Originator (38 page)

“Kid's right,” Jane said firmly. “I figure they'll pick up our network within a hundred meters, and then they'll target us just like we're targeting them. They've got built-in output, but they rely on the city network for passive reception—otherwise they'd have found us by now. So if we're going to hit them, we can't be too far away from Kiril, or we lose tacnet.”

Because whatever active signal the Talee-GIs were putting out, Kiril's uplinks were converting it harmlessly and processing it for Sandy's much-lower-strength tacnet. In Tanusha, the city network would have registered that tacnet and boosted the signal, allowing Talee to find it easily, and hack them. The Talee's active signal, Sandy reckoned, would be something that found autistic networks or network systems, and turned them on against their will. That would explain how they continually broke into systems that were supposed to be disconnected. But Cai had given her and Jane enough new barrier defence to limit the range of that, and now Kiril . . .

Sandy stared at him. He was muddy, tired, and panting, but uncomplaining. What else did Cai put in there, without telling them? Was what Kiril doing now a new function or not?

“If we're going to do this,” said Jane, “it'll need to be from range. If we're too close they'll sense tacnet and hack us.”

“No,” said Sandy. “I'm better in close, and you're the only one with a rifle.” She looked at the kids. “And you guys had better . . .”

“. . . stick together,” said Danya. “You need Kiril close, but Kiril can't move fast by himself if he has to. It's all of us or none.”

Raylee left the elevator into the lower-level carpark, where several more cars were pulled up, and GIs scrambling to hand out weapons. They'd only been
able to wake GIs from CSA and FSA, mostly, and didn't appear to think “straights,” as they called non-GIs, were worth the effort anyway. Raylee spotted Rhian in light armour and ran to her.

“Rhi, you got anything spare?” Looking at the boot full of weapons, and various light armour being quickly strapped on. “I can help.”

“I'm pretty sure Ari wants you to leave,” Rhian said dubiously, checking grenades in the rapid-magazine on her front armour webbing. “Deb, is that A5 spare?” A GI tossed her a heavy sidearm and magazines, which she tucked into a belt holster.

“Yeah, well, Ari's not my boss.” Her heart was thumping unpleasantly, and she couldn't quite believe what she was suggesting. But she was here now and apparently immune to the infiltration matrix for now, and she couldn't run away.

“What's your combat rating?”

“Standard police course, high marks.” Someone snorted, amidst other conversation. Raylee gave him a dark look. “I know I can't fight high-des GIs directly, I'm not dumb. But you'll need someone running around doing odd jobs, carrying ammo, retrieving wounded. I can do that.”

“You get wounded,” said one of the preparing GIs, “we can't spare another body to help you. Combat assets are worth retrieving, and wounded GIs can still fight, even missing limbs. You can't.”

“I know,” said Raylee. “I get it, I'll stay in the rear and keep out of your way.”

“
Ray?
” It was Ari, cracking in on their channel. “
Ray, don't you . . . Rhian! Rhian, don't be stupid, she's a cop, not a soldier, tell her to get the hell out of there!
”

Rhian turned him off. How Raylee could tell it was Rhian who did it, she wasn't sure. She could just see multiple sensory overlays across her vision. Audio made a small window on the bottom left, somehow synthesising itself across both eyes, not disappearing if she closed either one. Augmented reality just opened if she squinted hard enough, allowing network-uplink of surrounding rooms, and now the GIs' tacnet filled those rooms with friend-or-foe. Everything the network knew, she knew or could find out with a little effort. It was enough to make her head spin. This was what GIs saw, without trying.

“I don't like it either,” said Rhian. Ari tried to break back in. “Ari, either leave her alone or get a different girlfriend.” And cut him off again. And to
Raylee's grateful look, said, “The reason I don't like it is the same reason
he
doesn't like it—I actually like you, and I probably will risk my neck to help if you get hurt.”

“I won't be a burden,” Raylee said firmly. “I'm good under pressure.” She was. The few times she'd been in dangerous situations with criminals, where guns were drawn, she'd made good choices and everything had seemed to make sense. Her augments now were way beyond what they had been then, and problem-solving was always her thing. Surely a whole bunch of combat GIs could benefit from an organic perspective here and there?

