Legacy of a Mad Scientist (45 page)

Ash slowly stood behind the counter, surveying the
damage. The doors had been blown from their hinges and lay out in
the lobby. Soldiers lie twitching and groaning or still.

Ash boldly walked toward the garage. She picked up
the first loose weapon she came across, a tactical shotgun, similar
to the one downstairs.

She clicked the safety off.

The smoke hung in the air the way the ringing hung in
her ears.

Ashley approached the first soldier.

He lay at her feet and moaned. Blood ran from his
face and ears.

Ashley pointed the shotgun at his head and squeezed
the trigger. It erupted with a boom. She ejected the spent shell
and chambered another, as Ross had shown her.

As she came toward the next man, he objected to the
best of his ability, raising his hands and crying, "No, no,
no?"

"Who sent you?" Ashley asked, aiming the shotgun at
his face.

"Command," he admitted. "We have legal warrants!" The
soldier turned his face away from the gun, tension knotting his
features.

"Who?" Ashley demanded.

"We were cleared at the top! National Intelligence
Director."

Ashley raised the collapsible stock of the shotgun to
her shoulder, aiming in. "What's his name?"

"Director Stanwood! Director Stanwood!" he
screamed.

Ashley fired.

The name rang in her head, forever chiseled into her
memory by the concussion of the blast.

She walked to each of the soldiers in turn.

From those who were already dead, Ash collected
weapons and ammunition. If they were awake enough to answer, she
asked who sent them. Some answered her honestly for which she
granted them a quick and merciful release from their pain.

Some soldiers showed a bit more fortitude and refused
to answer. They were rewarded with the loss of a limb. Either way,
the end result was the same. When the shotgun ran out of shells,
she picked up another.

Occasionally she heard the sound of explosives from
some other section of the hotel, but no one interrupted her until
she'd finished.

Even Geoff had gone quiet.

Over and over again Ashley heard the names Stanwood
and Von Kalt. When her head stopped ringing, it was her own name
she heard being repeated by a little voice inside her head.

"Ashley, do you hear me? Ash? Ashley?" Geoff
struggled to be heard her small earphone. "There are more of them
coming! You have to get out of there!"

Ashley was all the way across the garage; close
enough to where the soldiers breached the wall to enjoy a
refreshing breeze blowing in from the night outside. Ashley stepped
closer. The fresh air smelled incredible after the stale motel.

Two soldiers suddenly appeared before her, hanging on
spider-lines.

Ashley raised the shotgun and fired, causing them to
vanish in an explosion of lead and smoke.

Ashley turned and sprinted from the garage.

“It’s okay,” Geoff said. “It’s okay. They pulled back
for a second.”

Ashley slung the shotgun and sprinted for the
kitchen. She collected as many extra bomb-pots as she could carry
and returned to the garage. She armed four pots, and set them in
series before the gaping hole.

Geoff spoke up over her earphones. "They’re shifting
their approach. Coming from the units, number five, they're
coming."

Ashley sprinted across the garage and again into the
kitchen. She grabbed a few plastique-and-nail-packed glasses and
crept toward the doors to the lobby.

From behind the counter she peered into the hall.

It was empty.

Ashley slipped around the counter and toward the
larger doorway.

Number five's doors had already been blown from their
hinges.

Three men stepped from blasted room into the
hall.

They carefully picked their way past several of the
tripwires.

Ashley was trapped, and she knew it. There was no way
she could escape without drawing them after her. From here, if they
were careful, they could follow her all the way to the
basement.

Ashley took a deep breath and stepped out to confront
them.

They hesitated at the sight of a child standing
before them, even if she did have a shotgun strapped across her
back and her hands full of what appeared to be improvised
explosives.

The soldiers lowered their weapons.

Ashley narrowed her eyes and tossed the glasses at
the soldiers and dove for the kitchen as the barrels of their guns
came up.

The moment stretched into slow motion.

The soldiers sprayed the area with bullets.

They missed Ashley but detonated the charges flying
toward them.

The burning shrapnel ripped into them.

