Hegemony (43 page)

The Captain and the rest of the team were piling in to the aircar as Ylayn ran up to the hotel's rooftop landing garage. The rented aircar stood out from the sleek skimmers and lavish limo-cruisers that usually parked here. It was a big vehicle, an eight-seater with a half dozen oversized lift fans and an oversized power-pack. It had been built to serve as a high speed courier vehicle, making maximum speed deliveries in large urban centers. The dealer who had rented it said it was capable of about nine tenths of the local speed of sound, more than 900 kilometers per hour; very fast for a civilian aircar, despite its bulky, brutal looks.

Ylayn jumped into the open side door and grabbed a seat, strapping herself in.

"Weapons check," Nas said, from the pilot's seat up front, and Ylayn checked that her laser pistol was secure in its shoulder holster under her short cloak. Quickly she initiated an uplink to the weapon's computer, checking the low power electro-stun and lethal full power settings. The power clip read 99.98%.

"Jesus, Ylayn," said Hyuer, watching as she leaned back in the seat, "you'd think you'd want to be dressed for something like this."

"I am dressed," Ylayn said. Her half-cloak, coming down to her waist, was a nano-weave capable of displaying moving patterns. Right now it was set to create a golden shimmer that flowed in reaction to her movements, hinting at the shape of the body beneath it. For the rest, she wore a decorated combat injector bracelet, heavy-duty boots that came to her mid-calf, and a thin halter and briefs of glossy black polycarbonate cloth. Her short, soft fur did nothing to hide the shape of her body. As a finishing touch, she had attached a decorative tail made of smart-fiber to the back of her briefs. It would flick back and forth in a pattern dictated by her heart rate.

"Meow," she added conversationally, and laughed.

The North Atrium
of the Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium was pleasant enough, Nas thought, if one ignored the constant signs of the Hegemony's dominance of this world. There were blooming flowers, and even bright-leafed trees, artfully arranged in massive, ornate stone planters. The bright vegetation matched attractive abstract color patterns that crawled across the atrium's high, transparent ceiling. And there wasn't much
overt
Hegemony propaganda. There was some, holographic portraits of a few of the previous Hegemons and the like; but more often it was subtle things that sent the same message: recruitment holos for the local System Defense Forces, or adverts for a hyper-bandwidth uplink and avatar rental service; the sort of thing only Hegemonic daemons could make use of... and a reminder to any humans who saw it who their ultimate masters really were.

The wide, enclosed space of the mall was like a garden, and pleasantly cooler than the hot, equatorial air outside. That was a minor convenience, allowing Nas to wear his short cloak over his laser without attracting attention for being overdressed. He walked alone, in contact with the rest of his team via encrypted data link. Getting the hand lasers through the mostly symbolic local security had been no trouble at all. Of course, that would apply just as much to the Coalition special operations agents he was hunting.

Three of his infiltration team, led by Gira, one of his lieutenants, was covering the far end of the atrium mall. He could see her from here; she was gangly and tall, and her bald, tattooed head stood out from the crowd. Bringing Gira along was a calculated risk, Nas thought. She was very capable, but young: a wild-eyed woman who was short on subtlety and long on ferocity. But her instincts were good for this sort of thing, and despite her love of violence, she would follow his orders without hesitation.

Ylayn and Hyuer had the nearer end of the mall. Hyuer was one of his best. But come to think of it, Ylayn stood out too. There were a few Modifieds in the crowd, but he was sure a scantily dressed cat-girl would be getting looks. For now, that was OK. Nothing about his team's outward appearance, however notable, gave away what they really were.

The five of them were slowly moving towards the center, scanning for anyone sending a signal on the Coalition info-net that Ylayn had hacked.

Nas strolled in the middle, close enough to coordinate the two groups. Two of his men were still with the aircar, ready to fly at a moment's notice; it was likely that Nas and his team would be leaving even faster than they arrived.

Once Nas, or any of his people, found one of the enemy agents, they'd try to follow him or her to the rest of them. And then Nas and his team would kill them all; a simple, fitting message about what happened to people who hired his ship and then tried to double-cross him.

