RETALI8ION: The Cobalt Code (2 page)

Regina pulled a high capacity hard drive from her belt and connected it to a separate processor box on her rig.  “Something is very, very wrong,” she said to herself as she started copying the files she had downloaded from MPHarm to the hard drive.  Then she then initiated a transfer to her private offshore net storage account as well, so that she would have two copies of the data available.

“Run,” came Thomas's voice in her headset.

“What!?”  Why?”

“You said run if SecFor,” Thomas replied.

Regina quickly turned her attention to her video monitors.  There was nothing going on in the lobby, but she quickly spotted several black clad, and armed, SecFor Enforcers moving through the halls of the hotel one floor below her.  “What tha fuck?”

“What is fuck?” Thomas questioned.

Regina looked up to see the video feed from Thomas, and from what she could tell it looked like he was still on the roof.  “How did you know SecFor was here?”

“Copter.”

“Copter?” Regina repeated.  “Oh!  Ah, fuck me!  Thomas, look up at them for me, please.”

“Yes,” replied Thomas.

Regina watched as the video feed from Thomas shifted upwards revealing three sets of lights and the faint outline of rotating blades.  “Three!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!”

“Four,” replied Thomas.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” Regina yelled as she hurriedly turned to her rig to see what the progress was.  It was at ninety percent for upload to her net storage, but only just above fifty percent for the transfer to her hard drive.

“What wrong?”

“It's not going to take them long to figure out I'm not there, Thomas,” Regina replied hastily as she started shutting down net connections, and extra programs she had running on her rig in hopes of speeding up the transfer process.

“You are not there?”

“No, I'm still here, I just... never mind.  Just come on down.  We're gonna have to make a hasty getaway,” Regina said.

“Yep.”

Regina turned her attention to the Enforcers on the monitors who were about to break into her dummy hotel room on the floor below hers.  She watched as they used a small pressurized battering ram to pop the door open.  The second the Enforcer with the ram stepped out of the way, additional Enforcers ran in the room and started firing blindly into the room, spraying a hailstorm of rounds in a matter of seconds.  Her eyes went wide.

“Nope, nope, nope.  That's a big pile of frack fuckin' 'nope',” Regina said as she instinctually rose from her chair and started packing as quickly as she could.

“Nope?” came a question from Thomas.

Regina looked over to the balcony opening and saw Thomas had made his way down.  “Come here.  We need to pack.”

Thomas walked over to the side of Regina's rig and sat on his back paws.  “Accidents happen lot.”

“Yes, it seems they do.  I'm sorry, I really am.  But please, sit still for a moment,” Regina said as she started packing smaller equipment and devices in the two side pouches of Thomas's harness.

Regina's monitors flashed an alert.

She turned to see what was happening.  “No no nonononono.  They managed to start tracing my location from the dummy terminal down there.  Fucking Enforcers can do a spray and pray, and plant bullets in every surface of that room, but manage not to hit the god damned terminal sitting right out in the open.”

“Leaving now?” asked Thomas.

“Just a second,” Regina replied as she put a few more things into Thomas's pouches.

“Yep.”

“There you go,” she said as she closed the pouches, and gave Thomas a quick pat.

“Leave now?” asked Thomas, seeming anxious.

Regina looked at the status screens on her rig.  The transfer to her net storage was complete, but the transfer to her hard drive was still only about eighty percent complete.  “
Kuso
!”

“Do not need to,” Thomas stated bluntly, with his head tilted.

Confused by his words, Regina looked over to Thomas for a moment before it sank in that he was responding to a request.  She then glanced back to the transfer status, which had barely moved, then to the video feed.  Several SecFor Enforcers were heading to the stairwells, presumably to head up one level to her location.

“Get to the balcony,” Regina shouted, pulling her hard drive from the rig.  She then clipped the drive back into place on her belt, picked up her trench coat, and started putting it on.

“Here,” Thomas said in a rushed tone.

“Bye, old girl,” Regina said as she took out a small box with a single switch on it.  With only a second's hesitation, she pressed the button.

A few loud pops, accompanied by several sparks and flashes throughout Regina's rig, went off sequentially.

Regina ran to the balcony and picked up what appeared to be a large umbrella.  “You ready?”

“Ready,” replied Thomas.

Regina pulled a few feet of cord from the bottom of the umbrella pole and attached it to Thomas's harness.  “Get on the ledge.”

Thomas hopped up on the ledge.  “Don't like flying.”

Regina opened the umbrella, turning it into a small glider, and stepped onto the balcony ledge.  “Yeah.  Me either.”

“Then don't.”

Regina carefully placed her feet on the two small footholds near the bottom of the glider's pole.  “No choice.  Jump!”

Thomas jumped as Regina slid off the ledge.  The two started sailing through the air as the hotel room's door was broken open, quickly followed by the sound of bullets ripping through the air.

Regina could not look back to see the stray bullets fly, the shaky glider demanded most of her attention as she had to steer it with her entire body.  But she could already see her target landing zone two rooftops away.  “See, nothing to worry about,” she said reassuringly as she looked down towards Thomas.

“I don't fly.  Gina don't fly.  Why we fly?” asked Thomas.

Regina could see that Thomas was doing everything he could not to freak out.  His paws were outstretched and reaching for something that just wasn't there.  “Well, if it makes any difference, we're not actually flying we're just floating.”

“Not different,” Thomas replied.

“I'm sorry, friend.  We'll be landing soon,” Regina said as she looked back up towards her destination, which was now only one rooftop away.

“Turn!” came a warning from Thomas.

Regina didn't even notice the carrier drone coming towards them.  She was only able to do a quick slide down the pole to avoid it hitting her.

Thomas screamed as the drone crashed into the thin wings of the glider.

