Necrotech (26 page)

“That's why we're all together,” Indigo said, one hand adjusting his helmet as we ran, like it bothered him. “Keep it up, five minutes and then we'll rest.”

We forged on, making our way through the smoke and lengthening shadows. A thick, cloying silence fell over us the deeper into the zone we moved, until the creep factor had my skin itching and my brain humming. Paranoia set in after three minutes of silence.

I was gritting my teeth when the sun sank beyond the skyline and the sky turned brilliant, breathtakingly purple.

An orange glow lit the sky faintly to the north.

“We'll stop here,” Indigo said, slowing. “Falk, Ange, keep watch. The rest of you, night vision up and take a breather. We won't get another until we get out.”

Ange stepped out onto the street a few paces, her helmet tipped skyward. “Think we'll see stars with all the lights off?”

“Not in this smoke,” Falk said, joining her to face the other direction, Sauger at the ready.

I kept my back to the others, fighting the urge to open my faceplate, knuckle at my eyes until the nagging, droning sense of paranoia – of being watched, followed,
hunted
– went away. Sweat didn't cool on my skin so much as absorb into the skinsuit, keeping me comfortable and dry, but I was beginning to seriously resent the enclosed helmet. Even with the night vision I turned on, turning my world to shades of black and green with the heads-up display turning red, I couldn't shake it.

“We should be, what, thirty minutes off?” I asked. “If we make time to shake any tails.”

Indigo had flipped open his wrist-mounted integration unit; a pad that allowed him to treat his own helmet like a monitor, and when he needed to, project a comp screen on just about anything. “About that exactly,” he said. “Nicely tracked.”

The Vid Zone was more or less new ground for me, and running it at night seemed like a bad idea, but we couldn't have gotten that far from the landing zone. How I'd known the time was beyond me. Lucky guess, maybe.

“So, if there are more than twelve,” Carter mused from her crouch, “what do we figure?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Ange, more a question than a statement. “I guess that depends on how many converted?”

“And how,” Indigo muttered. “Jesusfuck.”

My sentiments close enough, only with less Jesus and more
fuck
. Twelve necros.
Twelve
. I'd swallowed that because, sure, maybe there were people in that lab who were plugged into the system when it all went to hell. Why not? Fucked if I knew.

But this wasn't that. This was kids crawling out of the dark, gasping mouths hanging open and saliva dripping from half-mangled throats.

We crouched, sat, or stood warily, arranged in a crooked circle, and waited for Indigo to tell us to move again. Most of us faced the darkening streets, weapons held not so much loosely as in easy firing position. This time, I didn't have it in me to break the tense silence with a joke.

It was all I could do to force myself not to flinch from the wasps in my skull.

After only five minutes, Indigo finally spoke. “It's time.”

None of us jumped. We were too relieved. Anything was better than silently waiting for the necro shoe to drop. Falk stirred, shifting his weight, as Ange unfolded from her crouch and clapped him on the arm.

“Finally,” Hooker sighed.

Carter's boots scraped on the street as she stomped, like she needed to get feeling back into her toes.

“I'm picking up a serious obstruction between us and 35th,” Indigo continued. He pointed back at Carter. “You can detonate those through the bandwidth, right?”

“Within about half a standard block.”

“C-town or…?”

She chuckled. “Quarter of a mile.” So, a corporate sector block. The city blocks in other wards tended to be a fuckingly chaotic mess, and less
blocks
than war zones.

“Ange.”

“Yo.”

Indigo turned to glance at her. “Can you plant one of those mines?”

Ange snorted something amused and not even remotely modest.

He let it slide. “Carter, you'll blow it on my mark.”

“Can do,” Carter confirmed.

He gestured to Hooker. “You, can you see enough to cover her from here?”

“Why aren't we going around?”

“Because out here, we'll see them coming,” I answered, scouring the looming shadows between walls. “Or at least enough that we have a fighting chance.” There was no telling what forging through the checkerboard string of back alleys would net us.

“If we go around,” Indigo added, “it adds time we can't afford to waste. Can you do it or not, Hooker?”

