie said as Fox ran down the hall. She was a
second from the lobby and a dive into cover when she heard the door
slam open behind her. ‘He’s right there!’

Fox turned and
saw his weapons pod lifting, the three barrels of the minigun
spinning up, the flicker of the red sighting beam in the air. She
lifted her own gun, not bothering to wait for the tracking to lock
on, sighting on skill and pure talent as she threw herself
backward. Two rounds sprang from her pistol, each one hitting his
chest where the standard flexible armour of the suit was reinforced
by the hard armour of the riot harness. Two explosions blossomed,
flashes of brilliant light that flared against his armour. The twin
blasts were so close together as to be one, concussion battering at
Fox’s skin even at that distance. And then he was stumbling and
falling, collapsing onto his face as Fox’s shoulder hit the floor
and she skidded on her back into the lobby.

Keeping her
pistol aimed at the fallen, armoured figure, Fox tried to sit up.
Pain lanced through her back: diving headlong onto a solid floor
was
never
a good idea. Then Sam was there, his own pistol
pointed down the side corridor, even if it would probably do no
good. He pushed an arm under Fox and heaved her upright. Her
shoulder started throbbing, but the man she had shot was still
down.

‘Check him?’
Sam suggested.

A sharp nod and
Fox started moving, closing the distance back toward the man. There
was still no movement. ‘Get ready to put a foot on that pod,’ Fox
said. ‘I’ll turn him over. You make sure he can’t use that weapon.’
Bending, she hooked a foot under his shoulder and lifted, not
trusting her bruised shoulder.

Sam winced as
Sullivan was rolled onto his back, but he put his foot down, just
in case. ‘What did you use on him?’

Fox bent down,
fairly sure that there was no need to be secure about it. There
were two holes drilled right through the hardened armour over
Sullivan’s chest, the edges blackened, but there was not much
blood. ‘High-explosive, multi-purpose. Shaped charge warhead. Goes
through like a blowtorch, residual detonation and shrapnel.’ She
pointed at the blackened, pitted floor tiles near Sullivan’s feet,
and then she reached in for the catch under his helmet which was
there as an emergency release. Even before the upper part of his
helmet hinged back and she could see his face, she knew he was
dead. And somewhere in his body, running on a piece of hardware
linked to his dead brain, was a piece of software which was dying
too. She just hoped the power died on his implant before the thing
could get near a network connection.

~~~

‘Don’t fuck with me,
Canard,’ Fox said, her voice weary. ‘I just had to kill a cop.’

‘We’re still
determining whether that was a necessary action,’ Canard replied.
‘You utilised munitions which…’

He trailed off
as Fox glared at him. Even in his own office, he was backed into a
corner on this one and they both knew it. ‘MarTech obtained all the
proper licences for me to use that gun, and Sullivan had killed…
What’s the body count so far, Captain Canard?’

Canard sucked
on his teeth. ‘Forty-one dead, a further sixteen injured, three of
those in critical condition.’

‘Not to mention
the property damage, and this is
another
bad cop out of your
precinct.’ She could not blame Canard for what had happened to
Sullivan, but she could press the buttons. ‘It took another ten
minutes to get through the security barriers. That’s going to be a
minimum of twenty more minutes he had to increase the damage. I
stopped him with minimal risk to anyone else. You’ve got the
recorded video from the building’s security system, and the data
from my pistol and my implant. Don’t make me call in Palladium’s
lawyers, because if I do that, it’ll be a waste of my time and the
end of your career.’

The captain
gave a grunt, his brows deeply furrowed. ‘What did you mean? You
asked Sullivan about a voice. What were you talking about?’ His
tone had softened; okay, so the situation was not exactly making
him look good, but it could have been worse and, somewhere deep
down, Canard was a cop.

‘My PA
collected a lot of evidence about the Doran and Deedle killings,
and a bunch of related events going back to the death of Hector
Rossi in fifty-seven. We’re not entirely sure what it is, but
there’s some sort of… web entity jumping from victim to victim. It
gets into their implant and then it brainwashes them, for want of a
better term. Sullivan had to be skating on the edge anyway, because
it turned him in under a month, but he might never have gone postal
without this… parasite.’

Canard peered
at her. ‘That sounds crazy.’

‘Sure does,
which is why Sullivan’s going to go down as a cop who went nuts.
This thing
probably
died with him this time. No outgoing
network comms, nowhere to hide. The idea, though… If the public
finds out about this thing, they’ll panic. There’ll be a rush to
get implants removed or deactivated, and the technology will be put
back.’

‘I was under
the impression, Miss Meridian, that you disliked politics.’

Fox sighed.
‘Hate it, but it seems to have decided it likes me.’