Regina quickly lost her footing and barely managed to keep hold of the pole as the glider started a lilting descent towards the side of the building, instead of towards the roof.  She looked up and saw that there was nothing she could do.  The propeller blades had done a nice job of cutting up most of the glider's wing on one side when it had crashed into them.  Seeing no other way out, she thought she'd wait until they came close enough to a building and try to jump over and grab on to something.  But, even that seemed like a futile effort.  This building didn't have any ledges she could see, but she knew she had to try.  “Thomas, I'm gonna connect you to me and make a jump for it, okay?”

There was no reply from Thomas.

“Thomas!?” she screamed as she looked down, unable to see him below her.  She did see the cord had been extended below her, she quickly spun her head around, trying to match the slow spin of the glider, to look in the direction the cord was going.  Regina wanted to scream Thomas's name out again when she spotted him, but held it back as she could see that a distraction could cost them both dearly.

Thomas was slowly scaling the slick building's surface a few meters from her.  His claws were dug in to the sides of the glassy surface as best as he could set them, and it looked like he was slowly trying to climb to the rooftop.

Regina looked down, the glider was about to run out of cord length for Thomas, and it was about to smack into the side of the building.  Regina looked back up at Thomas, who was still about two meters from the reaching the roof.  She could tell that he wasn't going to make it to the top before the glider hit the building and started pulling him down with her.

Thomas turned his head around to try and see where Regina was.  Catching sight of the coming catastrophe he yelled, “Jump.  Hold on.”

Regina pressed the release, and grabbed on to the cord as it disconnected from the pole.  She felt the quick snap and pull as the cord went taut from her weight at the bottom.  Looking up, she winced in pain as she saw Thomas slide down the building's side, but had somehow managed to hold her weight without losing his grip on the glossy exterior.

“Hold,” Thomas said, as he tried to dig his claws in further, and braced for the second pull on the harness.

Regina readied her position to hit the side of the building with her feet to soften the impact in hopes of not pulling any harder on Thomas.  Though she wasn't actually sure if he could pull them both up, she was going to do all she could.  She hit the side of the building as softly as possible, bending her knees with her weight as she hit.  Watching carefully, she saw that her landing hadn't caused Thomas to lose any more ground.

“Hold,” Thomas said as he started climbing once again, this time much more slowly.

Seeing him struggling to pull his paw up to his next foothold made tears well in Regina's eyes.  She started doing the math in her head.  She weighed about 160 pounds, and Thomas only weighed in at around 95 pounds.  Granted, he had been engineered as a climber to carry small loads for workmen on skyscrapers, but she had loaded him down with about fifteen pounds of equipment before they left.  Tears fell as she watched him plunge his claws into his next hold.  She knew Thomas wouldn't give up on her.  Splice Cats never left their owners.  Many had even starved themselves to death after their owner's demise.  Shaking her head, and the tears, she clenched her teeth and let go of the cord with one of her hands to reach inside her coat.  A few seconds later she pulled out her knife, a 6 inch folding titanium blade.  She flicked her wrist to snap the blade into place and jabbed with all her might at the building's side.  The entry point wasn't deep, but it was enough to pull up on a little, and start helping.

The next ten minutes was a series of slow, and careful, moves upward by the pair.  When Regina saw Thomas start to make his next move she steadied her hand, preparing for a new, yet tentative hold.  Soon, Regina reached the area where Thomas had first started climbing, and was able to get far better holds with her free hand, and her knife.  Another ten minutes and Thomas reached his first paw onto the building's rooftop, and Regina had reached the claw marks that had been drug a few feet down.

Regina was able to find a small, but usable, foothold within the deeper marks.  “I have a foothold.  You can rest a moment, Thomas.”

“Must go,” Thomas replied as he reached his second paw over the ledge.

Regina winced at the sound of his voice.  He wasn't going to last much longer.  But she continued to follow his movements and climbed with him.  Her latest stable foothold seemed to give just enough relief that Thomas was able to pull himself up, and over the rooftop ledge.  Regina waited for word from Thomas that he was ready for her to continue upward.  While waiting, she took a few deep breaths, and tried to steady her hands, when something caught her eye.  It was one of Thomas's claws.  It was just hanging there, in the crevasse it had created.  She stared at it, fighting back the tears for what seemed like an eternity.  At last, she felt a few more tugs on the rope from Thomas.

“Climb now,” came Thomas's voice.

She felt a slight movement in the rope as Thomas finished speaking.  Looking up, hopeful tears started to well.  “We're gonna be okay, Thomas,” she said as she placed the knife's blade in her mouth, unable to fold it closed with one hand, and grabbed ahold of the cord with both hands, and started to climb.  She climbed slowly and steadily, not wanting to disturb whatever tenuous hold Thomas had found.

A few moments later she managed to pull her head up and look out over the rooftop.  There she saw Thomas, who looked as though he had managed to somewhat brace himself under a ventilation duct.  Between that and his weight, he had provided a steadfast enough hold for her to climb up the rest of the way.  She dropped the knife from her mouth.  “Thomas!” she screamed.  Then, with renewed strength, she pulled herself up the last few feet of cord, hopped over the ledge, took a few steps, and fell at Thomas's side.

“Safe?” asked Thomas, as Regina fell next to him.

“Yes. Yes, I'm fine.  Are you okay, Thomas?”

“Hurt.” Thomas replied, struggling to breath.

“No no no,” Regina said as she carefully pulled him out from under the duct.

“Hurt.” Thomas again said, this time much lower.

“I know.  I know, buddy.  Just be still,” she replied as she started to examine him.  She then carefully released the strap holds, and started to get the harness off of him.

“Better.”

“Better?  Okay.  Can you tell me what hurts?” asked Regina, as she slid the harness off of him.