Dyson's Angel Episode 1: Make A Killing Read online

  “Leave the face open and keep the hood up. Put some swagger in your step and you’ll blend in with the crowd.”

  “Swagger,” Moira muttered, shaking her head. She unzipped the face of the suit and pulled the front of the hood down so the top of the opening hung just above her eyes. Zau/Heraxo projected an image from the remora across the street into her vision and Moira allowed the damned hybrid intelligence a little credit. If she slouched her shoulders and walked with a rolling, carefree gait, she might actually look like she belonged in the Azi Zoo hideout.

  Assuming that she did not run into anyone who knew the owner of the suit.

  She helped herself to the unconscious guard’s sidearm, a battered flechette thrower with seven cartridges remaining the magazine, then dumped his body through the window of the pharmacy. The weapon she slipped into a baggy utility pocket on the outside of the suit.

  “Walk in the front like you own the place. Perhaps the {gang members/pitiful humans} within will mistake you for their {friend/homie}, from a distance at least.”

  “I still think I should have just snuck in, but we’ll do it your way,” Moira muttered, louder than was strictly necessary for her subvocalization implant to pick up her words. “And please never say ‘homie’ again.”

  She pushed through the rotating door at the front of the department store and found herself standing in a dimly lit, cavernous space. All of the merchandise had long since been looted and the various mobile walls, display cases, and racks had been rearranged to form a low-walled maze of sorts on the ground floor. Or perhaps it was intended as a series of barricades behind which gang members could hide if ever a firefight broke out in their hideaway. The walls, barricades, and even the floor were covered in a brightly colored, intertwining and overlapping array of art, some of which glowed with a faint chemiluminescence. At the center of the space a pair of crossed escalators rose up to the second level. A wispy fog of stage smoke rolled down both escalators, shot through with stuttering lines of laser light and occasionally flashing to opaque as strobes blasted white light down the escalators.

  To Moira’s left, a remora flitted past her shoulder, shot up to the ceiling, and skimmed across the space just below the level of the battered, sagging composite tiles. An instant later three new yellow tags appeared on the projected map.

  “Three humans are on this level. One is relieving herself in the back left corner, where rudimentary toilet facilities have been established. {You/we} humans can truly be filthy creatures.”

  “You said three?”

  “Two more are closer to your present location.” The map pulled in on two tagged outlines, seemingly laying side by side on the floor beside the elevators, their shaved scalps joined by tangles of glowing white wire. “We believe them to be asleep, likely in a a shared dream state, probably under the influence of one or more of the drugs being synthesized at this location.”

  “Target?”

  “Searching the second floor. You should be able to blend into the crowd until we locate him.”

  Moira glanced down at her suit, which was now seizing in time to the flashes of light from the escalators, and shook her head. “Blend in.”

  Moira ducked her head lower and set off towards the escalators, moving in an unfamiliar rolling stride that she hoped approximated a confident swagger. Dressed as she was, she felt like a psychedelic peacock limping towards a date with a butcher.

  Approaching the escalators, Moira’s implants detected an open network which advertised itself as an experiential immersion hub. She declined its connection request. No telling what sort of mind altering synesthesia the emcee was pumping into the crowd. If it was anything like the previous B8Z performance she had experienced, the sensory crosswiring would be both thrilling and debilitating.

  Climbing the broken escalator, her borrowed suit stuttering wildly as its corrupted software attempted to render the garishly painted surroundings through the thickening smoke, Moira subvocalized to the ship, “Can you analyze the experiental signal without risking yourself? I want to know if I should be following the rhythm of the lights or if there’s a separate soundtrack I should know about.”

  A moment later Zau/Heraxo replied, “We are unable to deconstruct the streams without feeding them through our own cognitive matrix.”

  “Don’t risk that.”

  “We would not have.”

