Killswitch (38 page)

The S-2s must have been paying attention, because no one shot at her, and she ducked and wove between trunks and undergrowth with a sudden impulse for a spot in the corner that her memory told her had a partial view of the eastward wing, and was in moderate fire-shadow from the flanks. She zigzagged toward a large, broad tree with a complicated root system, falling and rolling to a braced firing position past the trunk ... and ducked back in the millisecond it took for her vision to process the shape of a rifle, in the suspected location, snap directly her way. Shots sprayed wood in shattered chunks, then a rush of footsteps as S-2 pinned that location from the mansion, rounds zipping and cracking devilishly, filling the garden with flying earth and splinters.

"Hi, sis!" Sandy yelled as the firing died down, and Sundaram's voice could be clearly heard in her ear, asking for Commander Kresnov's position with evident concern. "It's me, Sandy! Do you like gambling?!" There was, of course, no audible response. But no audible movement, either, and S-2s guns fell silent, so evidently they didn't have a target. "Tell you what-you better start liking it, 'cause right now I wouldn't give you one chance in twenty! It's no fucking fun when they all know you're coming, is it?! And now they all know roughly where you are, so you can take them out a few at a time, but there's so many guns pointed at you now, one of them's bound to get you if you start firing regularly!

"And now I'm here! Remember what I told you before, about being a good little girl and behaving yourself?! You broke the agreement! That means I'm going to rip your fucking entrails out! So unless you like the idea of dying slowly, I'd just turn around and run for the walls, if I were you!"

Water fell in heavy drops from the leaves and branches, running cold rivulets down her scalp and neck. Super-enhanced hearing made out frogs croaking, and bats chattering to themselves in the higher branches, under cover from the rain. Doubtless scared witless by the recent noise. Jane could move silently, but S-2 had enough visual enhancement to spot slow, gradual motion. A fast dash provided greater safety ... and would be heard. Jane would wait. Would wait for ... a brilliant blue flash, there it was, forking and dancing across the overcast northward sky. Across sixteen to seven kilometres of range, Sandy's visual reckoning calculated, which meant the small matter of seven seconds until the barrage of sound began. Jane would go for the wall, she judged. Fearless, professional Jane, who lived for her missions and never shirked from a challenge, would suddenly arrive at possibly the first moral calculation of her short life so farthat this particular assignment wasn't worth her own, needless demise. Not a great victory for the moral conscience, perhaps. But proof, at least, of selfishness ... and thus, perhaps, humanity. Maybe.

Thunder crashed and boomed, and Sandy paused that fractional extra half-second in case she'd been wrong ... crack! came a shot from the mansion, followed by the unmistakable thud of bullet hitting combat-myomer, and a body rolling on loose earth. Sandy sprinted, and heard the footsteps resume in a rush beyond the descending rumble from the skies. Headed straight for the wall, and Sandy's mind saw immediately the nearest direct line from that last shot, to a leap over the wall behind the shelter of a particularly thick tree. She darted left, opening that projected angle for a shot on the reckoning that Jane, being Jane, would pause for a parting shot or two as she cleared the wall, to remove several S-2 heads and be gone, just to prove she could ... the footsteps ceased with a final spring, and Sandy fired a blind burst through the foliage as she ran, at where that trajectory ought to be ... and thought she heard the thud of a second bullet strike, and an untidy, tumbling thud on the wall's far side.

It was only a little surprising (but extremely annoying) to hear the footsteps resume once more on the wall's far side, with no apparent lessening of pace. Sandy reached the wall herself, and knowing better than to leap headlong over a blind obstacle, she paused. The racing footsteps continued, and she realised it was going to be an enormous disadvantage if Jane could uplink to a complete local map, and she couldn't ... no sooner had she thought it than An's uplink connected with an urgent download, which she accessed with a painfully slow assemblage of incoming data. It finally arrived and decoded within a half-second that felt like an age, and suddenly she could see the basic layout beyond the wall-a garden, a workshed, a swimming pool nearer the mansion before a grand patio.

She ran several steps along the wall, then tensed and leaped, angling for a low clearance and descent behind the work shed ... shots erupted from the patio as she sailed narrowly over the wall, snapping past her legs, then fracturing tiles upon the workshed's roof as she landed with a crunch-atop a small fruit garden with plants climbing short metal stakes that would have impaled her, had she not been a GI. So much for topographical intelligence.

