Silhouette (13 page)

Then the tank I was in turned in a different direction, bouncing up and down as it ran over something solid, which might or might not have been a body. The gunman drew a bead on some fleeing squatters, but he let them go when he saw that they were headed for the cityside exit. They would be picked up by the small army we had waiting out there. The tank turned again, ran over something or someone again, and I caught a glimpse of Harris sitting in the room with the transparent wall. He hadn't moved from his seat in the middle of the equipment, but now there were two armed figures near the door to protect him.

That was when the first squad got hit with the NuPain.

One of the views in my glasses belonged to an unlucky peacer, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that his faceplate camera was suddenly pointed down, then in various directions, as if he was shaking his head violently. His audio line was not open to me, but I imagined his screams of pain. I read the squad number on the bottom right of his view, and said to the editor, “Give me the bird on two.”

Within seconds, the view from a falcon replaced the others and filled the inside of my glasses, placing me at the scene and hitting me with a generous dose of the usual sensation of vertigo. It was worse than usual, because the falcon was moving excessively, swinging around and up and down as if its pilot wasn't sure what to do. Through the dizzying waves, however, I was able to register the scene: the squad was in a hallway they had been cleaning, but rather than moving through it efficiently, the two men were now stopped in their tracks, one standing and the other kneeling, but both clutching the sides of their necks. Their guns were on the floor near them, as was a small, smoking hole where one had dropped a grenade.

The man on his knees fell to his face, twitching, and the other one pulled off his faceplate as he stood, staggering. He seemed to be wearing shadows on his ears and below them, and as I watched, the black spread quickly onto his cheeks. The falcon dipped down toward him, so that his contorted face filled my vision. The encroaching darkness on it was something like a burn, but not really. It looked like some kind of cancer, spreading at an accelerated rate.

I heard the commander behind me tell the falcon's controller to scan the fallen peacer, and it did, revealing that he was no longer breathing. By the time the bird had swung back around, his partner was on the ground, too. At that point, the falcon sprayed both of their heads with foam, starting with the one that was still alive. This measure was designed to stop bleeding and burns, but there was no way of knowing if it would have any effect in this case, because none of us knew what was happening.

As the falcon moved close to the dead man to attempt to revive him, I saw one of the other squads approaching up the hallway, and asked for the line to them.

“Proceed with caution,” I said, and they slowed. “Send the falcon ahead at lead distance.” The bird from the new squad pulled away from them, and I switched my view into it. I was telling Twitch to sweep the hall thoroughly when another squad, elsewhere in the delta, encountered the same problem. I received the feed from their falcon, but minimized it to a small corner of the glasses so that I didn't have to endure the same horror again. This time, both men immediately jerked to the floor in pain.

I was about to tell all squads to hold their positions, when two voices started screaming in my ears. I said Twitch's name, and he turned the falcon, which had been studying the walls and doors, back toward the relief squad, which had slowly crept up to their fallen comrades, only to be waylaid with the same disease. I turned the glasses' audio off, too slowly, but then noticed that one of the dying men was pointing forward and up as he sank to his knees. His blackening mouth was moving, so I switched the audio back on.

“… From the light,” he croaked, then exhaled a death rattle and went the rest of the way to the floor, completing the pile of four bodies.

“All squads hold position,” I said, then told Twitch to continue to attempt to revive the men, and turned to the commander and the tech standing beside him. “Some kind of gas our scan didn't pick up.” They agreed by nodding. “Short-range delivery, only to certain locations.” They agreed again. “The two squads left should hold their positions. Send two back-up squads into this location, but only by the route that has already been covered. Stop at thirty feet out.”

By the time the backups had moved into position, it became obvious that neither shock nor chemical treatment was going to bring the fallen men back. So, when the teams arrived at the scene, I ordered the two falcons already there to move apart from each other, but within range of the big rectangular light set into the ceiling. Then I sent the new bird in to do a close-up scan of the light. It floated into a position almost directly under it, but a few feet away.

