Necrotech (28 page)

I didn't have to see them to know they were there every step of the way: necros. It seemed like thousands, but that was my imagination ruining my shit. If even ten of them came out with all the fuss, it was more than enough.

We could not handle ten, much less thirty, fifty, or however many there actually were.

And we sure as balls couldn't handle them while a team of unknowns took potshots at us from the sides.

“Either necros are learning how to hunt as a team,” Hooker gasped, catching up to us, “or we're being flanked by that second group.”

“I will pay,” I panted, “good fucking cred if they're human.”

“Pay up,” Indigo said grimly. “Control, we've got the second team on us!”

Control flicked the feed on, but whatever calm she'd managed to scrape together had obviously frayed. “What's your position?”

“Past
oh, shit
and two blocks into
fucked
,” he snarled. “We need support, lady!”

“We're waiting–”

“I don't care what you have to do, but you do it and
you do it now
.”

A brief pause. “We'll do our best,” she said, and the line clicked off.

Not soon enough.

I ran. Bullets pinged off the brick and metal frames surrounding us, but I didn't stop. None of us stopped. Indigo held the rear, and he didn't ask me where I took them. I could imagine his features, hard planes locked down to petrified determination. This was not the point in which a runner lost his cool. This was the point that separated the chrome from the diamond steel.

I didn't know which one I was right now – jumpy enough for chrome, pissed enough for diamond steel – but as I led the team through a maze of alleys, my heart pounding a bloody, ragged beat in my skull, I refused to end as a nameless statistic. I needed to zen it, and I needed to do it fucking now.

“There's a team on the rooftops,” I said through stretched, bloodless lips. My feet pounded the asphalt, jarring every bone in my body. “Another flanking us. How do they know where we are?”

“And why aren't the necros chasing
them
?” demanded Carter, with a righteous indignation that made me gasp out a laugh.

Indigo wasn't amused. “I've tried every frequency, I can't register them. How do
you
know where
they
are?”

He couldn't? I didn't look back at him; Hooker and Carter were in the way and I couldn't see through his faceplate anyway. “Angle of the bullets,” I lied.

I didn't know how I knew. I just did.

“Then what–
Fuck!
” A spatter of gunfire peppered the alley, and Carter went down on a ragged curse. The smell of blood – sharp, coppery, wet – filled my nose, even through the filters.

Fuck, shit, fucking spunkchucking
fuck.
“Move!”

“Carter!” Indigo slowed long enough to grab her arm and haul her to her feet. The Bolshovekia clattered to the asphalt.

The iron-rich fragrance of wounded flesh impaled itself into my senses.

My fingers clenched over my Sauger so hard, I saw the numbers spike under my personal visual display. I don't think it was strong enough to bend a nanofactory diamond steel rifle, but my arm had surprised me before. Swallowing hard, I forced myself to raise my weapon, aim into the black above our heads, and lay down cover fire.

I heard nothing; no return fire, no movement.

Even the white shapes had faded, far enough in our dust that my sensors couldn't pick them out anymore.

“You okay?” I managed, a semblance of together.

“Yeah.” Carter's voice was tight with pain. She hobbled against Indigo's shoulder. “Fuckers got me in a seam. Armor took the brunt.” But not all of it. The full-bodied fragrance of her blood made me want to puke.

That was a first.

“Riko, where the hell–”

I cut him off with a gesture to the right. “This way,” I said. “I have an idea.”

I didn't give any of them time to argue.

They followed after a beat, and I didn't run so fast that Carter couldn't keep up – but I knew it was a struggle. She wasn't dying, not yet. Not that it cleared her. If we didn't bandage that wound up soon, her nanos might not have the juice to keep her on her feet. Gritting my teeth, I worked my way through narrow lanes and thin alleys, some so constricted that I spent the whole time coiled, overclocked and waiting for the hail of bullets I expected from above.

It came instead from behind.

Sparks pinged off the walls by my head, so close I could see the flecks of brick skate off my visor. The echo of automatic fire slammed wall to wall until it felt like my head was wrapped in a vise and only getting louder. Tighter.

Indigo grunted. “They can't get a good angle.”

“Neither can I!” Hooker wasn't great at holding it together, but at least he kept up. “They're getting closer!”

What the
shit.
“Climb over me,” I ordered, and dropped to the ground.

“What–”

“
Climb over me
,” I shouted. Too loud, given necro senses, but I didn't care. Indigo hesitated. Hooker was ahead of him and didn't. I gritted my teeth as booted feet stepped hard on my shoulders and over. “Keep going,” I added, in case that wasn't clear.