The kid nodded. “Pretty sure. The smoke is tough, but if Ange calls out markers, I'll make sure not to shoot her.”

“I'll buy you a drink if you manage not to,” Ange tossed back.

As plans went, not a bad one. “Everyone ready?” Indigo asked.

Ready as we could get.

Ange took the proffered mine – a plate slightly bigger than Falk's hand, disc-shaped and concave – and slipped into the street. I was intensely aware of the faded blue dot mapping her progress, long after she vanished to green-tinged shadow and smoke.

“What's the obstruction?” I asked.

“Not sure, but it looks like a carrying truck.”

Carter nodded beside me. “That mine will at least shift it so we've got enough room to maneuver, and if there's any fuel left, it'll burn.”

“Necros don't like fire?” I hazarded.

“Would you?”

Good point.

“I've got her,” Hooker said, crouched in front of us, his eye plastered to his scope. “I don't see any movement nearby, so–”

“Do you hear that?” Falk demanded, staring up into the sky.

The only thing I could hear out there was that brain-wrinkling whine, and it wasn't even out there I heard it. I felt half deaf, like a cacophony filtered through too many layers, but a low hum – whirring on a completely different frequency – suddenly cut through even that. We all looked up, weapons out, scanning the open sky.

There was nothing to see.

“She's ten feet out,” Indigo said. “Hooker?”

“So far, no ticks.”

“Maybe we got all of them.” But even Digo didn't seem to buy it. I didn't have to see his face to know he was worried. He was probably triple-checking the overview even as he spoke.

“Falk?” I waved him over. “You ready to–”

“Heads up!” Carter shouted, her weapon tracking something round and black, nearly invisible against the sky. We all ducked; I flinched as it narrowly missed Falk's head. A metallic
thunk
crunched into asphalt.

Indigo's helmet jerked. “Cover!” he ordered. “Ange, withdr–!”

Bullets ricocheted off the street in a shower of white sparks, and Falk staggered beneath the impact. They scored his heavy armor, spattered a narrow ream of blood where a lucky round clipped his elbow. Falk grunted, turned, big body angled to leap out of the way of the trajectory pinning him down, but too late.

A white-hot ball blossomed from the black globe three feet away, enveloping Falk in a fiery arc that saturated the smoke-laden air with the stink of melting armor and charred flesh. His screams blasted through the feed, brutal and mercifully brief.

The column seared through the night vision in a painful white flare that left wicked afterburners floating in front of my eyes. The blast slammed into us a breath later. Indigo grunted, staggering, and Carter yelped, but it swept Hooker into the building's façade like he weighed nothing. Windows exploded overhead, shattered into a rain of glittering orange fragments, and the only reason I didn't kiss the pavement came down to sheer luck.

Carter's voice crackled across our feed. “I've got unknown processes activating my trigger–” A beat. “Ange! The bandwidth is lighting the fuck up,
drop the
–”

“
Shit
.” Ange's line fuzzed with static. It figured she'd sound more pissed than worried.

Too late. A second detonation echoed from the street beyond us. Ange's comm signal winked out.

“
Falk.
” Hooker stumbled, the rifle clutched in one hand by habit. Somehow, half blind, I caught him around the waist, halted him before he lurched after a man whose twisted shell was still glowing white hot in the center of the green street.

“It's too late.” I wrestled him back from the open street as Indigo shouted at us to get our asses out of the crossfire.

“Dios.” Carter's voice, high and tight. “Ay Dios. It went off. It's gone, ay–”

“Carter,” I barked, struggling to keep a hold of the kid trying to brain me with his weapon. I don't think he even knew how close he came, but I was suddenly grateful for the protection of my helmet. “
Haul it.
”

Carter's comm went silent. We withdrew fast, me wrestling with the kid until Indigo fisted one hand into Hooker's harness and dragged him, twisting and howling, back into a dingy, narrow avenue.

He was still fighting a sweat-drenched adrenaline high seven minutes later. We stopped, gasping, and Indigo shoved him hard against a peeling metal facing. “If you don't want to be necro bait, shut up and don't move.” Hooker sagged. “Control, what the
fuck
?”

