Chapter Eighteen

The next section of the cooling tower was a lot more straightforward. With the overwhelming press of specters taken down, and all the teams dialed in, it took about fifteen minutes for us to clear our way up to the last third of the tower’s height.

This section was again concrete, or something similar, reinforced with inlaid steel mesh and molecular bonding, meaning that without a lot more powerful explosives than we had, there was no way we were getting out without going all the way to the top.

The stairwell ended in a door, one that when it was opened exposed a reasonably wide corridor, with doors on both sides. As we moved deeper in, we checked the rooms, finding that aside from several specters that seemed to have gotten lost and trapped behind a couple of overturned desks, they were all empty.

“You think it’s done?” Liolet asked softly, on the command line as we started up a set of stairs to the next level. “You think we might have finished them all?”

“Not likely,” Timur growled. “Something was commanding them, something was making them a hell of a lot smarter than they usually are and…”

I opened my mouth, wondering if I should mention the basement. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but maybe the trio of ghouls that had been—

My thoughts and Timur’s mouth were cut off as a massive blade, spinning at an insane rate, dissected the short human, cutting through him, armor and all, across the chest, just below the nipples.

His body crashed to the floor in a fountain of blood, as a pair of ghouls stepped out of concealment at the top of the stairs, opening fire into the massed group of us with rifles.

We responded quickly, training overcoming the shock and horror, but it wasn’t fast enough.

Timur was dead.

Even nanites, as magical as they were, couldn’t stitch him back together when he’d been cut in two. Three others died in the stairwell as well, one of them Timur’s partner, who’d been standing next to him, staring in shock, and then shot in the head by a ghoul.

The majority of us were protected by Timur’s people, as they climbed the stairs ahead of us, but the stairwell erupted into pandemonium as we all tried to return fire, hide, or deal with the casualties.

The two ghouls were hit multiple times, but it wasn’t until one of Timur’s surviving assault shotgunners opened fire on full auto, that they were taken down.

These fuckers had been in body armor, with good helmets, and that had kept them in the fight far longer than they should have lasted.

The next floor was soon covered in blood, as we set up a triage section, eight of the group had been hit, four killed, including poor Timur.

Thankfully there weren’t many specters waiting on this floor.

This time though, Todds set up his stealth gear and fucked off ahead, returning a few minutes later with news that the next stairwell had a similar blade, but that when we were ready he’d take it out.

There were also, he thought, two more ghouls waiting at the top of this stairwell.

So he’d set up a grenade on a remote trigger near the top of the stairs, ‘just in case’.

As soon as we were all ready, I took the lead, and sent him ahead to disconnect the blade. The rest of us waited by the bottom of the stairs, with Reign braced and ready with her solid slug sniper rifle.

Todds disarmed the trigger for the blade, and returned to us, before I called out in a loud voice.

“OI DICKHEADS!”

That was all that was needed, any sound would have been enough I imagined, but as it was the pair stepped out, again in full body armor and helmets… but Reign shot the one on the right in the face before it could open fire, the high powered sniper rifle taking the back of its head off with a solid crack.

The one on the left was sent flying backwards as the frag grenade on a makeshift trigger was set off by Todds.

By the time we made it to the top of the stairs, the ghoul was almost on its feet, but due to the whole ‘having no arms and only half a head’ it really wasn’t a threat.

Todds shot it in the head and finished it off, before quickly scavenging it for ammo.

We’d taken to doing that since we’d met the others, and we’d also cross loaded the ammo from the dead. It felt wrong, like taking Scott’s battery had done, but it was also the right thing to do, and we all knew it.

An hour more, several dozen small encounters, a single specter here, a group there, and we could hear the wind and the rain from somewhere up ahead.

It wasn’t exactly subtle, letting us know that once again, the final stage of this fight was going to be in the maze and no doubt broadcast to all comers.

“Before we reach the top people, remember that the client has paid for access to your feeds, all of them, bar anything that is covered by the legal exemptions, such as when I used the toilet at the bottom of the building…” I looked at Todds, who frowned, then nodded catching my meaning.

