Division Zero: Thrall (26 page)

Eyes closed, Kirsten reached out with her mind in search of any source of paranormal energy. Dorian’s presence shimmered like a light in the dark. Something else was there as well, something malevolent and close. Close enough to touch her. Small… weak… evil…

I don’t like that. You’re getting paler.

Nicole’s voice in her mind carried the shock of fingers snapped past her eyes. She jumped, spinning once. Her fearful expression melted into one of annoyance.
I do feel something, but it’s weak. Could be a victim of the Reavers, maybe a Harbinger nearby. I don’t see anything.

Kirsten suppressed the urge to shiver. She did not want to say it aloud, or even telepathically, but the feeling had been dogging the edge of her conscious mind for several days. In fact, the only time she could remember in recent memory where she did not feel as though something had been following her was when she visited Father Villera. As comforting as the thought was, it scared her more with the idea whatever it was had been afraid to enter the church.

That could only mean one thing.

On the far side of the daycare classroom, Kirsten forced open a maintenance door and took a narrow cinderblock-walled corridor into the boiler room. Between two massive furnaces, a cluster of electronics hid beneath a dingy olive-green tarpaulin. Four fuboxes, military-grade fusion generators, hummed. The three-foot cubes were designated as portable, at least for anyone capable of lifting the weight of a small car.

Inch-thick black cables ran from them through an improvised trapdoor made from a large slab of rusting metal. Sounds of a violent video game leaked through the gap created by the wires.

“One moment,” said Dorian, as he sank through the floor.

Kirsten made a face at the giant half-inch slab.
That’s gonna make a lot of noise.

Nicole shook her head.
I can move it quiet, but it will take a while.

Dorian emerged through the floor. “You’re lucky, K. Adult male, about twenty-five to thirty. He’s alone, but he’s got a mess of orb bots on shelves.”

The trapdoor wobbled as Nicole concentrated. Kirsten kept her weapon trained on the hole as the slab floated upward at an agonizing pace. Faint squeaks came from crude hinges welded to the floor, too soft to be noticed among the sounds of digital warfare below. On delicate telekinetic fingers, the hatch moved until it touched the wall behind it. Nicole sagged, again out of breath.

“It wasn’t too heavy, I’m just tired from holding it up for five minutes.”

Kirsten nodded and lowered herself down a cheap portable ladder their quarry had positioned by his exit. Heavy pipes and rat-chewed wire bundles lined both walls of a narrow passageway crossing beneath the abandoned office tower. Forty yards away, a human outline glowed in the multicolored plasma of an enormous holo-bar display. The room shook with the sounds of explosions and machinegun fire, with the occasional interruption of a combat aircraft going overhead.

Wow, retro-gamer. He’s using a screen.

The pitch of Nicole’s telepathic giggle made Kirsten’s back muscles tighten. She raised her arm, E-90 out. With one final glance at her armband screen to confirm the signal source, she tiptoed forward. A VIP escape elevator shaft occupied the front part of the room, blocked off by armored doors indicating it was still unused, no doubt waiting at the upper floor.

She edged past several freestanding mesh shelves full of bot parts, power cells, and strange bladed weapons too small or unwieldy for a person to use. As she shrugged past the end of the shelf, she adopted a solid two-handed grip on the laser and trained it on the man’s head. Unkempt, shaggy black hair sprouted from under a dark blue wool cap, raining down over a ten-year-old military jacket four sizes too big for its wearer. He slouched back in a chair, fingers a blur through a pair of intangible holographic controllers. Two deck wires extended out of the hair at the back of his head, one draped left and one right. Both connected to net decks.

“Police! Hands where I can see them.”

The man did not react in the least, continuing to pilot his virtual soldier down a narrow Martian trench. Kirsten tilted her head at the oddity of watching World War II unfold on Mars… with aliens.
Game designers get the good drugs.
She peeked at his surface thoughts and backed out immediately with a mild headache. The man had two thought patterns occurring at once; half his brain was in the middle of cyberspace trying to break his way through a door, while the other played a game in the real world.

Kirsten snorted air out of her nose to chase away the smell of a body a month overdue for a bath, laced with the sweet fragrance of Flowerbasket.

“Good thing we were so quiet coming in,” said Nicole as she stomped past and made a ‘come here’ gesture with her hand.