It was like the distance had pulled the plugs from my ears. The whine faded to a muted thrum, a low-frequency signal hovering at the edge of my hearing, though my head still felt too full.

Some kind of jammers? Or an active power line packing serious juice? Maybe I was sensitive to a certain frequency out here, or this damned helmet was giving me claustrophobia issues. I'd take the thing off after we got out of here and see if that helped at all. I wasn't used to working in a full suit. Decent visual capability, sure, but it was too confining for me.

Which was all much better shit to think about than what the hell went sideways out here.

“Control!” Indigo snapped.

The operator's voice clicked over the feeds. “We're working on it,” she said calmly. “What just happened?”

“Assault out of nowhere. And way fucking more than twelve fucking necros!” Leaving a shaking, cowering Hooker, Indigo gripped Carter's shoulders and stooped to peer into her helmet, faceplate to faceplate. “Carter, you with me?
Carter
.”

“I didn't…” Her voice was hoarse. She stood there, Bolshovekia hanging limply from her hands, and let him shake her like she didn't have the strength to shrug him off. “The mine triggered. It was still moving, I could track it on the bandwidth. She still had it. It was in her hands, she was– she–” The words cracked.

“Shit.” Digo glanced at me. “Riko, I need eyes.”

It was him or me, and I didn't have the patience for two corp enforcers losing their collective shit. I nodded, glanced around and spied a fire escape barely in reach.

“Ange and Falk are paste,” Indigo told control flatly.

“Noted.” Two peas in a pod, except I could hear the anger stomped thin in Digo's voice. Control sounded like she was taking notes, disseminating information. Cool as ice. “We're gathering data.”

And orders, probably. Protocol demanded she call in Malik, at least update him.

That was going to be a fun conversation.

I jumped for the bottom rung, gloved fingers wrapping around the rusted, pocked metal. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up, shoulders and back aching with the effort. I was halfway to the roof before control's voice clicked back on to my feed.

“Drone activity was marked over parts of the Vid Zone moments before contact. You're not the only team in there, but it's unclear who's in the lead. Riko, your vitals are running high.”

I leveraged myself onto the ridge encircling the rooftop, my gaze on the green-shaded, too-dim environment but my attention on the sinking pit her question opened up in my stomach. “You can track our vitals, too?”

“Yes.”

Fuck me. “Which? Blood pressure, brain activity?”

“All of them,” she said patiently.

Just what I needed. “Any hope Ange made it?” I asked instead, ignoring her question.

She didn't miss a beat. “No. Your brain activity is still hitting high ranges of activity, is that normal for you?”

“I'm just peachy,” I said dryly. “Shot at by unknowns, lost two teammates, looking at a shitstorm of more-than-twelve necros,
hey!
What's not to be freaking about?”

“Point.” She was reasonable, at least. “If there's anything abnormal, the techs will pick it up later.”

Oh, good. Brain techs. Maybe one of them could be Orchard and I'd have to go put the squeeze on her after all. “This other team,” I said, changing the subject. “We playing capture the flag?”

“It's unclear what they want.”

“Find out,” Indigo cut in. “I can't do my fucking job without all the data.”

“Understood,” she said, surprising me. Go, professionalism.

I let the data dweebs talk around me as I made my way through the metal rigging bolted to the roof. Some kind of signal tower, maybe. Aside from the far distance on the outskirts of the quarantine, no lights gleamed in the dark, which made details fuzzy in the night vision. So far, I seemed to be alone.

“The data indicates an enormous heat signature moments before Falk and Ange died,” the woman continued. “What created the heat source that killed them?”

“I think it was a drone,” Indigo said slowly. “No identifiable logo.”

“Both of them?”

“No.” He spoke very softly, like he was making an effort to keep Carter or Hooker from hearing him. Closed-feed, then, between us and control. “Ange was twenty meters away. One of Carter's mines detonated early. She claims her frequency lit up with the trigger command without her.”

There was a short, charged silence. “According to the extensive data I'm looking at, that shouldn't happen.”