ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (3 page)

“Thank you.” The woman fell in behind them.

“I’m Lana, and this is Shui.”

The woman nodded. “Mei.”

“We don’t have time to babysit her, Lana,” Shui hissed in a muted tone.

Mei overheard. “I can take care of myself and my baby. I won’t slow you down.”

“You better not,” Shui said. “Or we’re leaving you.”

It was a cold thing to say, but Lana knew she wouldn’t be able to abandon her if it came to it. Shui’s words seemed to have the intended effect however, because though burdened by the baby, Mei kept pace.

The three eventually reached the underground entrance to the hotel. The escalator leading to the lobby no longer had power, so Lana and her companions warily climbed the metal stairway. Their footsteps sounded overloud to Lana’s ears.

The lobby was deserted. Usually the higher-end hotels kept at least one Artificial at the check-in desk at all hours, but not so today. All that remained in lieu of people were the uncanny paintings lining the walls. The subjects were women, dressed in traditional Chinese garb, posing with open fans so that the lower halves of their faces were masked, emphasizing the eyes.

Those paintings made Lana feel like she was being watched.

Not the best decor to have in an abandoned hotel lobby.

She shivered, and not just from the paintings: it was freezing inside.

Lana’s eyes were drawn to the far side of the lobby, where the glass doors of the main entrance had been smashed. Snow drifts formed eerie white piles just inside the doors, while outside the blizzard had intensified to near whiteout conditions.

“This isn’t good.” Shui’s breath misted. “Not good at all. Let’s go back. To the spaceport.”

The port was probably entirely shut down now, given the conditions outside, but she wasn’t about to tell her friend that.

Lana checked the Net.

Still offline.

The hotel would have had its own InterPlaNet node. The fact that the aReals and Implants of the hotel guests didn’t form a data bridge to the next node told her that the hotel was nearly empty of both humans
and
robots. Assuming the robots hadn’t simply disabled their network nodes.

And also assuming that the InterPlaNet nodes weren’t down citywide . . .

Lana had to know for certain whether the flight crew was here, so she tiptoed into the lobby, making her way toward the elevators.

In the middle of the lobby she passed a toppled luggage cart. Travel bags were scattered on the floor alongside it; one of the suitcases had broken open, leaving clothes splayed across the dark tiles. There was a small pool of blood beside the cart.

So far, Mei managed to keep her baby quiet. Lana hoped that would continue to be the case; their lives could very well depend on it.

Though the main lights remained on, the power had been cut to the elevators, so the three of them were forced to take the stairwell.

Lana and Shui set a good pace, and to Mei’s credit, she kept up.

On the eighth floor, Lana opened the exit door and peered out.

The long hall seemed empty. The doors lining either flank were shut. A ninety-degree bend at the far side led to the remaining rooms.

It was somewhat warmer up there, but Lana’s breath still misted slightly when she spoke. “Here we go,” she said.

She led her companions to door number 801, the room of her copilot, Keai. She knocked. No answer.

She tried again. “It’s Lana,” she said, softly.

The main hallway lights abruptly flicked off, and the emergency lights kicked in.

“Lana . . .” Shui said.

Lana checked the Net one last time.

Still down.

She tore off her aReal sunglasses: she could see better without them in the dim light.

She hurried now, moving from door to door. The spaceline crew had reserved the first nine rooms on this floor; she knocked on each and every one of the designated doors and quietly identified herself, but no one answered.

A beam of light appeared at the far end of the hall, coming from around the bend.

Lana heard the characteristic whir of a servomotor.

“This way,” Lana whispered. She led her companions to the room she shared with Shui. The door unlocked immediately at her approach, which meant the hidden sensors in the door still had power, thankfully.

They all piled inside and Lana shut the door behind them. The curtains were closed, and the scant sunlight that managed to filter inside gave the room a gloomy quality.

The baby whimpered, seeming on the verge of an all-out bawling session. Mei perched on the edge of the bed and made desperate cooing sounds as she rocked the child.

Lana didn’t think it was going to work. She was positive the baby sensed the frantic mood of everyone in the room and was going to reveal them to the approaching robot outside.

But then the child miraculously calmed down.

Shows how little I know about babies
, Lana thought. Maybe children had a sixth sense of some sort, warning them when danger was near. Whatever the case, the baby did not cry.

Lana and Shui listened by the door as the heavy footsteps heralding the approach of the robot grew in volume.

When the footsteps were right outside, the robot halted.

Lana and Shui remained very still. Neither of them dared gaze through the fisheye lens of the peephole.