“Okay,” Rhian sighed. “We're all big on free choice here, or so Sandy tells me.” She pulled a remaining weapon from a car boot—it was an assault rifle, standard SWAT issue. “Used one of these?”

“A few times on the firing range.” She took it, and it was heavy, but with her more recent augments, heavy didn't bother her.

“First thing, forget about the rifle. Use the grenade launcher if you have to—you know how to ricochet against GIs?”

“I've read about it.”

Another dubious look from Rhian. “Okay, you don't want to get line-of-sight against high-des GIs, because they'll hit you first every time. So rely on tacnet, don't look at them directly, and fire short into walls and bounce the grenade onto them, a half-second impact delay should do it.”

Raylee nodded, mouth dry, and as she activated the rifle's CPU . . . “Whoa.” Suddenly the rifle itself felt like a 3D space opening within her head. And she could see ammo status, barrel temperature, targeting. She put the rifle to her shoulder and got a visual close-up of the carpark's far wall. Exactly the spot where the bullet would hit. “My uplinks are integrating with the rifle. That's incredible!”

“Don't trust it,” Rhian said firmly. “You'll get tech-fixated, that's what we called it in Dark Star when we got some snazzy upgrade we were so impressed with it made us feel invincible. Always remember your opponent's just as high tech, and in this case far more high tech. This won't impress him at all, and it won't stop bullets.

“And remember the mission, mainframe computers are in central building basement. When we fire up Cai's counter-matrix, the Talee will be on it like flies on shit. We keep them out of the basement, simple. Got it?”

“Yeah, we keep them out of the basement.” Raylee glanced toward the open carpark entrance. “Shouldn't we shut that door then?”

“We've got another carload coming from some guys who've rounded up some CSA GIs from their homes. . . .” Rhian glanced at the open door as she spoke . . . and yelled, “Get down!”

Grabbed Raylee painfully and hurled her at the concrete floor as shots erupted, bodies fell, and return fire roared in the confined space. Raylee rolled and scrambled behind the car's front wheels, the combination of wheel and engine assembly the only part of the car that might stop bullets, as Rhian angled her rifle at the ceiling above the carpark doorway, not exposing it, and pumped three grenades. Explosions followed quickly, and Rhian braced above Raylee's head and fired a burst. On tacnet a red dot briefly appeared and died just as fast.

“Got him!” Rhian announced. “High-grade opti-cam, like Cai said!” Raylee rolled to peer past the wheel and saw the oddest sight—a body lying on the ground, flickering like a damaged display screen. One leg twitching amidst the debris from Rhian's grenade explosions on the ceiling above him. More shots from someone else, and the twitching stopped.

The efficiency of it was mind-blowing. Rhian had made the attacker dive for cover with the grenades, so he couldn't shoot, freeing Rhian to pop up and shoot—and in that split-second had probably hit all skull. Suddenly it really hit Raylee why Ari didn't want her here. That any straight human could survive combat at this level, for any period, seemed incredible.

“Four down!” came a yell from one of the other GIs, and Raylee looked the other way under the car . . . four? Sure enough, there were bodies on the ground, GIs who'd just been talking and preparing. Someone else was checking on them. There had been seven plus Raylee . . . and she realised she had to get up, and did that, legs wobbling, overlaid tacnet graphics unnaturally bright upon her vision.

“Good news is they don't seem to be much better combatants than we are,” said Rhian. “Probably a low-to-mid-forties average. Bad news is I could barely see that opti-cam, it's much better than we've got.”

“
I've augmented building sensors to compensate, based on this new encounter
,” Cai added. “
But building-network tacnet isn't reliable, only tacnet from fellow soldiers can be trusted
.”

“Fellow soldiers are going to be dead before they can give tacnet anything,” said Rhian.

Raylee rounded the car's end and found bodies sprawled, two clearly dead with penetrating headshots, one with a glancing headshot and unconscious, a fourth with a chest wound near the throat and struggling to breathe. One GI attended them, while Rhian and the other kept motionless under cover of the carpark entrance.

