Severance (34 page)

Linze hoisted her manikin back up into its chair, made sure
it was going to stay in place this time, then planted a boot in its crotch and
sent it wheeling across the arena. “Why’d I agree to help with this again?”

“Because you think our mayor is an honest, trustworthy man,
worthy of our respect and lives?” Hogg suggested. Linze snorted, and he allowed
himself a small grin. Bizarrely, with every sex dummy he handled, he was
growing more convinced he was doing the right thing. Whatever oily qualities
the mayor had, he certainly sounded like he was making sense when Hogg talked
to him face–to–face. And Thorias had stopped giving him orders entirely. Although
without any terminal — the mayor still hadn’t given that back — Hogg supposed
he wouldn’t know if there had been any orders. Linze and Croutl had had to give
their terminals up to Kinsella’s goons as well, but that hadn’t taken much
convincing.

Hogg looked up to see his new oily boss enter the arena. A
crew of idiots flocked around him, making a farce of their attempts to protect
him from imaginary dangers — Hogg hadn’t seen a security officer north of the
barricades since the riot.

Kinsella and his flock gathered around a large crate at the
far end of the arena. It had been delivered a few hours earlier by a different
selection of idiots, though they wouldn’t tell Hogg what was in it. While two
of his larger idiots fumbled with the crate’s latches, Kinsella looked up and waved
at Hogg.

“Think he wants us to go over there?” Linze asked. “Or to
stay away?”

“I can’t tell what his waves mean yet,” Hogg said.

“Hogg!” Kinsella yelled across the empty floor. “Get over
here.”

“Well, now you do.”

Hogg shook his head. “Yeah, but now I forgot what the wave
looked like.”

Together they crossed the floor, watching as the lid of the
crate was finally pried off. Kinsella reached into the crate and withdrew a
pistol, his mouth forming an O shape as he stroked the gun. “What do you think?”
he asked flipping the gun recklessly at Hogg. Hogg’s eyes widened, and he side–stepped
it, letting the pistol sail past and clatter to the ground behind him. Silence from
the idiots as they evaluated whether that was a smart or cowardly thing to do.
Hogg ignored them, bending down to retrieve the weapon.

“They’re not toys,” he said, examining it. “Sir.” He turned
the pistol over in his hands, nose wrinkling at the hot pink plastic they had
molded it in. “Are they?” He turned, aimed at one of the closer training
dummies, and fired. A burst of particles sailed across the arena, impacting the
dummy’s left shoulder, knocking it off its chair.

“Works though, don’t it?” Kinsella said. High–fives amongst
the idiots, as they began collecting weapons for themselves.

“Spread’s a bit wide,” Linze said, coming up beside Hogg.

Hogg looked at the focusing ring at the end of the barrel. “Not
too bad, though. It’ll work.” He cast a glance back at the idiots, then grabbed
Linze by the shoulder, tugging her out of the line of fire of the impromptu
target practice session that was starting to develop.

A furious cascade of shots erupted, sailing across the
arena, leaving the training dummies almost completely unharmed. This didn’t
bother the goons at all, amused by the simple joy of trigger pulling. But
Kinsella seemed to notice and directed a meaningful look at Hogg. Hogg stroked
his chin thoughtfully, watching the incompetence unfolding around him.

“Or maybe the spread’s not wide enough,” Linze said quietly.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

§

Trespassing beneath the mayor’s mammoth desk, Koller shifted
his weight, shaking his forearm to try and regain some feeling in the tingling
limb. For seven hours, he had been peering out of the open window in the back
of the mayor’s office, methodically scanning the rooftops and streets arrayed
in front of him.

It was work that could be done better and faster by the
myriad of sensors mounted in the garden well, but of late those had started
exploding. It was because of those dwindling sensors that the sensor he was
using himself was attached to a smart rifle, which had certain abilities inherent
in its design that the regular surveillance monitors didn’t. And if necessary,
those features came with orders to use them.

When Thorias had approached Koller specifically for this
chore, Koller hadn’t had to ask to know the chief was stretching his authority.
For the last couple of years, every time Thorias approached him personally with
orders, they were of the kind that weren’t supposed to be written down. Things
that needed to disappear. People that needed to be scared. That poor, dumb
technician in the Bridge mechanical room who needed a bit more.