Ashley rose to discover there was no one left for her
to interrogate.

Ashley collected as many of the glasses as she could
carry and rushed from the kitchen, through the admin offices and
down the basement stairwell, setting the charges behind her as she
went.

From the units above she heard several more
detonations. She waited, crouched to the side of the rigged door
leading to her brother and their escape transport.

She waited, listening.

The explosions had stopped.

After a few moments of silence, Geoff whispered over
the phone, "All clear. They're pulling out. They said they lost
enough for one evening."

"I'm going to double check," Ashley said, creeping
back up the stairs.

"Okay, but be careful, they could still be
alive."

Ash made a careful second sweep of the units.

For any found alive, she had one question…
Who
sent you?

Stanwood
or
Von Kalt
was always the
answer.

Ashley's mercy was consistent and quick. She didn't
think about it. She didn't wonder if she was doing the right thing.
She didn't care if Geoff or her parents might disapprove. She
didn't care if the enemy was listening over their radios.

It did occur to her that they were answering too
easily; almost as if she were asking, "Who's the President of the
United States?" The soldiers didn't seem to be giving up
secret
information
in their betrayal of their superiors.

Once she’d cleared the upper floors, Ash collected
their weapons and ammunition, carrying it all downstairs. She lined
the walls of their command center with shotguns, assault rifles and
pistols.

Ashley used their grenades to replace some of the
spent munitions, re-wiring the kill zones and booby-trapping
several of the bodies.

She and Geoff didn’t discuss the situation as she
busied herself with the tasks at hand.

Once she finished, she took a seat next to him,
scanning the monitors, behind the table and the giant armor plate
set in front of it.

Ash didn’t realize she’d drifted off to sleep until
Geoff woke her.

"Ross is here," he said.

A moment later Ashley's phone alerted her with an
incoming call.

Thursday, July 30, 2308

Chief Warrant Officer Reid called Major Ross, “Sir,
we just got our asses handed to us! Snow is out, and I’m limping
back to Montrose on a residual charge. I hope you guys are on your
way back?”

“What do you mean? You’re leaving them alone?!” Ross
shouted in reply from the passenger seat of the speeding transport.
“Chief, I need you to put Snow on auto-pilot and turn around
immediately!”

“They bought in five Maxwells, Major. I’m happy to go
back, you know that. But Captain Snow and I are both
Last
Legs
. If she doesn’t get some medical attention… Well, her suit
isn’t going to save her.

“We knocked out both the remaining wolves, but we
lost one of the gun-trees and this one isn’t going to make it very
far. I hope you wired Vinnie up tight, because whether I go back or
not, it is locked down.”

“Do not go back, Chief. Do you hear me?” Croswell
said. “Their orders are to take the children alive. They won’t go
in heavy-handed. Proceed to rally point Montrose. We will meet you
there.”

“I called the Preacher, and the rest of Charlie team,
none of them are any closer than twelve hours. I also activated a
despooler on Ashley’s Micronix, so whatever signals are bleeding
out of St. Vincent’s they won’t be able to record them. We need to
get to work on jamming that scanner of Bergstrom’s or even if they
do manage to escape, it won’t be for very long.”

“Are you still streaming those signals, Chief? Can
you forward them to us?”

“Hey, is this true? Phillips’s dead?” Reid asked.

“I asked you to forward the signals, not scan the
latest headlines.”

“Copy, sir. Mirroring to your amplifiers now.”

Von Kalt regained control of the battle suit, but
there was no returning to the fight. He’d expended most of his
ordinance, and he was bleeding altitude. He was still considerably
higher than most of the hanging city, but unless he moved inland,
sooner or later he was going to drown.

The alarms ringing in his head made listening to the
progress of the assault on Saint Vincent’s impossible. If he didn’t
get out of the suit soon, he wouldn’t.