The familiar thud of the launcher came as she sprinted for the corner of the shed ... the round smashed a window and exploded against the rear wall, which blasted flaming debris over the vegetable garden. Another thud, and she fell flat and away from the shed's corner before it too exploded, shrapnel peppering her clothes in a series of sharp, painless stings. Rifle shots then peppered that same corner, exploding stonework walls into puffs of dust and splinters Jane knew basic tactics all too well, and saw Sandy's best firing points in advance. The trajectory of the shots shifted as the source moved along the patio, attempting to open up Sandy's position behind the wall. Sandy flattened her back to the wall, right arm extended, rifle poised, as the shots whipping past that corner drew steadily closer as their angle decreased ...

There came then in the air the thrumming whine of an aircar, a powerful spotlight swinging across the yard toward the patio ... it vanished in a thunder of shots from Jane, and the cruiser rocked wildly. Sandy was already moving, an explosive acceleration toward a leftwards garden wall, unleashing fire upon Jane's position ... but Jane was already gone in anticipation, fallen flat and rolling behind a marble balustrade as Sandy's fire kicked pieces and fragments in all directions. The cruiser's desperate pilot struggled to pull his machine away from danger ... too late, as the launcher thumped again, and the underside of the front field generators exploded. Sandy hit the garden wall with her left side, rifle braced, eyes fixed only on Jane's position, out of sight behind the balustrade foundation as the cruiser spun wildly away, shedding pieces with a shrieking, vibrating whine of failing lift.

Jane would try crawling on her stomach, she knew. The balustrade went upslope along the paved side of a path above the patio. This was the stalemate of GI-versus-GI combat at this high designation-if one had firing position, the other could not expose herself without taking fire. If Jane so much as exposed a length of her finger, Sandy would blow it off well before Jane could hope to get her own shot off. A grenade was a better option, if she had one, but again, if she exposed an arm in the throwing, she would lose it, and the grenade most likely fall in her lap ... or be blown from the sky milliseconds after leaving her hand. But ditto if Sandy ran to a new position that exposed Jane's cover, the advantage lay with Jane to get the first shot off. Maybe. No better than a fifty-fifty proposition, at least ... and GI reflexes being what they were, it was entirely likely they'd kill each other at the same instant. But Jane had been hit at least twice, and maybe more. It must have slowed her, just a fraction of a second. At the speeds Sandy's brain operated in combat, a fraction of a second was an eternity.

Still the cruiser spun, a sideways, airborne pirouette. The grenade had only struck three seconds ago, and the fragments were still falling. But already, to Sandy, it seemed an awfully long time to wait in one location, watching Jane's guessed-at position and waiting for the fool of an aircar to hit the ground ... hopefully in the neighbouring property, which it seemed to be angling for.

Her uplinks automatically received Ari's next transmission, and ... wham! as the attack codes sliced through her newly repaired defensive barriers, Ari's desperate yell ringing in her ear as she flung herself back behind the narrowly angled cover of the garden wall. Even as the secondary barriers engaged, halting the killswitch codes just short of their goal, Sandy's index finger depressed rapidly, spraying fire across the balustrade as she fell. It bought her an extra half second, then Jane's rounds were ripping the wood-planked garden wall to pieces as Sandy covered in a tight, defensive ball, trying desperately to reorder her uplink barriers as the graphical complexity overloaded her vision, a wall of visual network shifting and flickering as codework attempted to counter the penetrators coming through, delaying enough for yet more modulated barriers to reform behind ...

A grenade hit the wall on a shallow angle barely a metre short, burrowing into flayed wood before detonating with a crash of exploding planks and pouring earth. The shockwave knocked Sandy rolling, struggling to bring her weapon to bear, and refocus away from her network chaos before Jane could move across and acquire a clear line of sight ... There was a flash of motion, and more shooting from a new angle, a dark rush as Jane leaped away upslope, then crashed through the window of the mansion. Suddenly the attack barrier faltered, its direct link broken. Sandy saw her secondary barriers surge, a swirling mass of rapid-calculating colour and motion. Primary barriers remodulated, adjusting to the threat as they'd been programmed. They resolidified behind the stranded attack program, surrounding it, and slowly strangling.