  Arriving at the top of the escalator, Moira turned about quickly as she stepped into the open space. Her implants captured the surroundings and, with assistance from the ship, tagged any potential threats. Unfortunately, the tags turned the entire floor into a seething pile of red and yellow blobs.

  Moira turned towards the greatest concentration of people. Through the smoke, Moira saw a crowd of people in various states of undress gyrating to an inaudible rhythm. Dancers slammed against one another, ran wildly through the crowd, twirled about with their arms in the air, and danced with ghostly forms of holographic aliens. At the center of the crowd, B8Z stood atop a stage constructed from scrap metal and retail display cases. He wore a skintight full-body haptic sleeve, the elastic fabric studded with winking lights and streaming lines of glowing threads. As the crowd danced around him, each of them interfaced with the experiential hub to some extent, the electroactive fibers woven into the suit tightened and loosened, conveying the mood of the crowd to him through subtle shifts in pressure all across his body. His fingers danced across the haptic suit, triggering and manipulating a multitude of sensory effects ranging from the mix of the music he was piping into the dancers’ auditory implants to the mapping of body parts within their minds.

  From the outside, it all looked incredibly weird, as if a crowd of mute performance artists and ghosts had all gathered to worship a matte black fertility god.

  “We have located the target,” Zau/Heraxo said.

  “Give me a visual.”

  “We cannot do that without attracting notice. He is in a private room on the far side of the revel.”

  “Guards at the door?”

  In response, the projected map shifted to show the second floor of the department store. Nearly a hundred human figures tagged in shades of yellow and orange were crowded together at the end of the closest to Moira. On the far side of the crowd, hidden from sight by the gyrating bodies, clouds of smoke, and flashing lights, the map showed a series of small rooms built into the center of the former retail space. In one of these glowed a distinctive purple tag, indicating the location where Bosami Haupt had been spotted. Between him and the escalator, Moira counted seven red figures, including one standing at the doorway.

  “That’s a yes, then.”

  “Thus the camouflage.”

  Moira raised her right eyebrow skeptically, “Would have been nice to get these numbers before I came in alone.”

  “We had to wait for the remoras to get in place before we could get a firm… {that was a lie/just like to keep you on your toes}.”

  Not now, Moira thought. Not freaking now. Conflicts within the Zau/Heraxo personality construct were not uncommon, but generally the fixed attention required by a mission was sufficient to keep the syntellect stable.

  “We’re just going to take a moment to {work out a tactical/not on your life},” Zau/Heraxo’s voice stuttered into incomprehensibility. It returned, still squelching out confused syllables, then collapsed into static and faded away again.

  Then the tactical display disappeared.

  “Zau!” Moira hissed, glancing around her as she stepped away from the escalator. The smoke was so dense that she could only see clearly a couple meters in any direction other than back down the escalator. Lasers pierced the smoke in shafts of brilliant green and blue, their roving interrupted by the pulsation of white strobes. A haze of holographic projections rose up around B8Z as the emcee began to tremble and wave his arms as if possessed.

  “Zau! Heraxo!” she hissed again. Nothing came back to her but a garbled string of noise that might have been the personalities du
eling incoherently over the com unit, or merely a burst of static.

  The projected map flickered for an instant, then returned, accompanied by an icon that told Moira she was operating on internal guidance and processing. She willed her wetware to provide more information and was rewarded only with a terse summary of the seven remoras which remained at her disposal, relaying raw observational data to her personal processing mesh.

  Moira swore under her breath, then grimaced and stepped forward into the crowd. Without the benefit of receiving any signals from the emcee, she could only depend on her enhanced reflexes to read the actions of the dancers and move through without bumping into too many people. Fortunately, everyone seemed more interested in the illusory performance that the emcee was projecting into their minds than in her presence. Indeed, after she had walked about five meters into the crowd, a path began to open in the sea of bodies before her. Moira glanced up at B8Z to see if he was watching her, but the mysterious emcee was not even looking in her direction. Perhaps, she thought, he had detected her presence as a disturbance in the mood of the crowd, and merely directed the dancers away from her path so that they would not be bothered by her passing.