“I used it there as well. I’ll remove that from the recording,” he said quickly.

“So, anything like a toilet break, or a personal moment, if you remove it NOW, before the jammer is dropped, stays in your system buffer, it doesn’t go to the client. Anything else? They get. Take a minute.”

I did as I’d suggested, having my RI scan to the banshee encounter and erase it all, adding in a section of me moving towards a corner to take a shit and cutting out, before restarting as we left.

The conversations that mentioned the banshee were similarly wiped, and I made sure the others did the same, despite the longer time it took them to do so.

Reaching the top floor, and moving out into the flood light and neon lit top of the cooling tower, I was immediately hammered by a dozen access requests.

First was one marked by a vaguely familiar symbol, but as soon as it opened, I saw it was from some religious nutjob who started spouting off about a pogrom against all those who ‘willfully injure the prophets of…’

I cut that one off and blocked the fucker, accepting the one from Julius next, figuring it said something that a religious nutjob had been the fastest to get a signal through.

“Kabutt!” Julius cried, clearly desperate for news. “Fuck’s sake, man, what the hell is going on there?”

“We were setup,” I said, checking the local area and cursing myself for being so overwhelmed I’d nearly let myself get distracted. There was nobody nearby, but the area here was huge, and with the panels of weather-beaten steel that ran everywhere cutting off any real sight ranges, we could be nigh on surrounded and we’d never know it.

“How?” he asked.

“The entire place is a deathtrap,” I said, still looking around. “Maps were useless, doors welded shut and reinforced cages that were set up to trap us, spinning blades, ghouls trapped behind armoring so they could guide their specters and be a right fuck on to kill… all that good fun shit, you know?”

“Mother fuckers!” he hissed. “I’m getting telemetry… fuck! Timur? Ah man…” He broke off, shaking his head and clearly struggling for words.

“Yeah, that wasn’t long ago as well, trap blade in the stairwell.”

“Look, you’re under contract to hand the recordings over at the end of the job, and they’re being backed up even now to a server they have access to, so…”

“So they’ll start streaming our people’s final moments at any second,” I growled. “Kids are going to find out their parents are dead by watching them literally die ‘live’.”

“Basically, yeah,” he snarled. “Kabutt, this is an order, are you paying attention, operator?”

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“Yessir,” I ground out through clenched teeth.

“You need to lock all emotion down, especially about any plans for the future. Get our people out of there, keep them alive, and we can discuss possible legal options later…”

“ Legal —”

“Shut it down, Sergeant!” Julius snapped. “To be discussed later, when there are less people fucking well listening, alright?”

“Yessir.”

“Good man, finish the job and bring our people home. Julius out.”

The line cut off, and I growled, seeing three more requests pop up trying to take his place, one using intrusion software that managed to activate my RI’s autonomic defensive subroutines.

The line opened, and I recognized the same voice speaking that I’d heard earlier. It was one of the talking heads on the panel that was fucking broadcasting this debacle.

“…we might have access to one of the team leaders here now folks and…” he was saying as I growled, then grinned and tagged the intrusion software as a live terrorist intrusion attempt and reported it using an old internal APS privilege.

It wasn’t, registering something as that when I was still an APS operative would have gotten me a fine, and possibly a demotion, but it was a legal option.

It was also sent directly to one of the city net’s AI patrollers.

Where certain AI were literally general purpose workhorses, with wide ranging purviews, others were, by necessity, given insanely strict areas to work in because of the possible damage they did when unleashed.

The defensive AIs were in that second group, and they really, really didn’t fuck around. Any danger, any possible risk to the city, and that met their limited tests?

The AI’s tended to go nuclear, tearing the system apart and searching for anything, then move on, totally uncaring of the devastation they’d left behind. When people had reported things to the AI before, they’d taken down corporation cyber warfare departments ‘accidentally’, hence now there were fines and demerits if one of us reported something that wasn’t really a terrorist attack…

…but I wasn’t APS anymore, and I had the defense that I was attacked by a cracker—a system designed to force access to my implants—without warning, so had fallen back on my training.