Earbuds tore loose from his head with audible pops. Stunned by the feeling of it, the man clamped his hands over his ears.

Kirsten edged a step closer. “You there, this is the police. Keep your hands where I can see them. You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of an officer of the law.”

“He tried to kill you,” said Nicole. “I hope he resists, so I can shoot him myself.”

“Panic code alpha!” wailed the man. “Wipe sequence whiskey tango fox―”

The wires popped out of the back of his neck, courtesy of an annoyed telekinetic. He fell face-first over his desk, from screaming to corpse-like in one eighth of a second. Crashing, banging metal made Kirsten jump, as a shelf on the right side of the room upended itself and fell into a cloud. A digitized metallic roar scraped through the air near two glowing points of red light in the dust.

A four-armed humanoid bot, about six feet tall and made of unpainted shiny plastisteel, lurched out of a pile of debris. On each of its four arms, an assault rifle mechanism chirped to life and swiveled forward. The two upper, larger arms had mounted tri-barrel rotary cannons while the smaller pair one-armed standard weapons. Automatic ammunition feed chutes emerged from ports along its sides, extending to connect while the weapons spun up to firing speed.

Freeze
. Kirsten’s eyes glowed.

It ignored her psionic command. “Pathetic mortals, you have trespassed in the domain of Mordac the mag―”

Clank
.

The skeletal bot’s emergence from the pile of junk continued forward, culminating in a headfirst meeting with the poured concrete ground. The spinning cannons bucked and jumped as the barrels clattered to a halt on the floor. Kirsten’s shaking E-90 continued aiming at its back for a full minute after it ceased moving. Dorian winked.

The hacker moaned. Kirsten swiveled on him.

“On the floor, now!” she yelled.

He fumbled at his coat, as if reaching for something inside.

Nicole flung an arm outward. The man’s hat flew off and his head jerked upward as if someone had a fistful of hair. He swayed forward, at his desk, and proceeded to smash his own head into the surface six times in a rhythmic beat. After the last hit, he slid down, unconscious and bleeding from the nose.

“Son of a bitch,” growled Nicole.

She ran up on the body and kicked the chair out from under him. With all the delicacy of an inebriated moose, she threw him to the floor and relieved him of a pistol and two grenades.

“Hey, easy.” Kirsten put a hand on Nicole’s shoulder. “We’re here to arrest him, not beat him to death.”

Nicole did not look at her as she gathered the man’s arms together and cuffed him. “What difference does it make? He tried to kill you. They’re gonna execute him anyway.”

“Nikki, you don’t want that on your conscience.” Kirsten rolled the guy over and propped him into a seated position against his desk. “Besides, he’s just a contractor. I want to know who hired him.”

A stimpak to the side of the neck woke him. Thick blood bubbled out of both nostrils as he shifted, testing his ability to brute-force his way out of the police-issued binders. He gazed at Kirsten, then Nicole, and smiled.

Nicole grabbed him by the lapels of a shirt so dirty it looked sticky, hauling him up to his feet. “He’s gonna make a stripper joke. I’m just gonna kill him so I don’t have to hear it again.”

“Hey.” Kirsten grabbed her arm. “Let me talk to him first.”

He groaned as Nicole forced him into an ungainly backward lean over the desk with her forearm pressed into his throat.

“Try me, jackass. You attempted to kill a cop, who also happens to be a close friend of mine. I could end you right here and get a medal for it.”

The grin, and the color in his face, faded.

“Look…” Kirsten stared at him. “You did send your little bots after me. By all rights, the law says you’re supposed to die for attempt murder on a cop. I know it wasn’t your idea. You guys never do anything without getting paid for it. Just tell me who hired you and I’ll put in a request for commutation to life.”

“I… If you kill me, you’ll never find out.” He thrashed backward, a futile effort to evade Nicole’s grip.

The redhead’s stunrod leapt on its own from her belt to her hand. “Please do that again. Look, K, this piece of shit isn’t worth it. Just mind-read him, get what you need, and let the law do its thing.”

He stared at the weapon, all fight leaving him at the sight of it flying.

“Kirsten…” Dorian reached toward her.

She glanced at him, then glared at Nicole. “Nikki, that’s not the way we do things.”