Mei had clamped her hand around the baby’s mouth, and Lana was afraid the child might suffocate. She almost moved toward the bed to force the woman’s hand down.

But she did not.

Her own self-preservation instinct had kicked in, and she couldn’t move or make a sound if she wanted to.

She hated herself in that moment.

The footsteps resumed, continuing toward the stairwell. Those heavy thuds receded as the robot descended to the floor below.

Lana slumped against the door.

Shui let out a long breath.

Mei lowered her hand. The baby coughed and resumed breathing. The child seemed fine. Thankfully.

Utterly relieved, Lana went to the bed in the dim light, and sat down. She wanted to scold Mei, but what did she know about babies? Maybe there was no chance the child would have died.

Lana saw a shadow standing in the corner of the room, near the curtain. The shadow’s eyes glowed yellow.

Lana started.

Shui had seen the shadow too. “Lana, we have to get out of here!” Her friend ran toward the door.

The robot made no aggressive movements.

“Shui, wait!” Lana said. “Wait. It’s just Dong. It seems to be operating normally.” She turned toward the robot: “You scared me, Dong.” “Dong” was a common name people gave to the loaner robots found in hotel rooms.

The baby started crying.

“Calm your baby!” Shui said.

Mei tried to silence the child, to no effect.

Was the baby’s sixth sense trying to tell them something?

Lana stared at the dark form of the robot.

She realized something.

The room had an outdoor balcony, hidden behind the curtain.

“Dong?” Lana said. “Have you stayed in the room all this time? Or have you gone out on the balcony?”

Dong emerged from the shadows.

Glowing blue droplets surrounded its chest piece.

CHAPTER ONE

Rade

Y
ou could tell how a man died by the smell.

A man who died of a gut wound smelled the worst, followed a close second by a man who’d suffered a grenade wound. Burn deaths smelled like roast pig. Cranial wounds smelled strangely of fish (someone told me that it was the eyes). Sometimes lung wounds smelled of tobacco. Heart wounds smelled like blood: metallic, coppery.

The man on the ground below me had died of a head wound, and the fishy smell of him filled my nostrils.

I was dressed like the dead man, wearing a privateer’s black, strength-enhancing jumpsuit, with an open faceplate. Holographic lighting units were arrayed along the bottom rim of my helmet and projected an image over my face so I looked like an SK (Sino-Korean) thug.

I was on Pontus, a colony world in Gliese 581. The system itself was officially owned by the Franco-Italians, but the SKs had purchased and developed Pontus primarily because of its proximity to
Tiàoyuè De Kǒng
Gate, whose Slipstream led to Tau Ceti and the heart of SK space. (Slipstreams were the only way starships could “jump” the vast gaps between systems, and required the use of Gates to enter safely. These Gates led to and from fixed locations, so you couldn’t simply jump anywhere you wanted.) Tau Ceti was where the UC (United Countries) had built the secret Gate to Geronimo, eight thousand lightyears away. A Gate that was now dismantled.

Pontus. A small pocket of SK space in a system that was otherwise neutral. The planet was basically enemy territory, and off limits to the UC. If I were captured here, let’s just say the United Countries would be in a world of trouble. Actually no, that’s not true. They’d merely disavow my actions and call me a rogue asset. So
I’d
be the one in a world of trouble, at least until my platoon brothers came to the rescue.

And they would.

That was what most of my missions were like. Direct action: getting up close and dirty with the enemy. Ah, the wonderful life of a MOTH (MObile Tactical Human).

The SK terraformers had done a bang-up job here on Pontus. The air contained twenty percent oxygen, pressing down at a comfortable 1.07 standard atmospheres, while temperatures planetwide averaged a balmy 30 to 35 degrees Celsius (86 to 95 Fahrenheit). The surface of the planet was roughly ninety percent water, and sandy atolls populated with palm trees made up the remaining ten percent, giving the entire world a tropical island air.

It was almost paradise.

Tell that to the dead man in the flora below me.

I lay chest down on the edge of an elaborate wall of thick stone that surrounded a sprawling palatial compound. The wall’s copestone proved wide enough to comfortably hold a prostrate sniper such as myself. A slight berm along the inner rim of the wall formed a sort of parapet, offering a convenient hide.

My platoon brother Lui was our inside man in the palace. He posed as an SK manservant, placed two weeks before. He’d had some minor cheek and nose reconstruction done to fool any facial scans (moles in Big Navy had leaked sensitive data to the SKs, and our classified files had ended up in the hands of privateers on more than one occasion).