It was Gira who saw the man first-- the same tall man, the one who had hired him on Perihelas IV. Nas was watching through her uplink interface, walking slowly along the atrium mall, pausing at store fronts to close his eyes and check the data feeds being coordinated by Ylayn: tactical schematic data feeds and sensory feeds from his people.

"Target!" sent Nas, locking on to the man's image and sending it into the data feeds of his crew with a sudden, savage intensity. He couldn't see the man from where he stood, but the tactical overlay showed him the location and Nas moved, breaking into a fast walk as his augmentation went live, implanted reservoirs releasing carefully tailored neuro-chemical combat drugs into his blood stream. Everything seemed to slow down as his movements took on an almost liquid grace.

Gira's implanted augmentations were going live as well, and her reaction was smooth and lightning fast. A twitch of her shoulders spun her half-cloak clear of her holster. Her laser was in her hand in a fraction of a second. She seemed to move with slow-motion grace while actually moving almost faster than an un-augmented eye could track. A fat, well dressed young woman stepped into the line of fire, oblivious, unaware of Gira or the tall man. For a fraction of a second, it seemed that Gira might shoot anyway, but instead she hesitated and Nas felt a hot spike of indignation at the sheer, perverse fucking bad luck of it.

The tall man didn't hesitate at all. His draw was fast in the way only someone with substantial augmentation of his own could manage. Three rapid laser flashes strobe-lit the atrium mall.

Gira dropped soundlessly, leaving a mist of vaporized blood as a laser pulse caught her at eye level and blew out the back of her head. Her data feed went dead.

"Fuck!" Nas hissed, breaking into a run. The tall man's other shots had gone into the crowd, one pulse striking a store-front, shattering the clear polycarbonate window, the other pulse amputating a bystander's arm. People in the crowd began to scream.

For an instant Nas could see the tall man, moving purposefully through the crowd. He was moving fast, getting ahead of the wave of panic and confusion caused by his own shots. Gira's body lay on the decorative tile floor of the mall. A young man rolled on the ground, screaming and clutching at the stump of his left arm.

Nas drew his laser without conscious thought, lining up on the target with the fluid precision of a third-stage
Telestraal
adept, but the tall man, the enemy, caught the flicker of Nas' draw out of the corner of his eye and dove forward, twisting mid-air to bring his own weapon up. Nas fired, lighting up the space around him with reflections of his laser's flash, but the man's spinning evasion was deceptively fast and Nas' pulse only struck the man's cloak, igniting the dark fabric with a burst of saturated light.

The man's return fire slashed through the space Nas had been in a fraction of a second earlier and tracked across the decorated column which Nas had darted behind. The laser pulse seared the air with a white-violet flash and an echoing
snap-crack!
of superheated air and superheated stone. It would have cut Nas' head off had he been a fraction of a second slower. Shards of heat-shattered stone flew outward, pinging off the ground, somehow audible over the rising screams of bystanders.

Just my luck, the bastard is an adept too, Nas thought as he rolled up and launched himself behind a wide, thick walled stone planter, anticipating his enemy's obvious next move to make lateral distance and shoot around the column that Nas had taken cover behind. More than half of the art of
telestraal
was in really
seeing
one's surroundings and being able to understand what an enemy could and would do next. The rest was timing and speed; neuro-chemically augmented speed, for a serious adept like Nas... and like the tall man.

Another laser flash lit up the air behind Nas, striking a narrow, bright-leafed tree in the planter, cutting it in half in a spray of flaming splinters. But Nas was already behind the heavy stone planter, rolling up to ready himself for the next move. The tall man was throwing off his smoldering cloak as Nas dove out of cover, firing mid-air. The tall man was diving out of the line of fire before Nas' laser cleared the cover, and Nas' pulse missed by centimeters, striking another stone planter full of decorative blossoms and shattering a fist-sized crater into the fused stone. Bits of superheated stone, dirt and plant debris traced thin arcs of smoke through the air. Nas hit the ground rolling and firing, even as the tall man threw himself behind a stunned bystander and then somersaulted behind another of the broad stone planters that decorated the atrium mall.