Von Kalt crashed into the courtyard of an abandoned
shopping center, shattering the marble tiles under the wolf’s heavy
terillium-armor plates. He triggered the ejection handle and the
suit blasted him across the parking lot, the parachute unfurling
behind him. Von Kalt tucked and rolled as he crashed to the
courtyard tiles. The guidelines, and kevlar-terillium chute,
wrapped around him like Cleopatra in a carpet.

The battle suit, no longer occupied with protecting
the meat-puppet pilot, attempted to right itself and exploded.
Fiery shrapnel hit the deputy director hard enough to bruise him,
but didn’t rip through the chute.

A few minutes later he’d extricated himself and taken
a cooler seat across the courtyard. The sky-mall gave Von Kalt a
perfect view of the ongoing hostilities at St. Vincent’s. The
Maxwell vehicles hung overhead like vultures, while white and
orange flashes sporadically erupted from the motel, followed by
billowing plumes of smoke and tongues of fire.

His ears had only just stopped ringing when his
communicator took up the challenge. It was Stanwood.

Von Kalt accepted the call but didn’t speak.

“Oh my God, what happened to you?” Stanwood
asked.

It must have been clear, given his beaten, battered
and burned visage, that all was not well. He didn’t answer but
looked back to St. Vincent’s.

“I’m monitoring form my end, I’m glad that’s you down
there. A rescue craft is inbound.”

Von Kalt looked back to Stanwood’s holographic image
projected before him.

“Phillips is dead. Croswell and Ross were in the
room.”

Von Kalt took a deep breath. He didn’t say a word,
but his glare spoke volumes.

“Conway has ordered you to stand down. He wants you
to call back the Maxwells. Apparently Fox, the sick fuck that he
was, implanted his own kids with five-kiloton failsafe
devices.”

Von Kalt broke his silence. “So what? They’re in the
middle of nowhere.”

“The order was for them to be taken
Alive
,
Director.”

Von Kalt looked at the burning motel and the hovering
assault vehicles. He snapped the communicator closed and tossed it
over the nearby ledge.

Ross returned to St. Vincent’s at dawn. The sun's
first rays revealed the extensive damage to the exterior of the
motel, highlighting the wholesale carnage on the balconies. He
noticed that several of the soldiers had been blatantly wired with
explosives, right where they lie, like some macabre battlefield
joke.

Ross triggered the remote for the garage doors and
was greeted by the sight of a dozen more dead soldiers, dead and
still wet. He noticed that none of them were armed and doubted they
had arrived that way.

He took the cruiser off autopilot and found a section
of floor where he wouldn't be setting the transport on top of a
corpse.

The major cautiously picked his way past Ashley’s
hasty-ambush lines and made his way to the basement.

He dialed the phone, but Ashley was already there,
disengaging the shotgun and opening the door.

Ross killed the call and entered. He did a double
take at all the assault rifles and handguns. He met Ashley’s eyes
but said nothing.

Ross, Croswell, and Reid had all caught the
same-streamed bits of Ashley’s interrogation of the prisoners.

Where was he supposed to start that conversation?
Don’t break the fifth-wall? God give me strength.

"I have the papers. It’s time to go," he said.

"But we know who did it! We have evidence!" Ashley
said.

"What evidence?" Ross asked.

"Their confessions! They told me..."

"Before you blew their faces off?" he asked.

Ashley hesitated to answer the obvious flaw in her
logic.

"None of these cameras are spooling, so there's no
recording of their confessions, and lucky for you, there's no
recording of their executions."

Ashley had no reply.

"Now. Let's get out of here," Ross said.

Von Kalt had never called off the assault. Stanwood
had been forced to take remote control of the op all the way from
D. C. The deputy director couldn’t have cared less.

As Stanwood had promised, one of the Maxwells broke
off and stopped to pick him up. He made no effort to board the
flying pig. Two sergeants had to run out and half-drag half-walk
him aboard.

The Guard Commander was incensed. He wanted to rescue
the wounded or at least recover the deceased. He swore that this
wasn’t over.

Apparently suffering from shock, Von Kalt made no
attempt to reply.

They reached the armory sometime later, and Von Kalt
was taken directly to the medical ward and treated for his
injuries.