“You better…” Indigo's voice hazed into background noise as another set of boots planted on my armored back. It wasn't the weight. Carter was unsteady, but I was strong enough. It was the noise. Crackling, shimmering, strident. I banged my helmeted forehead against the asphalt, but it didn't help. All it did was pop something in my nose.

I tasted my own blood.

This wasn't the first time.

Blood in my mouth, pressure in my head. The flashback struck hard and fast, just like in Orchard's lab. I spun in a mental vertigo, struggling to slog through shattered memories I couldn't grasp.

There was no white tile here. Just asphalt and filth.

“Go,” I gasped, leaping to my feet. Hooker's shoulders scraped against the wall as he sidled ahead, but I wasn't as wide as he was. I had room to move, to pull the Adjudicator out of its holster and sight, straight-armed, down the alley.

Nothing moved in my thermal vision, but I knew they were there. I knew where they all were.

My skin prickled.
There.
As if I had a map of the area, I could see them. Sense them. I jerked my arm up, sighted once and pulled the trigger.

The echo of the shot cracked through the dark, the muzzle flash flaring white.

Something scraped. Clattered. A man-shaped blur hazed into a white silhouette as it fell from the roof. It smacked the asphalt in a tangled knot of splayed limbs, bounced off the ground with a sickening crunch and fell against the wall.

Ange may have had stealth tech, but theirs? Way better.

No more bullets came out of the alley behind me. “Thermals, off,” I said.

The ghostly shroud faded.

Black shapes solidified into view.

“Fuck!” I grabbed a hand splayed inches from my faceplate, held it fast and smashed my metal fist into my assailant's elbow. The fact I carried the Adjudicator in it only added to the impact. Before he managed to wrench back, arm momentarily useless, I turned, slammed a straight-legged kick hard into his plated chest and left him colliding into the other guy on his heels. Assmunch. Choke on that.

“Go!” I shouted, just in case my team needed the reminder. If they said anything, I couldn't hear it.

I was angry wasps and pain and blood thick in my throat. My vision flickered under the strain, but I didn't stop. Didn't dare slow. For whatever reason, the bodysuits on my tail didn't open fire again.

Small smegging favors.

I holstered the Adjudicator and sprinted after my team, certain the bogeys would follow. They wanted something. They weren't after the necros, that wouldn't have put them on us. They wanted something we had. Knowledge? Our gear?

If they weren't looking to shoot on sight, that made it unlikely they'd hacked Carter's mines. Which meant something else had gone wrong.

Hands grasped at my rig and I wrenched away, lashing out another kick that didn't connect with anything but brick. The jarring pain rippled up to my knee.

“Come on!” I snarled, almost blind with it.

“Oh,
fuck
,” Hooker squeaked, voice cracking on a raw note of terror. “Necros!” He stopped at the alley mouth.

“Everyone, back–”

I didn't let Indigo finish that order. Barreling on them, I rammed my shoulder into Indigo's back and forced him and Carter to collide with Hooker. We stumbled out of the maze, all of us gasping, two of us screaming.

Hooker.

Me.

The sound was unbearable now. Blood vessels ruptured in my eyes, something I didn't know what to name ruptured in my awareness, and the world went red, then black.

“–
a
ss to get
up
.”

I jolted into awareness on the heels of an order lined with ice, sharpened to a bloody edge. I was already lurching into movement, but as my vision cleared I stumbled, unsure of where I was going. What I was doing. My boots skidded on slick ground.

I tried to speak, but blood turned it into a mucus-thick gurgle. It took effort to clear my throat. “Malik?”

“
Clock in
.”

I shuddered, somehow gasped, “I'm here.” My helmet was gone, which made checking the faceplate worthless, but the display on my bracer told me I'd lost time. Four minutes, give or take.

Talk about losing my shit. Smoke and blood and the tang of decay filled my senses. My muscles ached, body thrumming with pure adrenaline, but I felt rooted. Hazy.

Everything but zen.

I could all but taste the seething fury on the line. “We are going to talk about this later. Get eyes on your team.”

I frowned, shaking my head. “Indigo?” I turned around.

Red. Black. Gleaming, textured, gorge-inducing.

I blinked, trying to clear my vision, but it wasn't my disorientation painting the street.

I didn't have the vocabulary to punctuate the carnage around me.

Limbs. Guts, intestines, chest cavities gutted and heads blown clean off where they weren't a scattered mass of gobbets and brain. My EMP knife still hung loosely from my hand, blood dripping from the serrated edge, charge emptied.

Did it explode a head? Did I miss it?