  She successfully avoided the guards who were scattered throughout the crowd of dancers, but as she broke out of the revel and approached the door, Moira was confronted by a guard dressed in cutoff denim shorts and a tattered leather jacket. He launched himself from the wall where he had been leaning and gripped the stock of the automatic rifle slung across his chest.

  Cocking his head to one side, the guard called to her, speaking in the peculiar cant shared by many of those who had grown up on the outskirts of Covington society. “Oi! Wassa doin hup er?

  Moira raised her hand in greeting, then let it swing down and casually rest on her leg, just outside the pocket in which the flechette gun was stowed.

  “Ain’ ja signed ta gard ta dur?”

  “Got a message for Bosami,” Moira said, slipping her hand into the external pocket of the camouflage suit.

  “Ja ain’ Duncan!” the guard exclaimed. His hands tightened on his weapon and he began to raise his weapon, but he was not fast enough. No minimally enhanced soldier in a gang was likely to be fast enough to stop her.

  Moira blinked.

  In the space of that blink she gave over control of her fine motor skills to the combat wetware wired throughout her body. Her balance shifted and her hand darted into the pocket of her active camouflage suit, emerging with the flechette gun faster than most people could even have seen. She felt a subtle adjustment in the angle of her wrist, then her finger squeezed the trigger and a flechette round shredded into the face of the guard. He fell and Moira blinked again, regaining conscious control of her body before the dead man had struck the floor.

  She leapt forward and slammed her booted foot into the flimsy door that led back into the dressing rooms. The cheap composite wood shattered and Moira dove forward, tumbling into room and coming up with the flechette gun raised.

  Bosami Haupt twisted beneath the woman who sat astride him, reaching for the gun that lay poking out from beneath a pile of discarded clothes beside his filthy mattress. The woman continued ride the gang leader, lost in her own world of sex and drug induced bliss. Judging from the trails of animated tattoos running down either side of her spine, the woman was an organized crime groupie from Covington proper. Probably not a threat, unless the drugs caused her to flip.

  Moira aimed and squeezed the trigger, shredding the pile of clothing and sending Bosami’s gun skittering across the stained carpet. Flecks of concrete subfloor and shattered flechettes ripped into the mattress and cut into the skin of the couple atop it. Bosami grunted in pain and bucked, thrusting his bedmate up and throwing her back so she fell off of him and sprawled onto the floor at the foot of the mattress, where she continued to moan ecstatically and thrust her hips into the air, seemingly oblivious to what had happened, despite the blood seeping from wounds in her leg and side.

  Moira stepped closer, pointed the flechette gun at Bosami’s head and leaned over him, looking down into his dark eyes as she whispered, “Come with me quietly and you’ll be fine. Make a scene and I take your head off. Got it?”

  Bosami sneered, but nodded. “You won’t make it out of here alive,” he said.

  “I might surprise you,” Moira said. She stood and, keeping the gun trained on Bosami’s chest, stripped off the camouflage suit. She kicked it over to him and said, “Put it on.”

  The gang leader grinned and swung his feet around to rest on the chipped concrete floor. “Can I stand?”

  “Stay down there. Get the suit on.”

  “Hard to do that without standing.”

  “Harder still without your face. Now put it on and sit there.” Moira spared a glance for the woman, who still appeared to think she was coupled with Bosami. Clearly not a threat.

  Bosami grunted and began pulling the animated material up over his brown, tattooed skin. “Covington send you here? You some sort of bounty hunting bitch? Or you from those Flame Social frakers?”

  “That isn’t your concern.” Moira tried to signal for Zau/Heraxo, but the ship ignored her message. She inwardly swore at the syntellect, but kept her face steady. “Now stand up and put your hands behind your back. Get up against the wall.”