Lui was the reason we had full blueprints of the palace. This morning he’d also deactivated the perimeter sensors, which were cleverly embedded into the many statues of the Paramount Leader that ornamented the wall I lay on at this moment. Trace, Ghost, and I had circled the perimeter and sniped all the cameras and other sensors anyway, just to be safe. Since Lui had replaced the camera outputs with vid feeds, the security algorithm shouldn’t notice the difference anyway.

We’d also taken down all the outer sentry robots, leaving them in shot-up piles at various points outside the wall. Snakeoil’s Node-jammer had prevented the robots from sharing telemetry data, so we didn’t even have to eliminate them in unison.

The dead privateer below me, just inside the wall? One of the few human sentries inside the compound. He’d decided to take a piss at the wrong time and Trace had been forced to shoot him.

There were five more sentries—three robot, two human—patrolling the compound grounds within, but they weren’t my concern just now. I wouldn’t be able to harm them anyway, not with this weapon—I’d switched out my sniper rifle for a tranquilizer gun hours ago.

I was gazing through the scope of the tranq even now, aiming at the palace. Specifically, through a certain window, at a certain door. Lui had left the window open at our request. It wouldn’t do for bulletproof glass to get in the way of a tranquilizer dart.

Because of the dictates of the mission, I couldn’t look away from that door, not for a moment. I did keep my other eye open for situational awareness purposes, but other than that, all I’d known for the past three hours was the feel of the tranq gun in my arms, the sight of the closed door in my scope, and the fishy scent of the dead man below. The palace itself was just an unfocused blur in the background, this brown lump of a pagoda with dragon statues guarding the entrance (though they looked more like giant worms than dragons to me).

The palace, and the island it was built on, was owned by the privateer financier Lóng Xiōng, or Serpent Heart. He was responsible for financing some of the most infamous privateer crews out there, including the crew of Mao Sing Ming, the murderous “Malefactor of the East,” who my leading petty officer, Facehopper, had personally taken down. Lóng Xiōng procured the ships and weapons, and the privateers gave him half their profits.

From the looks of it, he’d become a very rich man. Blood money. It’ll buy you the world. But what it won’t buy you is a modicum of decency. Nor protection from those who would see your kind forcibly removed from the world.

Today, our financier was having some sort of pool party. Scantily clad women and female Artificials lounged on the pool deck. The Artificials were obviously Skin Musicians—gorgeous, sensual robots too perfect to be actual women. They looked like they were straight out of a porn vid: long hair, flawless skin, curves to die for, shaved in all the right places. Their every movement oozed sensuality and coquettishness, and I knew they were well versed in man-pleasing.

The financier himself wasn’t present at the party. Not yet, anyway. He was inside the palace, behind the door in my sights, meeting with a privateer captain whose shuttle had arrived this morning. With Lui’s help, we’d positively ID’d the second man as Hóng Húxū, or Redbeard. He was almost as notorious as Mao Sing Ming had been. With his arrival, the operation had been greenlighted.

And here we were.

“I’m getting a cheeseburger when we get back,” Ghost transmitted subvocally, via his Implant. The albino was staring into the scope of a tranquilizer gun beside me. His job was to take out the privateer captain, while I was to handle the financier. Once we got them, we’d switch back to our Mark 12 sniper rifles.

Earlier, Snakeoil had carefully measured out the tranquilizing dosage required for the two targets. The financier was heavier, so my dart had more of the tranquilizing agent meted out. Even so, if the dosage was even slightly off, the stuff could cause death in minutes via heart-lung stoppage. Which was why we all carried the antidote.

I resisted the urge to look at Ghost. I had to keep my eye on the closed door. “How can you think about food with that smell?” I sent back. “I’ve almost retched three times.”

“What smell?” Ghost returned.

“The smell coming from the dead guy.”

“Ah,” the albino sent. “Hardly even noticed it. All I smell is barbecued meat.”

“Bro, there’s no barbecue down there.”

“When you’ve been staring into your scope for three hours straight and your stomach starts to growl with enough force to give away your position, all you can think about, and all you can smell, is grilled cheeseburger. It’s my greatest dream right now.”

“Ghost, if your greatest dream is to eat barbecued cheeseburger, you’ve got some self-improvement to do.”

Eight months ago I would have never dreamed of talking to Ghost that way. As a friend, I mean. I was the new guy. The guy who had to prove himself.