I swallowed back a nauseating need to laugh.

A black-clad arm lay limp and discarded by my feet, leaking blood at the severed biceps. A crisp white logo glowed obscenely clean on the sleeve.

“MetaCore?” I asked, my voice sickeningly steady. My brain shut down the colors around me – red so heavy and dark it was nearly black; the brown spatter of thicker things my subconscious quietly shoved into the dark recesses of memory to be drowned in drink or slank later – and focused instead on the logo. “It's MetaCore in here.”

But why? Was it me, after all?

Had I led them in here? Or were they after the same data?

“Thank you,” Malik said, anger and ice packed in to absolute calm. As if I wasn't standing in a circle of butchery so complete, I wasn't sure how I wasn't screaming. Maybe he couldn't see it. My helmet had vanished somewhere. “I'll figure out why. Get your team somewhere safe.”

I raised my gaze from the mess around my feet, skimmed the rest of the street in either direction.

Indigo watched me from his splayed position against the front door of an empty junkshop, his helmet cracked and faceplate shattered. Blood smeared the side of his visible mouth.

To my left, Hooker was bent over the remains of something in black armor.

I didn't see Carter.

Or maybe I did, and I wasn't putting a name to the mangled remains.

Slowly, I picked up one foot. Put it down.

Gobbets of something milky and pink squelched underneath my boot.

Another step. This one made no sound.

The third splashed. Bile rose in my throat, burned a hole in my chest, but I forced myself to clear the street –
squelch, squish, crunch, snap
. The things I stepped on defied description.

Indigo's eyes closed as I knelt beside him. “I forget,” was his resigned greeting.

“Forget what?” I put the knife down, searched his helmet for the clasp underneath his chin that would release the seal.

“You're a hell of a splatter specialist.”

My smile felt too tight. I pulled his helmet off with care, caught his head when it would have fallen back against the shop's rusted facing. The thick strands of his loosening braid clung to my blood-drenched fingers. “Obviously, you've been taking us on the wrong runs.”

Indigo looked like death. The quiet sort of death, not the ruinous mess of necro and corporate carcasses behind me. I couldn't tell how much was pain and how much was terminal.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Bad. Gut wound.” His teeth bared in a smile that indirectly reminded me of mine. Too much edge. Not enough warmth.

I was a terrible influence.

I tilted my head. “Malik?”

“Vitals won't read without the head unit,” he said in my ear, as cool as control had been until shit hit the fan. “But if you patch it and down a recharge, your nanos will handle the rest.”

“You know what?” I put a hand on Indigo's shoulder, forcing him to lean back until the bottom edge of his chest plate shifted out of the way. “So far, your armor sucks. Infrared that doesn't see through stealth units better than yours, night vision without filters for near-zero light. I've seen scrap gear with better systems.”

“Noted. I'll pass it on to tech the desk. When you return,” he continued on the same even note, “we're going to talk about why your vitals just went apeshit.”

If it had anything to do with what happened in the four minutes I'd lost, that was not a conversation I was going to have. Maybe there was a good reason. Adrenaline, berserking haze, whatever. All I knew was that I'd led my team into a necro knot to shake MetaCore and barely come out in one piece.

Carter didn't come out at all.

This shit scared me.

“Shut up, Malik,” I said, my tone making it clear I wasn't paying any more attention to him. “I'm busy saving Indigo's life.”

He said nothing, but Indigo sucked in a sound that might have been a laugh.

I peeled back the curled remains of the plating covering his gut and saw nothing but a bloody tear. “What the hell did this?”

“A necro,” he said tightly. “Tore through the armor like it wasn't even there. I don't know what the hell he'd been wired with, but it was sharp and fast and it sucks.”

“Yeah, well, sucking abdominal wounds, am I right?”

“Fuck you, Riko.”

Everybody was a critic. I stood. “We need to find somewhere safe. Can you walk?”

“I can lean,” he managed, and took my hands. I braced myself, hauled him upright, and flinched when he locked back a groan. Shoving my shoulder into his armpit, I stabilized him the best I could.

“Hooker!”

The kid jerked, scrambling for his discarded weapon.

It took everything I had to gentle my tone. “Come on, kid. We're going.”

For once, nobody flipped me any shit. Tearing himself away from whatever he saw in Carter's devastated remains, Hooker dragged himself to his feet, turned, and trudged after us.

At least the wasps in my head had settled to a mellow buzz.

We walked in silence, punctuated only by the crunch and squish of our boots dragging through obliterated corpses, and very deliberately did not talk about what happened.

I wasn't sure any of us even knew.