Molehunt (12 page)

Grimm smiled at her apparent distress.

Idiot
, she thought.
Now to break his rhythm, shock him. Shock the mole, too. He's up in the stands, no doubt of that
.

She stepped into Grimm's kill zone, and for a split second was completely vulnerable, but even as he reacted she dropped to the ground, kicked out and swept him off his feet. Grimm went down hard, winded. Anneke was up in a blink and had her sword at his throat. His eyes widened.

‘Kill him or duel,' said the umpire.

Anneke stepped back. ‘Let's be sporting about this. Duel.'

Grimm managed a weak smile though his eyes blazed with shame and humiliation. He snatched the projectile weapon off his second and, muttering, marched off 20 metres. When he turned to face her his expression had changed completely.

He looks triumphant
, Anneke thought.
Like he's already won. The weapons have been tampered with
.

‘Are you ready?' asked the umpire, peering at each of them in turn.

Grimm nodded curtly.

Anneke said, ‘Shoot.'

Both raised and fired with the speed of a striking snake. Both gasped with pain as they were struck, jerked with the impact, then fell. Anneke clutched the wound, but did not seem to be in any pain. Grimm was writhing in agony.

Anneke started to sit up, then something inside her chest detonated.

The explosion literally ripped her apart. Bits of bloody flesh, bone and ruptured organs were raining down, and thudding to the ground. The umpire and seconds were splattered with blood, and what was visible of the umpire's face was white with shock.

A great gasp went up in the stands. People surged to their feet, booing, shouting, and demanding that something be done.

An official marched onto the field, his face livid with rage. He ordered that the wounded merc be seized.

‘Never in my life,' he said over and over again. ‘I'll find out who did this if it's the last thing I do. You people there. Inside. Return to your apartments. The police will want to take a look at this.'

Anneke's second went directly to the secluded apartment, closed the door, then unbuttoned the bloody habit and threw back the cowl to reveal Anneke Longshadow. With the habit removed she was wearing only briefs and an actuator web. She re-activated the web for a moment and winked at the mirror. Out on the field her decapitated head winked seductively, and a young games official very nearly reached the sanitation cart before vomiting messily. She slipped the actuator web off and shoved it into a backpack.

Only now did she make a call.

‘Shaker? It's me. Everything went fine – your web bypassed their blockers. You might want to come and pick up the pieces and staple them back together for the revival vat. I'll stash the control web in the usual place. Oh, and remember, you salvage anything and the price comes down next time I need my doppelganger, okay? Sure, I owe you. Bye.'

Anneke dressed in moments, then pulled on a wig, darkened her skin several shades and made her eyes an aqua blue. She raised a large mole on her cheek near the corner of her lips. Some people said it made her look provocative, but she liked the symbolism: a mole for mole hunting.

She pinned a shield to her top. It showed a picture of the new Anneke and declared that she was a security official in the employ of the Empire Coliseum. Once she was outside she made her way to her hired skimmer, climbed inside, locked the door and polarized the windows.

She opened the tracker.

The idea had come from Kilroy's worm. Kilroy was seriously behind the leading edge, and he was not particularly bright in the first place. The recording cube she had given him was impregnated with i-bots, tiny enough to penetrate human skin. Once inside his body, the i-bots followed their programming and constructed a unique biochip worm, a machine that was both organic and inorganic. It also emitted a signal in an old-fashioned part of the electromagnetic spectrum: FM radio.

Anneke turned on her tracker and a green pulsing dot appeared on the screen.

‘Gotcha,' she said. ‘Now the hunter becomes the hunted.'

She put the skimmer into gear and drove slowly. If her plan worked – if the simulacrum that she had been directing from underneath her habit an voicing via the mike succeeded in fooling the mole – then she had a window of opportunity. The mole would believe she was dead. He might let down his guard a little, and then she would kill him. If he did not … at least she would have learned something.

It made sense that Kilroy and the mole would meet up after the fight in the coliseum. Anneke had no doubt that Kilroy had been watching also, but doubted that he had been seated near the mole. Nobody was that stupid.

Kilroy's signal was loud and clear on the tracker. From the signal's profile, he seemed to be in a moving vehicle. Anneke brought her skimmer into a parallel track with his, one block east and one behind.

Too easy
, she thought, then berated herself.
Too easy is always a trick
. She had to assume that Kilroy knew he was being followed, and that the mole had seen through her puppet show.
I need a fallback plan
. The mole wouldn't be expecting one. He would be too confident, and that was a fact. In her heart she knew the mole had been fooled. She would have been. She wanted the mole dead so badly she could taste it.
Bad attitude. Emotional people don't live long
.

Kilroy's vehicle stopped. Anneke parked a block away and tracked Kilroy into a warehouse cluster that fronted the industrial section of the port. She closed the distance between them in time to see him meet a robed and hooded figure. They talked briefly and the hooded figure slipped something to Kilroy, who got back in his skimmer and drove away.

Keeping to cover, Anneke hurried to the back of the warehouse.
Nobody with the mole's profile leaves by the front door
. As she moved into the shadow of a container she spotted him jumping down from the loading bay. They were in a roofed lane, long and doorless. The figure was half way along with nowhere to hide. There could be no better time or place.

She took aim with her zip gun. For a second her crosshairs sat squarely on the figure's back and her finger to the side of the tab was white with pressure. She wiped sweat from her eyes, but a red haze of hatred blinded her.