~~~

Marie was waiting for
Fox when she got back to her building. She was waiting in Sam’s
apartment, the two of them emerging to find out what NAPA had had
to say, but the sight of the redhead still in her turquoise
clubbing dress brought a smile to Fox’s face.

‘Are we in
trouble?’ Marie asked as Fox marched down the corridor, aiming for
her own door. ‘Are
you
in trouble?’

‘No and
no.’

‘Told you,’ Sam
put in, smiling.

‘Canard was
pissed off, but he hadn’t got a leg to stand on and he knew it.’
Opening her door, she walked in, followed by her friends.

Kit was waiting
beside the window. ‘Building communications are back up, Fox, as
are administrative systems. Mister Martins asked for you to call
through as soon as you returned home.’

‘Yeah, okay,
put a call through.’ She glanced back at Sam and Marie. ‘Get coffee
or whatever. I doubt this’ll take long.’

Jackson’s image
appeared in Fox’s vision field a second later. ‘Ah, Fox. Hold on, I
need to loop in a few more people and go to full conference…’

Fox blinked,
seeing names being added into the connection. ‘Oh, we’re going the
whole hog then. Right, Kit, add Sam and Marie into this,
please.’

‘Me?!’ Marie
squeaked.

‘You were
there; you might have an answer to something I don’t.’ Fox took the
coffee mug Sam offered her and walked over to the sofa where the
other attendees were starting to appear. Alongside Jackson, Terri,
Jarvis, and Dillan were appearing as avatars. ‘Still at the tower,
Helen?’

‘I’m off duty
today,’ Dillan replied, a little defensively. Terri just smiled
rather innocently. ‘Marie’s still at your place?’

‘Luckily. Turns
out she makes a good lookout.’

Alice Vaughn
appeared, her eyes flicking around the collection of people.
‘Afternoon, everyone. Hello, Sam.’

Sam gave her
one of his best smiles, with a hint of an evil twinkle in his eye,
and Vaughn’s cheeks coloured, even in emulation. ‘Good afternoon,
Alice. Mister Jarvis, I assume? We haven’t met. This is Marie
Shaftsbury. She lives in the basement apartment at the house in the
MCD, but she was here for today’s little event.’

‘I just hid in
the control room and watched camera feeds,’ Marie said. She was
looking awed again. She might not have known who Jarvis was, but
she knew he was someone important and… Jackson Martins!

‘Do we have
confirmation that this incident was the same as Deedle and Doran?’
Jackson asked, kicking off the business of the meeting.

‘I got enough
out of NAPA to suggest it is,’ Fox replied. ‘Sullivan got himself a
LANVisor-Six not long after they came out. He was a career cop, but
getting nowhere and he figured a next-generation implant would give
him a push.’

‘It certainly
did that.’

‘I checked on
what he said to you, Fox,’ Kit said. ‘“I am Nemesis. Adrasteia.”
Most people have heard of Nemesis, a spirit of divine retribution
in Greek myth. The name is derived from a word which means “to give
what is due.” However, the appellation “Adrasteia” was also given
to Nemesis and that means “the inescapable.”’

‘I have some
difficulty believing that a street policeman in modern New York
would come up with that as a statement while gunning down innocent
civilians,’ Jackson suggested.

Fox nodded.
‘The way he spoke… I think it got deeper into Sullivan’s psyche
than it did with the previous ones. It was running him more
closely. Marie, you were watching him more than the rest of us.
Would you say he seemed kind of… robotic?’

‘Um… Well, with
that weapons pod and the heavy plate over his chest, he looked more
like a robot than usual, but… Now you mention it, he did seem to be
running on automatic. It was like someone was pulling his strings.
Was this guy being controlled somehow?’

‘I think,’
Terri said, ‘that the speed employed on this man left little room
for subtlety. It probably did need to control him more than usual.
We believe that this was caused by a… A form of virus.’

‘Something
we’re keeping quiet,’ Fox added. ‘It probably died with Sullivan,
and it could only affect certain groups of people.’

‘And we
released the countervirus yesterday,’ Jackson said. ‘There should
be no more cases like this.’ Jackson looked over at Marie, smiling.
‘Miss Shaftsbury, you’ve signed our NDA regarding the house we’re
going to refit. I should point out that we did run some background
checks on you as well. We trust you. We
are
trusting you
with some very interesting new technologies so, while you aren’t an
employee of MarTech, we do consider you… part of the family at the
moment.’