Network functions abruptly restored themselves as her defensive barriers got on top of the problem, and no longer required the input of external functions-eyesight recovered, then hearing, then a rush of overwhelming sensation as suddenly, she could think clearly again, as if a crushing weight had been removed. She snap-rolled to a firing crouch, shoulder to the shattered planks as dirt continued to pour through the torn hole, and dust clouded the way. A new dark shape streaked across the upper patio, beside where An's feed had informed her the swimming pool would be, and covered beside the shattered window into which Jane had disappeared.

Rhian, she saw with a zoom of vision, and ran forward, feet digging up clods of earth with the traction as she accelerated. Took a low, flying leap up the garden embankment, over the balustraded path, hit the patio beside the swimming pool and smacked into a controlled collision at sixty kilometres per hour against the wall opposite Rhian ... who, she saw, was holding her pistol left handed, with a bullet-sized hole in the right forearm sleeve of her black jacket.

"Fast, isn't she?" Rhian murmured. Typically, they would establish a tac-net and fight as such, tactically linked and coordinating as a single, two-track unit. Now, that was impossible. And speech, in these circumstances, was painfully slow. "I got her twice, but she's wearing armour."

Against which a mere hand pistol, obviously, would be useless. Probably Rhian's right arm had been the only visible thing to hit around whatever cover Rhian had been using ... and Jane had hit it.

"Careful of the residents," Sandy warned, and they ducked through the broken window together. Broken glass littered the living room, Sandy and Rhian covering opposite sides around the lounge chairs and coffee table, covering opposing doorways by silent reflex. It occurred to Sandy, in a time-stretched flash, that she had no idea who the assigned resident of this house was. All lights were off, normal for this time of night, residents most likely sleeping, safe in the knowledge that Tanusha's most impenetrable security network would protect them from any eventuality.

Rhian cut through the kitchen, wordlessly heading for the far side of the ground floor in case Jane had gone straight out ... only now there was a new sound reverberating overhead, the familiar, rhythmic thrum of hypersonic-bladed fans atop support thrusters. A-9 combat flyers, which meant CDF. Someone must have called.

There came a scream from upstairs, and Sandy shot to the stairwell, hurdling one flight, then rushing smoothly up the next, rifle poised down the tiled hallway beyond. Another scream-a woman's scream, coming from several doors down. Then sobbing, Sandy's hearing caught the words ... ..... please ... don't hurt him ... don't hurt ..." Then a thud of rifle meeting skull, and a second of a body hitting the floor.

"Tell the flyers to move away!" came that cool, familiar voice from down the hall. A new sobbing began-a child's sobbing. Then the screaming wail, perhaps a three-year-old, restrained by an armed stranger, and seeing now his mother (Sandy guessed) lying unconscious on the floor. Sandy moved closer, gliding on silent feet that held her torso as smoothly poised as if on rails. The rifle sought an angle through the walls, ears and mind in hard calculation to try and pinpoint Jane's location within the room by the sound of her voice alone. The fans grew to a harsh roar, surely deafening to unaugmented hearing. Doubtless they were in contact with Ari, and thus trying to contact her.

Ari's signal, then, in her inner ear ... and she took her time, letting her receptor codes analyse and break down the signal key, not wanting a repeat of Ari's last communication attempt. Movement behind her, then, but preceded by Rhian's faint call of "me," Sandy's hearing automatically placing the vocal patterns as authentic. The child's screams grew louder, seeming to shift within the room ahead ... Sandy immediately pictured Jane, weapon in one hand, child in the other arm, moving from window to window for a view.

"Cap," said Rhian as she arrived alongside. "She's got a child." Rhian's tone betrayed more tension than usual for any GI under combat conditions. Stating the obvious was not usual, either. Unless one were Rhian, faced with a predicament from her very worst nightmares, and needing to articulate ... something.

"You've got ten seconds!" Jane shouted. "Otherwise, I'll do it slowly!" Sandy smacked her left arm cast across Rhian's chest before anything suicidal happened. Rhian stared at her, desperately. Sandy accessed Ari's link, and it unfolded with a strange, unpredictably shifting pattern of uniquely tailored encryption that was not regulation at all, but entirely Ari ...