  Moira pulled a restraint strap from her side pocket and slapped it around Bosami’s wrist. He made to turn around then, but she drove her fist into the back of his skull, slamming his face against the wall. “Don’t even think of it.”

  She pulled an interface disruptor from another pocket and slammed it around his neck. One the floor beside them, the woman stopped moaning and opened her eyes. “Bose? Bose, what happened?” she pleaded.

  “Your man’s got somewhere else to be kid,” Moira said.

  The woman’s eyes dropped out of focus and she collapsed, then crawled towards the mattered, muttering to herself.

  Moira grabbed Bosami’s wrists and pushed him out the splintered door. As they passed the body of the dead guard Bosami said, “How many did you kill?”

  “Only that one, so far. Come with me quiet like or there will be more.”

  “Definitely Covington. Fraking Flamers want me dead. Let’s make a deal. What you say to that?”

  “Shut your mouth, that’s what I say.”

  They pushed through the crowd, Moira keeping the flechette gun pressed tight against Bosami’s spine and her eyes scanning the crowd of bodies. So far the guards had not reacted, so they clearly did not have a good panic system in place. Still, even Bosami kept quiet, she was now walking through a crowd with a high-powered rifle clearly slung over her shoulder.

  As they approached the center of the crowd, Bosami craned his head around and spoke over this shoulder at her. “You donking shade mercs and cops all have the same weakness. You look at us sunnies and ja tink we stupid jest beku we tak odd. Jest beku we donai follow you fooken law.” Bosami stopped walking and turned his head until he could see Moira out of one eye. “But we aren’t stupid. My techs are as good as any you have. We’ve heard of interface disruptors.”

  “Yeah?” Moira snapped, shoving him through the crowd towards the escalator. “You gonna tell me you’ve got some magic tech that’ll override them?” She sent another query to Zau/Heraxo. No telling if the gang leader was just screwing with her, but she needed to get out of this place. When the ship didn’t respond she sent a query to the remoras. The ones in this building were available to her, ready and waiting to strike, but those outside the structure had fallen off the mesh.

  “No. But I am telling you that the party is over.”

  Moira glanced around and saw that many of the people immediately surrounding them had stopped dancing and were even now forming a ring of muscled bodies surrounding them.

  This is not going to be pretty, she thought.

  “Takedown exit path,” she shouted.

  The seven remoras still under her command immediately fired a burst of da
rts, striking fourteen of the gang members who stood between Moira and the escalator. It wasn’t enough, she knew, but the surprise was more important than the number. She drove Bosami forward, knocking aside the stunned men and women.

  The tactic proved more effective then she had hoped. As the drugged targets collapsed, many of them took down one, two, even three of their fellows. Bosami or some other gang member might have interrupted B8Z and alerted the crowd, but the revelers were still suffering the aftereffect of the experiential performance. Reaching the end of the line of darted revelers, Moira was able to push Bosami forward through the crowd with only minimal resistance.

  “Takedown armed threats then exit path,” she called.

  The drones responded by firing their second wave of darts into the armed guards first, then striking more of the partygoers in her path.

  “Sweep ahead, path home,” she commanded the remoras. The small units darted down the escalator and out of the building, some of them hovering in the air on their micro grav drives, others scuttling down the escalators on insectile legs. As Moira shoved through the last of the crowd, she received pings telling her that five more guards had been struck with darts along the path back towards the ship. That left only nine remaining darts, unless she was able to gain control of the other drones again. She hoped that would be enough to get back to the ship without resorting to her rifle.

  Arriving at the top of the escalator, Moira shoved Bosami forward so hard that he stumbled, lost his footing, then caught up against the handrail and started sliding and rolling down the steps. The active camouflage, already confused by the lights and smoke, convulsed with a disorienting series of collapsing patterns. Glancing back, Moira saw that more of the dancers had begun to recover from their stupor and several were moving towards lockers at the side of the room. If they were retrieving weapons, that could be bad for her.