But my platoon brothers respected me now. I’d proven myself in battle. I’d covered their asses, taken bullets for them, patched them up while hell rained down on us. When the fecal matter hit the fan, I was the one who kept my wits and found a way out of the situation. More often than not, that involved strategies and tactics no one else had thought of, such as turning off said fan and letting the fecal matter drip right back at whoever had thrown it.

Still, I’ve had my doubts about my abilities. I lost two very important people in the past, and a part of me still thought it was my fault. If any more of my brothers died because of something I did, I’d never forgive myself.

“I can has cheezburger?” Trace said subvocally, mocking Ghost from his own position on the wall ten meters to my left. He was equipped with a sniper rifle, not a tranquilizer gun. Trace was East Indian, Bengali to be exact. He’d shot me in the arm during training as part of my Combat Resiliency Qualification. I didn’t hold it against him—he was just doing his job.

“Har har,” Ghost sent back.

“You know, it’s too bad we can’t just terminate both targets,” Trace said. “Why the UC wants to capture scumbags like these alive is beyond me.”

I kept my eye on the door. I didn’t have to look at Trace to know he was aiming his rifle into the compound at this very moment, ready to snipe with lethal accuracy. I knew I could trust him with my life.

I heard Tahoe shift behind me. He was watching our backs, heavy gun in hand. “You know the political situation,” Tahoe said via his Implant. “There’s been way too much backlash lately. We take them alive or we don’t take them at all.”

Tahoe Eaglehide was Navajo, with a wife and two children back on Earth. A good friend. The best. I’d known him from the beginning. He, Alejandro, and I had enlisted together. Officially, I was supposed to call him by his callsign, “Cyclone,” but it never really stuck. Not for me.

“Hey, I’m just saying, things would go a lot more smoothly if we could just drop the two of them,” Trace said. “Send in a drone, and we’re done. Or have Lui do the deed from the inside, and make it look like an accident. But noo, we have to take them
alive
.”

The last three drone assassinations didn’t go over too well with the media. The political fallout was intense, with the SKs threatening to declare all-out war if another “innocent” SK citizen was executed by a drone launched by “UC cowards.”

“Moe just passed checkpoint Wheat Lager,” Trace said, this time over the platoon-level comm. “Should be coming up on your two o’clock, Facehopper.”

Moe was one of the three remaining privateer robots patrolling the inner grounds. All three were military-grade humanoids, armed with assaults. Basically equivalent to the UC’s Centurion-style combat robots. Trace had nicknamed them after characters from his favorite Net comics, while the two human privateers on sentry duty got the names of the Golden Age pirates Blackbeard and Kidd.

“Confirmed,” Facehopper said over the comm. His four-man fire team was positioned on the opposite side of the courtyard. “Moe in sight, checkpoint Pale Malt. Blackbeard is up next.”

The seconds ticked by.

Facehopper’s voice came over the comm again. “Rage, Ghost: How are you blokes holding up?”

“Mighty fine, sir,” Ghost said, chuckling slightly. He was just as tense as I was.

“Hang in there.”

“Yes, sir,” Ghost said. “You know how much we love hanging.”

“I do indeed. Balls in and tits up.”

Twenty minutes later, the door I had been watching so carefully through my scope finally opened.

When you acted as a sniper, waiting for your target, the moment of action always arrived unexpectedly. And if you blinked, or you sneezed, you missed it. Which is why you always had your finger on the trigger, and your eyes on the target. But you had to be careful, because sometimes—actually most of the time—things didn’t quite go according to plan.

I almost pulled the trigger of the tranq gun.

Thankfully, I didn’t.

Because it wasn’t the target: a woman had walked out, and she didn’t match any of the profiles.

“Uh, who’s that?” Ghost sent over the comm.

“The financier’s girlfriend,” Facehopper sent, obviously viewing our vid feed. “Look sharp, people.”

No one else emerged from the room. The woman sauntered down the hall, toward the window Lui had left open for us, and once she was there she rested her elbows on the windowsill. She leaned out dreamily, looked at the pool, and waved at one of the girls, who waved back. After a moment the woman retreated from the window.

But then she turned around, and cocked her head as if considering something.

Then she closed the window.

“Are you guys seeing this?” Ghost sent. The disbelief was obvious in his subvocalization.

Bulletproof glass now resided between me and the doorway.

Tranquilizer darts couldn’t penetrate bulletproof glass.

The woman took the stairs and vanished from view.

“Trace, we’re going to need you to poke some holes in the window when the targets emerge,” I said. Which could be any second now, given that the door in my sights remained wide open. “Transmitting visual data.” I sent him a snapshot of my current point of view, so he’d know where to make the hole. Ghost sent him a snapshot, too.