With the neuro-chem racing through his system, the decision not to shoot through the bystander was calm, almost leisurely, for Nas. Instead he darted for cover in the entryway of one of the mall's stores, firing again into the planter the tall man had taken cover behind, hoping to at least distract his enemy with a shower of superheated fragments. He had no time to spare now for the rest of his team's data feed, but the flash and crack of laser fire sounding from other parts of the mall told him that he wasn't the only one in the fight.

The sudden flash-cracks of laser fire, and the screams that followed, took Freya by surprise. She had been worried, expecting trouble, but her instincts were wrong for this sort of fighting and for a moment she hesitated.

The crowd in the atrium mall was substantial, if not to the point of jostling, and Freya could not see where the shot had come from, or where it had gone.

A man dressed in a nondescript gray cloak and dark sun-visor glasses stepped from behind a wide decorative column and paused. He seemed to look at Freya for a second. Something about his manner screamed a warning to Freya, but her eyes still went wide with shock as he brought a laser pistol from behind his cloak and leveled it at her. Time seemed to slow down and Freya felt as if she could not move except in slow motion, but the combat reflexes trained at the Fleet Academy kicked in and Freya found herself twisting to throw herself aside. Too slow, she knew. The man seemed to move in slow motion also, but Freya could tell that it was an illusion, that his motions were actually blazing fast, maybe even augmented with neuro-chemical boosters.

Muir's needler went off with a rapid crackle. The stream of explosive needles tracked across the gunman's torso, detonating in a rapid line of yellow flashes. The man did not fall, but the explosions knocked his arm off its aim; the laser flashed but Freya did not feel a hit.

Freya hit the ground and desperately tried to claw her laser from its holster. The gunman was still on his feet, side-stepping and bringing his weapon down on Muir. His cloak had been torn to shreds by the stream of explosive needles, and Freya thought she could see glimpses of black polycarbonate mesh armor underneath.

The gunman's laser flashed again as Muir, a
telestraal
adept, threw himself down and rolled. Not fast enough. The laser pulse cut through Muir's right arm, severing it a few centimeters above the elbow.

Freya scrambled to a crouch and brought up her laser, but the gunman seemed to track her motion and stepped behind a wide column as she did, denying her a shot. Time seemed to be running normally again, and Freya could see that the gunman's movements were flicker-quick, almost certainly the result of implanted combat augmentation.

Zandy saw the gray-cloaked man shoot Muir, taking his arm off with a laser pulse that reflected for a searing instant from the glass panels of the atrium-mall roof. Muir's severed right arm, still holding the little needler, lay on the mall's polished floor. The laser had cut too fast to cauterize; bright red biosim circulatory fluid, not quite the color of human blood, pooled around the severed limb.  Muir rolled behind cover, as if  unaware that he had lost an arm. 

Everything seemed to freeze. Zandy saw Freya come up from a dive with her own laser in hand, but the gunman was already gone, flowing behind cover.

The facts of the sudden fire-fight seemed clear, even crystalline, in Zandy's brain, but her reactions were lagging. She wasn't in an interceptor here, and none of her honed combat instincts seemed to have any relevance.

Belatedly she threw herself down behind a wide stone planter that held a spray of colorful flowers. Three or four laser pulses flashed somewhere in the mall, strobing reflections from the glass roof like miniature lightning bolts. Zandy looked down to find her needler pistol in her hand. She did not recall drawing it.

Her instincts were screaming nonsense at her, telling her to deploy sensors drones, to see from behind her bow-shield; and the mild but persistent disorientation of the new avatar was making it even harder. Part of her mind seemed to think that since she was in combat, she must be in a 'ceptor. She had only minimal training for this sort of thing; a personal laser fight in close quarters was not what the Fleet expected its interceptor pilots to get involved in.