Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (33 page)

Red picked one at random, and walked. He did not check to see if the others followed.

His plan was stupid. It was risky, and hasty, and maybe even evil. But it was the only one he had.

Amongst his few sparse virtues, forethought and caution did not number. Red’s thoughts, which should have been firing like an electrical storm, seizing onto any desperate, hopeful scrap of an alternative, were instead pure, still and serene. His only intention -- a soft and throbbing thing, endlessly repeating like a snippet of pop-song through the muddy, indistinct static of his forebrain – was righteous malevolence.

And then he heard the strangest sound.

Red stopped, and moved his head in the direction of each of the five access corridors surrounding him until he placed the source. It was coming from a passage just behind him, and to his right. He took a step backward, and peered down the hallway. A distinct, metallic ringing was echoing rhythmically against the backdrop of the persistent, dull thrum of the filtration pumps.

Footsteps.

A gangly woman in an elaborate gold and blue suit rounded the far corner and advanced purposefully towards him. There was something off with her features; something uncannily familiar, but all wrong. She seemed to have QC’s lips, a shock of James’ bright red hair, and part of Zippy’s large, curving nose. To his horror, Red recognized his own eyes staring back at him. Then her whole head blinked, and became an opaque, pixelated grid.

Red turned to run.

Victoria carefully modulated her pace -- kept it nice, steady, and even. She felt the nervous energy build up in her limbs, and let the agitation scratch at her joints. She breathed deep from the diaphragm, touched the tips of each finger together to sync her hand/eye coordination, and focused on the measured timing of her own footfalls. It took a constant, low-grade effort, limiting each stride to sync up with Albert’s like this, but it must be worse for him: Forcing every pace just a few inches beyond the comfort zone of his stubby little legs.  The vibrations at the base of her neck told her that the adrenaline boosters were starting to kick on.

3 paces per second @ 30 paces distance to primary threat = ~10 second ETA to optimal engagement grid. Shit. Still two steps ahead of Albert, with all threats already seeing past her scramblers. Using them was a bad call on Hanover’s part and she knew it: Not enough people in here for the facial recognition software to pull a convincing average, but the overall combat stats still favored deployment, so she used it anyway.

All right, don’t panic. Back to the code: Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize.

Identify primary threats: Two Caucasian males, one Arabic female, in grids 43-04C to 46-07C.

The skinny guy in front (secondary objective, she recognized) was just standing there stupidly, giving her a cockeyed, inquisitive puppy stare -- but the two behind him were already moving, shoving him back and whispering hushed orders. Twenty-four paces.  Eight seconds. Breathe out.

She hated syncing, even with a partner closer to her measurements, but she and Albert weren’t insured for engagement with an effectiveness rating of less than 97% today. Syncing pushed them up to a staggering 99.65. Sometimes, Victoria just did not understand the index. She had no respect for this particular Albert: He was all numbers and no balls. No creativity and no flair. And yet Hanover had never put her rating higher. She had no choice; she had to trust the algorithms. The algorithms did not fail. She would engage in two seconds, and if Albert kept to his sync, he would round the corner just in time to take the threats from behind right at their highest rate of panic and distraction. Only a few more paces, and she would enter the mid-range combat grid.

Breathe in, three paces, breathe out, two paces. Check the ER: 99.70. Can’t ask for better.  Engage.

She reached into her jacket and smoothly withdrew an obscenely large, gleaming silver handcannon. The numbers in her display flashed red and dipped as Hanover scanned the non-regulation firearm, but only to 99.55 -- well within operating parameters.

She leveled the pistol down the narrow corridor. The secondary didn’t react, save for a comical widening of the eyes, but the other two immediately turned sideways, dropped into a half-crouch and held their jackets up before their torsos, concealing the exact positions of the vital organs. Her targeting software went haywire, trying to compensate.

Not bad. If it had been Albert on point, the move might’ve helped them, but Victoria hadn’t used aim assistance for years. Shit didn’t even work with the unauthorized replica Colt.

She aimed down the antique iron sights and pulled the trigger.

Victoria felt the concussion of the shot and the resonance of the recoil, but didn’t hear the sound. She was just as deafened by the noise in the confined space as the targets -- almost certainly moreso, in fact -- but she was psychologically prepared for it. The threats were not: They all flinched, and briefly broke formation, though the red-headed fellow and the one-legged Arabic girl recovered much faster than she expected. Her ER blipped back up to 99.60.