I might get a message from the AI managers at some point telling me to not do that again, but considering they were a government entity charged with the security of the city, and this was an illegal hack? That was the worst I’d get.

“Hey…” One of Liolet’s people called out suddenly. “The broadcast, its down!”

“For everyone?” I asked, and clearly something in my voice caught Reign’s attention.

“Kabutt?” she asked, her voice low.

“Yes, Reign?” I replied calmly, just as someone else spoke up.

“The entire broadcast is cut, something about a terrorist threat?”

“What did you just do?” Reign asked me on a direct link.

“I don’t know what you mean.” I smiled. “Someone just tried to hack me, to force their way into my implants, and as I still have limited classified data in there? Well. I did what I had to do.”

“And that was?”

“I might have reported it to the defensive AI’s as a terrorist attack,” I admitted. “After all, it might be, and I couldn’t risk that data getting out.” I sent her another smile, as my voice dropped to a purr of satisfaction as a thought occurred to me.

“In fact, I’m legally required to defend that data with my life, and report any attempts to access it to the proper authorities…”

“Oh,” she said, clearly running the words and the unspoken meaning through in her mind, before sending me an image in return as she spoke. “I think that’s a very good point Kabutt, you should make very sure that whoever did this is reported to the correct people… for the city’s security.”

The words she sent were entirely innocent, and publicly correct even.

The image she sent me, well… she apparently liked what I’d done and I’d be getting a little reward later for being a good boy.

I coughed and surreptitiously adjusted my pants as that image replayed over and over before me.

I quickly tagged the intrusion and dredged up the possible areas it infringed upon and while the others deployed, I sent a dozen messages in thirty seconds.

That done, I sent a compressed report to Julius, got a single image from him as a response—a Carcharodon smiling, thankfully, nothing sexual—and I locked down the external links again as much as I could.

I replaced the lockouts that I’d disabled earlier, my usual settings prevented any kind of contact in a fight after all, but I’d not realized that I’d overridden that earlier in trying to reach out as the jamming came online.

Well, you live and learn.

When you live, anyway.

“Reign, Liolet!” I barked out, connecting to them both. “What do we have?”

“My people are scouting,” Liolet said distractedly. “I’ve two runners left out of four, and they’re out there, telemetry is good, and they’re stealthy.”

“Reign?”

“I sent Todds,” she said. “He’s in full stealth, and going a lot slower, but between the three we’re getting a decent image of the upper floor.”

A partially filled out map appeared before us, and I growled as I saw the layout.

The rooftop was circular, we were atop the tower after all, and the lip of the tower came to around hip height on us where we currently stood at one edge.

The center stepped down into a bowl shaped depression though, leaving it protected from the constant wind that blew this high up between the buildings.

That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that there were three things that promised that this was still all to fight for.

First and foremost, we’d not killed the last ghoul or banshee nor completed our sweep yet, and I seriously doubted that as the ‘finale’ for the broadcast area, this was intended as the easy part.

Next? There was a fuzzed intrusion shield operating above our heads.

I’d seen them before, a kind of shimmer to the air that made clear recordings almost impossible… unless you had the decoding key. That one was live and blocking out the view from above right now, as a good two dozen drones flitted and wove about up there, with more presumably on the way?

Not good.

Last of all, was the worst.

This place had supposedly had a maze, followed by a central area as the final deathmatch for people to bet on. I was assuming the maze was trapped to buggery, because it sure as shit was still there, and it looked freshly painted.

Metal walls with the occasional entrance could be seen, and from where we stood, we could see just over the top to make out interlocking plates further in. There was a central higher section that terminated right at the level of the intrusion field, so clearly we weren’t supposed to find out what was waiting for us there.

Clearly we were going to be the first, because while yes, according to the others nobody had managed it yet, but they were all people that were armed with melee weapons, against hunters that paid for the chance to hunt live people.

This time the prey had assault shotguns and grenades, not to mention a foul fucking temper.

It was time to go slaughter something.

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