“He tried to
kill
you, will you stop being so nice to him?” Nicole shoved her arm into his throat. “He ain’t gonna say a damn thing. Bastard isn’t even afraid of us. Hell, I’ll do it.”

“Kirsten!” Dorian yelled. “Get her away from him, now!”

Nicole glared into the man’s eyes. Kirsten jumped forward to grab her friend by the shoulder, but was too slow. The instant a telepathic link formed between the suspect’s brain and Nicole’s, the man fainted on his feet. His face sagged into a drooling caricature, eyes rolled back into his head, and he exhaled a dark crimson mist from his mouth and nose, which Nicole breathed in.

The redhead staggered away, gagging, losing her grip on the stunrod as she stumbled to her knees and held her head. Kirsten ignored the unconscious man falling to the side and shook Nicole by both shoulders. When there was no reaction, she gathered her astral energies and felt a presence within her.

The room blurred, and Kirsten slammed into the wall fifteen feet away, upside down. Telekinetic force pinned her while Nicole stood up and flashed a demonic grin. Her deep blue eyes had faded milky white and nearby veins darkened into a raccoon mask. She glanced down at herself, cupping her breasts in both hands.

“This is nice. I should take women more often,” said a male voice. Nicole shook her head with a dismissive sigh. Kirsten struggled to look away as Nicole pawed herself. “No, that would be a bad idea. I’d never get
anything
done. Such rage inside this one. Yes, I can use this.”

Dorian tackled Nicole. The telekinetic crush ebbed, letting Kirsten peel away from the wall and land flat on her chest, bracing for pain. Between getting drilled into cinderblocks and falling, she expected to hurt―but felt nothing.
I love this armor.
She sat up, amid shrieking that vacillated between Nicole’s chirpy pleas for help and a dark quasi-feminine laughter. Shelves and debris shuddered behind Dorian, telekinesis tried to fling the insubstantial man away, to no avail.

Kirsten summoned the astral lash, bathing the area in harsh shadows and scintillating blue-white light. Nicole hissed at it, shoving and pounding at Dorian as she fought her way up to her knees and tried to slide away from the spectral whip. His eyebrows went up, unprepared for such strength. With Nicole possessed by something, his grip was tenuous at best, as if wrestling with a gelatinous mass.

“Please don’t hurt me, we’re like sisters!” Nicole added a childlike pitch, the voice now more female, making a face to match the request.

“This won’t hurt Nicole at all.” Kirsten spun the tendril around in preparation to strike, but sailed butt-first into the wall a second time. She bounced away and landed sitting.

Nicole (rather what was inside her) loosed a mocking laugh, pointing at her. “Ha, ha. Can’t reach me.”

Kirsten snarled and ran at her again, kept just out of reach by a casual emanation of telekinesis. Boots squealed as she tried to run through an intangible wall. The lash swiped back and forth inches from Nicole’s face, making the creature laugh even louder.

The entity’s amusement faded as Dorian’s running leap from behind drove her forward like a Gee-ball player’s check. Kirsten, emboldened by knowing the lash could not hurt the living, tore the weapon through Nicole’s chest. It snagged as if striking something solid.

“Get out of her!” roared Kirsten as she pulled back on the energy thread.

Tension gave out as if the entity inside her friend ruptured. The lash came free, and Nicole fell to her knees in a drunken sway. Black liquid oozed from her ears, nose, and mouth as the sense of a weak obliteration rippled through the air. Kirsten swished the lash through again, feeling no trace of contact with anything.

Nicole whined, scrunching up her face. “Thib if so”―she spoke as if her mouth was full, and coughed up a blob of black jelly―“fucking nasty.” She coughed again, this time just liquid. “It’s oozing from
everywhere
.” She shivered. “I feel like I went skinny dipping in hot noseblow.”

“How is that different than those damn gel tanks?”

The most pathetic, pouting face Kirsten had ever seen on a grown woman stared up at her. “That stuff didn’t come out of me.”

“Well, I think our hacker was compelled,” said Dorian, scowling at the ichor. “I doubt there’s going to be any electronic trail to follow back to whoever sent it.”

“I’m still gonna bring him in. Maybe Ashcroft can find something.” Kirsten breathed a sigh of relief after checking and finding him still alive. “At least they won’t execute him now.”

Nicole tried to gather her dignity and wobbled to her feet. Every motion made her wince. Kirsten rushed to her side to help her stand.