The Ramal Extraction (23 page)

“
Rikotilo de Dió
, they call them—God’s Sickle. Two kilos of razor-edged nastiness.

“In the first few seconds, one of our guys was beheaded,
and a couple others lost hands, or were badly butchered. They knew how to use the things. Three of my squad didn’t make it.

“Once we commenced firing, we chopped them up by the scores.

“I probably shot a dozen fanatics waving those fucking swords in the five minutes before somebody cranked a Hot Screamer Pulse through the crowd and shut it down.

“Afterward, there were a hundred bodies and way more who were seriously wounded, and some of them were surely mine, but I couldn’t tell you which one was the first.

“They all wore those white robes with cowls and scarves across their faces, so telling one from another once we started blasting? No way to be sure.”

The others nodded.

Gramps said, “I was in an MCC during that one, once it got cranked up good. Saw a lot of those sea-of-white attacks on the feeds. They did all look alike.”

“There you go,” Jo said. “My story. And I do have some training I need to go do. See you all later.”

She headed out of the conference room, padded down the hall. Actually, she wanted to try out the new aug in the rain, see how it worked with things being slippery and slidey. She’d strip down to tights and slippers and run through the mud a little, do a systems check. Never hurt to work on different surfaces, in bad environmental conditions. It wouldn’t always be a bright, sunny day on clean plastcrete when the line went hot, and practice might not save your ass in every situation, but it would give you as much advantage as you could give yourself, and that was worth something.

Everything she’d just said to the others about her first military action was true—but it wasn’t the whole truth…

At sixteen, she had been on a field trip with her science class. They’d gone to Adelaide, to the new Extee Museum. Afterward, a few of them went to a local bar that apparently looked the other way when underage customers came in.

Jo had been sitting with a couple of her friends when a guy came over and offered to buy them a drink. He was tall, good-looking, a few years older, maybe twenty, twenty-two, and he had a slick line.

They were impressed, and while she was careful not to drink more than two of anything alcoholic, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been drinking water.

Because he doped her drink.

Things got hazy, and the next thing she knew, she was naked in a cheap room somewhere on a bed on her back with the guy on top of her pumping away. She was aware of it, but she was unable to move.

He turned her this way and that, used her until he was too spent to continue, then got dressed. He walked away laughing.

“Welcome to the big city, Outback. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Come back anytime.”

Hours later, when the drug wore off, she put her clothes on and found her way to the place where the class was staying. She didn’t tell anybody. They assumed she’d gone off on her own and had a good time, and she didn’t say any different, only smiled.

She hated it. Hated how she felt. How helpless she had been.

She vowed that nothing like it was ever going to happen to her again.

She saved some of his DNA. If you had money, there were semilegal ways to ID the person it came from.

Once she was sure she wasn’t pregnant and hadn’t been infected with some disease, Jo took some of the money she’d saved from working in the opal mines the last couple of summers and found an augmentation medic in Port Augusta, a couple of hours’ drive away from her home in Woomera. She wasn’t old enough to have the implant, but she did the research and found out the medic was a drinker and willing to do work to keep himself in booze.

She took the pubtrans bus to town, got herself a room, and went to see the medic.

He was a drunk, but skilled, and the outpatient implant a basic one, what was called CAS, which stood, she learned, for
Citius, Altius, Fortius
—the old Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger…

She was already pretty fit from digging in the mines, but the implant, which included hormones, genes with spliced viruses, and connective-tissue strengtheners, worked just like advertised. A few weeks later, she was half again as strong as she had been, measured by how much weight she could lift; her speed was only 20 percent more on hand stuff, a little less on things like running; and she could only jump about a quarter meter higher than before, but those were enough to bring her up to par with a lot of male unaugies.

She was careful not to let anybody know what she had done. Her parents didn’t suspect; neither did her sister.

A follow-up visit to the medic in Port Augusta showed that everything was working fine and as good as it was likely to get without a lot more training.