Another flicker on tacnet, and audio buzzing, voices distant until Raylee focused on the audio, which brought it forward, loud gunfire, explosions, and shouting. A friendly icon disappeared from tacnet, then another.

Raylee put pressure on the chest-shot GI's wound, as the carpark security door rolled down and latched with a thud. Then Rhian raced over.

“I've got it!” Raylee told them all. “You guys go and fight, I'll get these guys patched up!”

And they were gone, no arguing, just racing footsteps to the stairwell. Raylee's hand pressed hard on the wounded GI's chest; it felt like steel. How the hell did you put pressure on a GI's gunshot wound? Blood seeped between her fingers, but not nearly as much as she'd expect with a regular human. And it occurred to her that while she knew first aid like any cop did, she had no idea how much of it would translate to GIs.

“Open your mouth for me!” she told the wounded GI. He looked scared, fighting for breath. That shocked her. This wasn't some synthetic fighting machine, just a young guy in a lot of pain who didn't want to die. “Open!” He did, and there was no blood, and he wasn't coughing it up. “Okay, I don't think it's penetrated to the lungs. You're going to be okay!”

“Can't breathe,” he muttered, still scared. As on tacnet there was yelling and shooting, and terse remarks from Cai and Ragi—they hadn't even turned the counter-matrix on yet, so the Talee must have figured out what was about to happen and hit them preemptively. So now they were turning it on. There were casualties in the outer buildings, as defensive GIs struggled to spot advancing opti-cam. And here she was, like so many grunts in battle, preoccupied with something else entirely while the war raged around her.

She checked the holes—it was a tight grouping of three, one above the collarbone, two below. The one above would have severed the jugular on a
straight, and the two below would have punctured the lung. An attempted neck or head shot, as chest shots would disable but not kill.

“Where is it hard to breathe?” she asked. “Is your chest constricted? Or your throat?” She got no response, his eyes were zoned out with fear and pain, his breaths shallow and gasping. She racked her brain to remember some stuff she'd read about GI physiology . . . assault rifles could penetrate major muscle groupings but would fragment in the process and do no more damage. Internal bleeding wasn't an issue, GI blood was a different consistency and coagulated much faster when the victim was injured. But those muscles contracted to armour density against gunshots, then surely released some of that density . . . but this guy's upper chest continued to feel hard as a rock. . . .

“Shit,” she said as she realised and pulled out her pocketknife—one of those things a cop learned to carry for those unpredictable moments. “Hang on, I'm going to get that bullet out.” It wasn't hard to find, though it had fragmented to several pieces against something hard in the man's neck . . . and when she levered the biggest piece out, he gasped a deep, sudden breath, and she could see the tension relaxing around his throat. “That better? Good, I'm going to get you to cover, you're too exposed out here. . . .”

But the man stopped her and pointed to the unconscious head-shot victim, a woman. Raylee nodded, got an arm over her shoulder, and did a deadlift she'd never have managed before the augments, jogging with the woman's body over her shoulders. She made the stairwell by the elevators, shouldered the door, and deposited the woman inside with a brief check—she looked okay, a gash of white skull visible through the torn skin, and a lot of blood but already coagulating, and if the bullet hadn't penetrated skull she'd be okay.

Back outside the stairwell door, Raylee found the other man had recovered enough to stagger over himself, and he now lay on the stairs beside the woman, tearing off some cloth to attend to her head, with weapons on the steps alongside.

“We'll block the stairwell here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Go.”

She realised she'd left the assault rifle back by the car, ran back to retrieve it, a part of her brain firmly expecting to be shot at any moment despite the carpark security door firmly closed. So much empty space felt lethal, and she wondered if soldiers ever became agoraphobic, so great did their desire for protecting walls and cover become.

Back past the wounded GIs and up the stairs, fumbling with the rifle and surprised that her hands weren't trembling more. Perhaps that was the augments, damping down the worst of adrenaline overreaction—the doctors had given her all kinds of lectures about effects and capabilities, but she hadn't had the opportunity to test half of them and hadn't been game to try many others. The stairwell turned, once and again, and she stopped on the second floor, confronted by that most horrid of urban combat obstacles—a door, opening onto a length of space that could end in an enemy who could put a round through her eye faster than she could blink.