At the last moment as she depressed the tab, she jerked the gun down, and a section of pavement exploded. The figure whirled and stood frozen.

‘That was a warning shot,' Anneke shouted. ‘Make one move and you're dead.'

The mole had been taken by surprise, but recovered more rapidly than any human should have.

‘Well, well, Ms Longshadow, back from the dead.' His voice had the odd, unsettling quality of a voice camouflager. ‘I have to hand it to you, you had me
completely
fooled.'

‘That was the idea.'

‘Now what?'

‘I could have killed you with that shot.'

‘Why didn't you? I would have.'

‘Maybe that's why.'
Why am I doing this?
Anneke asked herself.
Kill
him!

The mole gave a single bark of laughter. ‘So you're taking me in?'

‘Take off the hood. I want to see your face.'

The mole stood his ground for a second then slumped slightly. Slowly he reached up and grasped the two edges of his hood. The next moment he was enveloped in a cloud of thick smoke.

‘Damn!'

Anneke opened up with her zip gun, squeezing off a volley of shots. None penetrated her quarry's garment, which shimmered and passed through a laneway wall, leaving a crumbling outline.

Bush nanobot cloak, Moravec device
.

She shoved through the hot chalky hole left by the billions of the mole's articulated disassembler nano–branches, then raced up the lane. A sewer grating lay discarded on the pavement, leaving the hole gaping. She dropped a stun pellet into the opening. It detonated, shaking the ground and punching a wave of stench up into the air.

The sound of rats squealing came from somewhere below. ‘Which one of you is the mole?' she muttered to herself as she dropped into the hole and headed for the disturbance.

The rats were everywhere, and a dead giveaway for both of them.

‘You don't give up, do you, Anneke?' the mole's filtered voice echoed eerily through the tunnels.

‘You killed my uncle.'

‘I wouldn't have had to if you hadn't interfered.'

Was it her fault that Uncle Viktus was dead? Damn that.

Your curiosity will get you killed one day
, Uncle Viktus had once warned, smiling and tousling her hair. He had been wrong. Her curiosity had killed him, but would he have wanted it any other way?

She forced herself to keep going, wading through water and past plump sewer rats, her vision blurring as she fought back tears from the stench and guilt.

‘How many lives you have got left now, Anneke?' came the mole's taunting voice again, seeming further away.

‘Enough for you,' she answered.

Suddenly she stepped out into a wide cavern and stumbled, nearly losing her balance. The stumble saved her life. A chunk of wall to her left burst into a hissing cloud of steam.

‘You know what I've got here, Anneke? A needler. Maybe you ought to back off for today.'

A needler. One of the prohibited weapons of the Old Empire.
A weapon of nightmare
, a tutor had once described it,
from a barbarous age
. Still, a dead man with a needler was as dead as any other dead man.

Anneke sent off several return shots, and dodged into another tunnel as more sections of wall burst around her. Tiny shards of stone slashed at her. She felt blood trickle.

That's when she saw it, sitting in shallow water. The discharge flash from one of the mole's shots illuminated it. She lunged, snatched it up, and then dived across into another tunnel. As she had expected, the mole thought she would return to her cover. A blast sizzled past behind her.

That's one more lesson learned about you
, she thought.

In the new tunnel she glanced at her prize. It was an e-pad, dropped by the mole when he stumbled into the larger cavern.

‘Well, it's time to say bye-bye now,' came the mole's voice. ‘I'm sure we'll meet again.'

‘You dropped something, Mole.'

‘I never drop anything.'

‘Even your e-pad?'

A very satisfying cry of dismay echoed through the sewers behind Anneke as she slipped away.

M
AXIMUS limped out of the sewer.
Limped
. He glanced at the ugly red burn on his leg, scowling. The bitch had winged him with a lucky shot. A shot in the dark. It had to have been lucky.

The loss of the e-pad hurt him a lot more. Losing both his legs at the hips would have been better than losing his e-pad.
Inexcusable
!
You deserve to die for that sort of carelessness
.

It almost seemed as if the universe itself had turned against him.

Well, he would show the universe!

Back at his safe house in the Draco Quarter, he pumped a cocktail of painkillers and neural stimulants into his bloodstream, cleaned up his leg, and then sat down at his console. Three clicks confirmed that the tracking device built into the e-pad had been disabled.

What to do? Hijack a warhead and nuke the city? Tempting, but if she knew my profile well enough to find me, she would know I might do it. The e-pad could be in orbit, underground, anywhere
.

A huge cat's eye appeared on the screen. As Maximus's jaw began to drop open, the pixelated eye slowly winked at him.

Very funny, ha ha
.

Well, he had a joke or two of his own. For one, he had tied a subtle launcher to the deactivation cycle of the tracker. Whenever the tracker was neutralised, a self-randomising algorithm was immediately launched. This algorithm would fragment the already encrypted data. A clever and sustained effort to decrypt the e-pad's data might still throw up random fragments.

Touché
, Ms Longshadow.

Yet there was no way to know which fragments. She was clever, and she had proved that she was into sustained efforts. He slammed his fist down on the desktop. He had to be more careful.

His next e-pad would feature a thermal charge keyed to his own neuro-EM signature. If the pad left his person for five minutes it would turn itself into a molten blob of uselessness. Yes, that was it … but he might go through a lot of e-pads.

Still, it was incentive to be careful
.