The medic was even willing to check the database for a few dollars more and ID the DNA sample she gave him. He had given her a funny look, and at the time, she thought he might have had some idea of what she was up to, but if he did, he didn’t care enough to say anything.

Roxby Norse was the name of the man who had raped her. Twenty-three years old, a resident of Adelaide, SoAus, occupation salesclerk, at the Outdoor Produce Market on Currie Street, near New Light Square. Married, no children, no criminal record. A predator, and not one you’d likely spot looking at his stats.

She spent the next month working on her plan.

She had learned from research that the less complicated something like this was, the better. There were few links that anybody knew about between her and M. Norse, and it was unlikely anybody who knew her would remember him.

She lived in a town five hundred kilometers away from where Norse lived.

She did the research. Ran the maps. Found his place of work, where he lived. She was careful to do it from a computer that didn’t leave ways to backlink it to her, just in case somebody thought to look.

She memorized the maps, sat images, transportation lines, and schedules. It was like studying for an important test, and she’d always been good at that.

She found a place in Port Augusta where she could buy a full-head skinmask retail, no ID necessary. She bought one.

She waited for fall break, when there would be a lot of students out and about.

She mailed a package to herself at a mail drop in Adelaide.

She took a flight to Victor Harbor, well south of Adelaide, and caught a feeder maglev to the big city, buying her ticket with cash and flashing a fake ID she had made herself. It wouldn’t pass a careful check, the ID, but nobody was apt to do that.

In the crush of travelers, nobody gave her ID a second look.

She got to Adelaide, rented a covered trike at the train station.

She rode to the mail drop and picked up her package, using a different phony ID. She stuck the package into a cheap backpack.

She rode and parked the trike two klicks away from where Norse lived. She had determined that the best time and place was when Norse left his cube for work. He was on a night shift, and it would be dark.

In the night, at a ratty public fresher whose camera watching the door had been smashed and not yet replaced, she went into a stall and opened the package. She removed from it the skinmask and put it on. Once it was smoothed into place, she put on an outback cap, an old shirt and sweater,
and baggy pants. She donned thinskin gloves and pulled the last item from the package, an old ball-peen hammer that had belonged to her late grandfather. It had been in a box of tools in the attic of her parents’ house for years. Nobody would miss it, even if they had known it was there.

She tucked the hammer under her sweater, loaded her street clothes into the backpack.

She walked the two klicks to the plex where Norse lived, timing it to arrive half an hour before he was due at work. It was only a ten-minute trip by bus from his place to the market.

It was dark, though the streets were well lit, and she felt conspicuous in her disguise, but nobody paid her any mind that she could tell.

She saw Norse leave his cube and head for the bus stop.

She fell in behind him, far enough back so as not to draw his attention.

There were a few people on the walks, shift-changers going or coming.

She had thought about it long and hard and decided that any kind of righteous announcement, about who she was and why he was about to die, was a bad idea. The walls had ears and eyes, and it didn’t matter that he knew because he wasn’t going to remember it anyway.

She was ten meters back, and the bus kiosk was half a block ahead.

She pulled the hammer from under her sweater, took a deep breath, and sprinted.

The aug kicked her natural adrenaline surge even higher.

At the last moment, he sensed or heard her coming and started to turn, but too late. She smashed his skull with the hammer just over his left ear, felt the bone give and the hammer sink in.

He collapsed, jittering, and she stopped, dropped, and hit him again, five times, all to the head.

Each strike punched through the bone.

By this time, some of the pedestrians and cyclists had seen the attack and somebody would be calling the police.

She came up, put the hammer into her pocket, and took off, her new speed giving her feet wings.

Nobody moved to stop her.

She ran, found the alley she knew was there, turned into it. Ran, cleared the end, made another turn. Ran faster.

There was a small park with a dead zone, no camera, and under a thick bush, she changed clothes, removed the skin mask, and tucked the hammer away in the backpack.