Four seconds; Albert should be flanking at any moment. A large hole was blown clear through the girl’s jacket, but Victoria couldn’t tell if she’d been hit or not. She swiveled the barrel of the Colt down and left, and fired again. The two shifted with the gun this time, ready for the blast, and she could tell immediately that her shot went wide.

Shit. Wait.

New threat priority: Caucasian female, blonde, no visible weapons, multiple nanotech control panels, lightly muscled, 5’2, 120 lbs.
The tertiary objective
, Victoria realized,
the ‘Loon girl, QC
. She must have been hiding around the corner.

The little blonde ducked swiftly out into the hallway and made as if to throw something upward. A spray of blood spattered from her apparently wounded palm, and struck a bare industrial LED panel. The whole grid went dark. Victoria blinked, and glanced down to Hanover, but saw only a luminous circle with a slash through it under Recommended Actions. 

Damn it. She was never very good at the Guerilla Theorems.

Victoria swiveled the cannon up toward what she assumed to be the now-fleeing threats, but there came a sound like a metal spring engaging, and the Arabic woman exploded out of the darkness. She closed the distance instantly with two rapid, loping bounds of the prosthetic and two quick, uncertain stumbles from the normal limb.

Like skipping.

***

Albert was winded.

He had no excuse to be winded. Not this soon.

Albert religiously followed all of the strict stamina maintenance schedules laid out for his weight, frame and age – and yet here he was: Panting, red-faced, struggling to drag the giggling Gashead along behind him. His circuitous route through the filtration tunnels was 6,220 modified paces.  If Victoria kept to the agreed-upon synchronicity, he would be running thirty-three seconds late.

Wildly unacceptable.

Albert skidded to a stop, dropped to one knee, and laid the primary objective on his side in a valve control alcove. He took a single deep, steadying breath, straightened his jacket, and broke into a dead sprint. Albert re-measured his pace: 130% the synced stride. Stopping and discarding the primary had taken eleven seconds. He should be able to make up the time difference with 101 seconds of sprint.

God, his lungs burned.

It wasn’t fair
.

They had no right to be so ineffective. He kept to the schedules! Every four and a half hours of off-time, like clockwork, he ran through the 30-minute intensive callisthenic drills. Even his sleep wasn’t safe from that shrill alarm in his BioOS, with its flashing yellow lights. Without fail, he would awaken to his heart hammering in his chest, to the thickness in his limbs, and the panic his throat. Without fail, Albert would push it away, and dutifully, sleepily drop into the first form.

There was no excuse for this. Some sloppy mathematician somewhere had failed to factor a variable and rendered his entire stamina schedule ineffective. The thought infuriated him, and though he knew it was self-destructive, the anger only made him push harder.

What use was all of it, if you still just got old?

Respirocytes were supposed to be super-oxygenating his blood; augmented cellular repair was supposed to triple the effectiveness of his workouts; reserve nutrient packs were supposed to be providing emergency fuel for his body, but when it came right down to it -- when it was all out there on the line – Albert was still just a stocky, out of shape old man.

And Hanover knew it. How could it not? The damn thing was sending him a message. Making him run numbers for yet another lean, vicious, beautiful young punk whose only priority is making him look bad and teasing him with her tig-

Albert ran flat out into the little blonde girl.

She rolled backwards with the impact, and his feet got tripped up in her tumbling form, landing the pair of them in a tangled heap at the feet of a redheaded, bookish-looking fellow in a comically anachronistic tweed sportcoat.

The small man was already moving, even as Albert fell.  The rumbling sickness of dismay seized Albert’s belly, as he recognized the man’s fluid movements for those of a trained fighter. For his part, Albert managed to roll with the impact some -- his own muscle-memories kicking in a little late, but better than never. He locked his forearms in front of his neck and face, just as something hard and sharp struck his wrist. Albert swung his legs up to kick out, buy some distance, and gain enough inertia to roll to a stand. He hit something soft, and felt his opponent stagger. Albert was already swinging his legs back down from the blow, using the momentum to spring to his feet. As soon as he was upright, he started into another sprint, trying to open up enough distance to pull his woven pistol, but something was pushing on the back of his knee, and he was going down again. Just before he hit the ground, the small man jerked Albert’s head swiftly to the side, redirecting him into the wall.