“There's a square outline to the right of the light,” I said as I looked through the middle falcon. “Zoom in on that.” I maximized the view until it filled my glasses, so I could see more detail. The small square grew larger slowly as the falconer followed my order, until it filled my view and did appear to be some kind of closed flap. As I was studying it, the flap suddenly slid open and the barrel of a large handgun, held by a small hand, poked through the hole. The black hole at the end of its muzzle filled my view, and then flashed as it shot me right in the face. I winced, mashing my eyes closed and hearing the sounds of the shots and their impact on the bird from the open line to the back-up squads. When I opened my eyes again, my view had automatically defaulted to one of the other two falcons, and I watched the rest of the skirmish from that bird's-eye view.

The remaining two falcons began firing at the extended hand and gun, hitting the ceiling and light next to it. Surprisingly, the light stayed on for a few seconds, and the hand retracted momentarily. It reappeared in the middle of the barrage and tossed an object the size of a fat pill toward the men in the back-up squads. As we shouted at them to fall back, they did, apparently far enough that the timed discharge of gas didn't reach them.

Meanwhile, the falcons made short work of the assailant. They had to use killer rounds to make sure they penetrated the ceiling and the light's casing, and they didn't stop firing until the still-extended hand was obviously hanging limp, the gun having fallen to the floor. The falcons' spotlights now shone on the shattered remains of the light, because the hallway had grown considerably darker without it.

We were deciding on our next move when the riddled light casing creaked loudly and then collapsed with the crash of glass, metal, and ceiling board. All that, plus a small, bloody body, rained down to the floor between the two floating birds. Their cameras and lights turned toward the pile, and we then saw that the guerrilla was a little boy, probably about ten years old, with blood covering much of his body, and tattoos on the rest of it. He was naked except for a leather belt with a few pouches hanging from it.

I had known that there were children living among the squatters, whom they had “adopted” (read
corrupted
). But I had failed to notice that very few of the children had been visible in the earlier stages of the operation. This could have meant that they were locked up inside rooms, but it could also have meant that the squatters had armed them and stuck them in ambush positions in the moments right after our bugs had swept the delta.

I cursed myself for having given them a warning, as I studied the hole in the ceiling through the falcon's camera. I could see why they used the children: the space above the light was not big enough for an adult, especially with extra support built into it. I guessed that someone in the slot could see down into the hallway, but no one could see him, which also made it ideal for this purpose.

As I thought of how many other, similar ambushes might await us throughout the delta, it occurred to me that if we hadn't staggered the pacing of the squads and we hadn't stopped them when we had, we might have lost every one of them, plus quite a few backups. It was even possible that we might have cut our losses and retreated. It amazed me to think that Harris actually could have pulled this off, and that he still might give us some trouble. I may have actually felt some grudging admiration for the walking work of art, but mostly I was even more eager to kill him.

 

11

All the squads were still holding and doing fine, so I took this opportunity to back up each of them, to check the progress of the tanks in the big room, and to allow some more time for the gas in the hallway to dissipate. We had already concluded, however, that it had a very brief life span.

When I thought we had waited long enough, I sent one squad ahead, farther into the hallway, imagining their hearts beating faster as they faced the prospect of meeting their doom if the chemical was still active. But the gas was gone, as we had thought, and they were even able to pull a few remaining pellets out of the dead boy's pouch. The peacer who examined them told us they were triggered by an Ehrlich mechanism. To activate it, the user had to grasp the pellet between finger and thumb, depressing both ends for three seconds. Then the gas would discharge in another three seconds. These kinds of “immediate action” weapons were reserved for people like jihadists who placed very little value on even their own lives … you had to be very desperate or even suicidal to use them.

We went back into the virtual tunnel to see how many lengths of hallway had yet to be cleaned, and also to try to pick out any signs of other ambush spots. Believe it or not, some of the bugs had recorded such a high level of detail that we could actually zoom in and see little squares next to the lights in a few other sections of hallway. So now we knew where some of the other prepubescent assassins were—if the squatters had chosen to use those compartments.