This was a trickier job than any of that. How the
Othersiders got their hands on a smart rifle wasn’t a complete mystery. It was
clearly the one stolen during the Breeder raid years earlier. Which evidently
still worked, to judge by the steadily shrinking supply of high altitude
surveillance sensors in the garden well. Whoever was shooting it was still a
mystery, although solving that was easily done — shooting him, then
reassembling his various pieces.

Koller just had to find him first. The hard way to do that was
what he was trying now. Slow, tedious searching of every rooftop and window in
the garden well, looking for someone that didn’t hang out in one spot for very
long.

The easier way was what Koller was really banking on, but it
would require some patience. One of the smart rifle’s features was the ability
to recognize and pinpoint muzzle flash. If the enemy sniper fired again, and
within his line of sight, his rifle would spot the flash, and calculate a
return trajectory within fractions of a second. If the Othersider didn’t know
about the feature — and Koller wouldn’t have known about it himself if he hadn’t
read the documentation — he would be in for a very small, very fast surprise.

But for that to work, the Othersider would have to shoot
first, and for the last half–day, he had been stubbornly refusing to do just
that. Koller gave up on the rooftops and began scanning the wall at the far end
of the well. Left to right in broad sweeps, moving up or down after each sweep
and heading back the other way, working a rough grid. Every nook and crevice on
the wall was examined in both light amplification and IR. Maintenance corridor —
clear. Ventilation shaft — covered, probably clear. Odd–looking panel — odd–looking,
but completely solid. And so on.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when the gun chirped in his
hand. “What the heck?” he said. He blinked and looked into the viewfinder. A
bright red arrow on the left of the screen. “Ohhhhhhh.” The counter–sniper
sensor, telling him where the shot had come from. He rapidly panned the rifle to
the left. The arrow moved to the right of the screen. Swears filled the spot
under the mayor’s desk as he corrected to the right, overshooting again. Taking
a deep breath, he tracked back to the left at a more measured pace. Finally, the
arrow turned to a dot, hovering over a dark room on the far end of the garden well.

The sensor automatically adjusted the gain on the light
amplification, revealing an observation room overlooking the garden well, seats
arrayed on a gentle slope like in a theatre. One of the many rooms on the ship
that had seemed like a good idea to whoever had designed it, it hadn’t been
enjoyed much by the actual citizens of the ship and had fallen into disuse over
the past centuries.

Not complete disuse, however, judging from the movement in
the back of the room. There, a figure struggling in the low–gravity, trying to
haul a bulky object up the stairs to the door. Koller moved the reticule onto
the door the figure was moving towards and hit the targeting button. A blue
arrow appeared on the side of the screen. He knew what that was and slowly began
panning towards it, until a blue reticule appeared almost in the center of his
viewfinder. He settled the crosshairs on the blue reticule, took a deep breath,
and pulled the trigger. The rifle shuddered beside him, snapping the projectile
out with a pleasing sound.

Panning back to the observation lounge he watched as the
door shut behind the retreating figure. A split second later a fist shaped hole
appeared in the door accompanied by an explosion of plastic and metal
splinters. Koller watched the hole for another several seconds. The fragments
of the door wafted around the room, plastic and metal and foam, taking a long
time to settle in the low G. The splinters were not, sadly, accompanied by any
noticeable amounts of blood or gore. “Fuck!” he yelled, swinging the gun back
and forth across the room in hurried, jerky movements.

§

Stein held her breath as Bruce pulled the massive hatch
open. It had already been slightly ajar when they had found it, and although
there were no sounds coming from within, they had approached it carefully,
nonetheless. Bruce’s shoulder sagged slightly. “Empty,” he said.

They were on the 20
^th
level, getting close to the
central axis of the ship. Gravity was present but was more of a suggestion than
a law. Getting there without being seen or shot had taken a ridiculously
circuitous route involving a great deal of crawling, skulking, stairs, and
complaining about stairs.