Albert felt most of his face break.

But he recognized the move: That rapid-fire grappling style they used down in the ‘Wells. Mostly about redirecting momentum as force, and using obstacles to strike instead of the fists and feet. They could always count on walls close at hand, down there in the ‘Wells. It was a brutally effective martial art, but there was hope: This corridor was narrow, but still wider than the ones his opponent was likely accustomed to. Instead of struggling to stand, as the attacker would be expecting, Albert went limp, fell to his side and struck backward with his fist. Just as he’d expected, the small man’s knee crashed against the wall, right where Albert’s neck would have been if he’d tried to gain his feet.  But Albert’s own strike went low, and he hit only open air. He felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment at the awkward miss, but quickly stored it away, knowing that if he survived this, he’d have plenty of time to dwell on the shame later. Albert would double up his close combat training for a week, afterward. Maybe two. Three.

Jesus, forever, if he just got out of this alive.

***

The eye was lost. The Arabic girl had gone right for it, as she came bouncing out of the shadows on that prosthetic leg. Victoria managed to get one hand up to block, but her other still held the Colt, and the weight of it slowed her too much to save the other eye. She felt the woman’s thumb part her eyelids and sink straight into the jelly there with practiced precision. But even with only one good eye, she could see that her shot had connected, and the one-legged woman’s strength was swiftly ebbing out of a wet and ragged hole in her abdomen.

The pair of them fought in silence.

The other threats had fled while the woman covered their retreat, leaving Victoria alone against an unarmed opponent. Her numbers briefly spiked, but promptly dipped again into the low 70s as soon as she lost the eye. Victoria vaguely recognized the corridor-grappling style, but it wasn’t uniform – spiked randomly with conventional boxing, some fencing and the occasional elaborate flying kick. It was impossible to predict, and hard to counter. The primary threat made a few good contacts with that prosthetic leg of hers, and now Victoria was favoring her own – almost certainly fractured. Victoria was stronger than the primary, and maybe even faster, but she was having trouble adjusting to the trauma and reduced visual field. Every strike was just short, or too long, and the vicious bitch kept circling to her sightless side. Victoria parried a pointed claw strike toward her throat, and shoved a retaliatory elbow into the woman’s ribs. But in the process, she’d lost track of the prosthetic again, and now felt it press up between her knees. She was falling. The woman was on her immediately, using the momentum of the fall to augment her own blow, and Victoria felt her solar plexus collapse. She fought back the sudden chromatic explosions crowding the edges of her vision, and lashed out blindly, landing a solid headbutt right on the bridge of the woman’s ample nose. They scrambled backward from one another, each struggling to regain their footing.

Victoria felt a belt of blood ooze out from the ruined hole in her face, run down her cheek, and trace the path of her jawline before utterly ruining her frilly lace ascot. The one-legged girl was bent almost double, trying to hold her own guts closed as best she could. They stared grimly at one other. She saw it in the Arabic woman’s eyes, and knew it was written in hers: They were both ready to die here. Their blood dripped silent and slick through the grating below.

“You play rough and I’m telling!” The woman squealed.

***

The pixie-cut blonde and the skinny one in the leather jacket, whom Albert placed now as the secondary and tertiary objectives, didn’t hesitate for an instant when he and Tweed Overcoat started fighting. The two of them turned and sprinted down the access shaft as fast as they could, immediately disappearing around the nearest switchback. The training was keeping Albert alive, but just barely. Tweed Overcoat was younger, stronger, and had some crude but massively effective training of his own. He managed to use the width of the corridors to take some of the effectiveness out of Tweed Overcoat’s grapples, but regardless, Albert’s hand, elbow, and ankle were all clearly, painfully broken. He had landed two good shots of his own, and Tweed Overcoat was bleeding from the nose and favoring his knee, but the small man would recover quickly enough, while Albert could barely stand. Tweed Overcoat feigned high and ducked low, caught Albert behind the leg, then shot upward, flipping his head painfully into the wall behind him. If Albert had been a foot closer to that wall, the impact might have snapped his neck, but his opponent’s depth was off, and so the crash merely sent searing pain crackling down his spine and shattered his two front teeth. He countered Tweed Overcoat’s clumsy follow-up and boxed him on the ears, causing him to pull back in shock. Albert dragged himself to his knees, and tried to line up a tackle.