“We have another fleet of bugs, right?” I asked Twitch, who seemed shaken by the situation, perhaps because he had just witnessed six painful deaths from an intimately close perspective. He said, “Yes, sir,” and I told him to send in five at a time, one for each member of his puppeteer team, and scour the ceilings until they located all possible dangers. So the falconers left their birds hanging where they were, on autopilot, and began an hour-long process of scanning the hallways. It took so long because new bugs had to be employed every few minutes. Their tiny antigrav engines were not able to last any longer, at this early stage in their development.

Long before the bugs were done with their task, the tanks had finished theirs. They had completely cleared the big room at the end of the delta, and the two that had not been assigned to moving patrol were sitting near Harris's office, facing the freak and his two bodyguards, who were safe for now behind the impenetrable see-through wall. Harris was still sitting in the same place amid his equipment, but he was gesticulating wildly as he broadcast what he undoubtedly thought was a PR nightmare for BASS.

I so looked forward to enlightening him with the truth, but I had to sit tight until the hallways were cleared.

That happened with more of a whimper than a bang, as the falcons assaulted the pinpointed danger spots one after another, firing gas pellets through the flaps, after we'd found out that would work. The peacers would then pull the unconscious children out of their slots, relieving them of their lethal toys. We missed only one, because she was hidden in a wall slot behind a couple of movie posters. One man died before we realized what was happening, but so did the little girl, when his partner reacted instinctively and blew open the wall with a grenade from his rifle, before the falcon could gas her. As I watched the tail end of this mess, I thought of Lynette, who was not that much younger than the girl, and the aggression inside me boiled to a rage.

Shortly after that, even though the hallways were not yet completely cleared, I ordered a team to enter the big room through the cityside gate, which we had secured at the very beginning of the op. As I watched from a camera inside one of the tanks that was facing Harris's room, they crept alongside the wall to the left of it, unseen by anyone inside. When they reached the heavy transparent door on the left end of the room, I told the commander to give them the signal to take it.

The point man placed two matchbox light bombs on the wall near him, which immediately sped across the door and onto the transteel wall, until they stopped at a spot directly in front of Harris and his two bodyguards. From their bottoms, the little robots discharged a glaring pulse of light through the wall that temporarily but very thoroughly blinded the men. Within seconds our team was inside the room, disarming Harris and his buddies, though one of the peacers was wounded by the rounds that Harris fired wildly toward the door. He also hit one of his own men, but that didn't prove to be fatal, either.

Part of the assault team hauled the bodyguards and wounded agent away, while the rest searched the room thoroughly for booby traps. But they left Harris where he was, as I had instructed, and posted a guard. After they were done, I checked the status of the hallway clean-up to make sure it was going well, then slid my boas to the front of my belt and walked into the tunnel, ignoring the concerned pleas of a pilot who had kept his tank in the command area so that I could ride it into the combat area. That would have been safer, for sure, but my blood was up from watching the assault and I wanted to enter the fray to some degree at least. The tank followed me as I strode through the smoking debris, broken bodies, and cases of spent ammunition that littered the hallways (the last was from the squatters' weapons, because we used caseless ammo). I reached the big room without incident, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and the pilot of the tank shadowing me parked it next to the other two that were facing the transteel wall. I headed into Harris's office, leaving the big door open and motioning for the guard to leave.

“Are those guns, or are you just glad to see me?” the multicolored man said, with a fake laugh. He looked smaller in person, and sickly—maybe because he knew the end was near. I noticed that the chair he sat in wasn't just a chair but his bed, bathroom, and kitchen as well. There were intravenous and other tubes connected to his lower abdomen, and I could tell from looking at the room that it had formerly been one of the delta's bathrooms. He had obviously chosen this one because the plumbing system was already there, ready to connect to his chair. I had heard about hologame cultists who lived this way (never leaving one spot), but it surprised me that Harris did it, until I realized that it made perfect sense for someone whose entire life was the net.