Bruce stepped inside the disconnect cavity, Stein moving to
the entrance to look inside. There were the two clamps, just like the others
they’d examined, this set still grasped tightly together. Bruce’s terminal
light flickered around the cavity, casting odd shadows on its curved walls. To
Stein’s eyes, the disconnect didn’t look obviously bent. But their stolen notes
indicated that it had indeed jammed. Someone would be getting to it soon.

“There’s a hatch on the other side,” Bruce said.

Stein stepped into the cavity, bracing herself against one
of the big clamps with one hand, stepping carefully in the awkward gravity. She
turned on her light and moved around the disconnect. Sure enough, there was
another hatch on the far side of the cavity, clearly connecting to the aft core
of the ship, the part that would ultimately separate. “Is it open?” she asked.

Bruce nodded. “A crack, yeah.” He froze, then flicked his
light off.

From the far side of the hatch, the sound of voices as
people approached. Stein froze as well, turning off her own light. The voices
stopped, just outside the hatch. “We’ll have a better angle at it from this
side,” one of them said. “I’m going to start it up out here. This thing’s a
bastard to maneuver in low G, and I don’t want to cut my foot off.”

Stein swore under her breath and started backpedaling away.
Standing nearly in front of the hatch that was about to open, Bruce crouched
under the threshold, grabbing for his pistol. Stein reached for her own weapon,
but with the terminal still in hand, she fumbled it, sending both the terminal
and gun spinning away in the darkness. The access hatch opened, casting a dim
light on them. A loud buzzing noise, and then a flash of light, as a blue blade
shot into the room.

Blinded, Stein realized she was taking cover behind the
thing that was about to be sawed in half. She pushed off, sending herself to
the side of the cavity, scrambled for a moment before bouncing again, this time
coming to rest on a small ledge directly above the access hatch that had just
opened. She blinked, rubbing her eyes with her free hand. The strange,
malformed letters shimmered in the center of her vision.
Dammit Vlad, this
is not the time
. She looked down, using her hand to shield the blade from
her eyes. Below she could see Bruce prone on the floor, unable to reach his
gun, the blade of the torch directly above him. The engineer, still having not
seen them, planted the edge of the blade in the disconnect and began sawing
through it. Sparks rained down over Bruce, who pressed himself against the
floor, willing himself to be thinner.

Suddenly, the fuse torch shut off. “Who’s that?” Stein heard
the voice ask from the threshold, presumably confused as to why an idiot would
be lying on the floor in front of a fuse torch. Beneath her, she watched as the
torch was withdrawn from the entryway and was replaced with a head and pair of
shoulders. Seeing her opportunity, Stein pushed herself downward off the
ceiling, planting a foot against the back of the engineer’s head. An anguished
cry, the engineer fell forward, smacking his face on the threshold of the
access hatch. As Stein completed her own only marginally less clumsy dismount,
the engineer fell backwards out of the access hatch, swearing loudly. Outside,
Stein could hear the other one, sounding exactly as bewildered as she would
have been in his position. Scrambling in the low–gravity to regain her feet,
she managed to get upright enough to see through the hatch as the uninjured one
stared back at her, mouth hanging open. At his feet sat the engineer she had
kicked, rubbing the back of his neck, goggles twisted around his face. He looked
up and pulled off the goggles. Stein’s mouth fell. Curts.
She had just
kicked her boss in the head.

The uninjured one reached for the fuse torch. On all fours,
Stein planted and sprang upwards as the blade flared to life and swung
murderously back into the cavity. Again, the light and mysterious words blinded
her, but growing more comfortable in the cavity, she coolly bounded off the
edge of the disconnect clamp and returned to her perch above the door. She
blinked and shook her head, squinting downwards. She doubted she would get
another chance to jump on anyone’s head again.

Two shots thundered in the cavity, abusing her senses
further. The fuse torch snapped off. Stein blinked, shifting her head around,
trying to look around the dancing letters in her vision as Bruce lunged
forward. Moving like a torpedo, he slid through the access hatch, pistol in
front of him. She heard three more shots as her friend/projectile subdued Curts
and his colleague a bit more.