She got back to the trike and climbed onto it, headed for the Grange Street Ferry Terminal.

She caught the next hydrofoil ferry heading for Wool Bay. It was ninety kilometers, an hour-and-a-half trip.

Halfway across and running at speed on the foils, she leaned out over the lower deck rail, used the hammer to weight the skinmask and gloves, and dropped them into St. Vincent Bay.

When the ferry landed, she dumped the rest of her disguise into a recycle bin.

She caught the morning maglev to Victor Harbor, then took the maglev from there to Port Augusta, and finally, the pubtrans bus home.

The StatNet news the next day listed the killing of Roxby Norse in Adelaide. The police had no motive, nor any suspects. Eyewitnesses could add little. One of them indicated that the man who had done it seemed to move really fast, but nobody got a good look at him. There was a partial recording from the bus kiosk, but it was blurry and useless.

And Jo didn’t feel helpless after that…

She went to her quarters, stripped, stretched, and put on her tights and slippers. Time to go run in the rain…

Kay enjoyed the storm. It blocked the sun, cooled the air, yet was warm enough so it was not unpleasant, a giant shower. Running and climbing helped her to work off her frustration at not finding the Rel.

Prey that did not behave as such was disturbing on a visceral level.

Back at the perimeter of the base, the skies still dumping steadily, with strong wind gusts, she became aware of another running in the rain.

The rain washed away scents, and the heavy clouds dimmed the light, but there was no mistaking the other: Jo.

The woman was aware of Kay. She angled in her direction, slowed her run.

“Great day,” Jo said.

Kay nodded. “Good weather for play.”

“Want to dance?” Jo said.

“Yes.”

“I have to warn you—Formentara has given me a new toy. Proprioceptivity enhancement.”

Kay whickered. “Perhaps that will help make it more of a challenge for me.”

Jo grinned.

They were five meters apart, on muddy ground. The footing would be inconstant. If Jo had a way to better augment her balance, that would offer her an advantage; then again, Kay’s feet were clawed, which gave her a better grip.

Jo turned slightly and edged to her right.

Kay mirrored the pose and motion.

When the two fems played, each had strengths that could give her the match:

Jo had more formal training as a fighter.

Kay was slightly quicker.

Jo’s reach was greater.

Kay was more agile.

Both could see deeper into the red and violet than most humans, and both had better hearing and olfactory functions. though the rain would dampen their senses about equally. Of course, at contact range, eyes, ears, and noses were less important than positional sensitivity.

Jo stole a half step toward her.

Kay settled into a lower stance.

In their early matches, Kay had won; the first eight times, she had prevailed. As Jo had gotten more experienced in dealing with Vastalimi tactics, she had taken a few matches. Then, it was every fourth time. Then, one in three. Recently, her skills had improved to the point where Jo could prevail 40 percent of the time.

Four of ten was better than any human had a right to expect in a one-on-one with someone of Kay’s species. Jo was the most adept human opponent Kay had ever played with, and likely as adept as any human who had faced a Vastalimi anywhere. Which was impressive, but still less than her goal.

Any mistake by either was usually the match-ender; both had learned to capitalize on errors, forced or accidental.

In the beginning, Jo could be drawn into traps. Now, she was more wary and apt to offer traps of her own.

Of course, it was but play—claws sheathed, and Jo did not use bioweapons, nor knives or zapwands.

Kay still had the edge, but it was not that much sharper.

Jo slid another half meter closer, switched her feet into an angled left lead.

Kay unfocused her gaze, alert for any giveaway motion. She dropped her stance a bit more. Lower was better in a clinch. Legs bent to spring gave the potential of a farther and higher leap.

Vastalimi usually caught their prey from the side or behind, by bounding for it and launching themselves into a grab. A million years of that was hard to overcome. Of course, they fought each other, the Vastalimi, and thus knew how to deal with an attack rather than fleeing prey, but leaping was part of that, too.