~2~

(Chef d'Escadron Azra Ahmed)

Moskva-6 Vactrain Station, Moscow DMZ

09-07-2088

~Rooster Crow, this is Spider Maroon One. Package is ready to play.

The telepathy implant relays the voice into my skull. Not an actual sound, it whispers effortlessly over the shrill of the aircar's internal rotors and the pound of rain against the armored fuselage.

~Rooster Crow to Spider Maroon, I reply with a thought. Hold your dogs until the cats dance.

~Spider Maroon One to Rooster Crow. Will comply.

Even I have to admit my insistence on code is probably unnecessary. Any enemy eavesdroppers would almost certainly know what we're up to anyway. Indeed: they're likely to be my superiors. They might even be with me on the command aircar.

But "likely" and "might" aren't absolutes. Though it's impossible to fully hide my actions, I've requested no approval for this raid. I'm acting off record. Let surprise be my sword.

I don't need to look out the cabin window. Reclined in my seat with my eyes closed, I conjure a light-enhanced, bird's eye render of Alexeyevsky District five hundred meters below us. It's not so bad, as Moscow goes. Most of the buildings here are intact, if derelict, and the decade of overgrowth from the neighboring parkland gives an air of pastoral neglect rather than the urban festering that characterizes most of the city. As we pass the Exhibition Center with its lonely patriotic statues and vacant Greco-Roman pavilions, I feel as if I'm glimpsing a Golden Age remnant from a dozen revolutions ago.

My aircars bank and begin their descent towards the Moskva-6 Vactrain Station. Old fire damage spots its pretty white roof like bruises on a long, rigid banana. Thirty, forty years ago, during Russia's brief day in the sun, the train system was a world marvel: Minsk in fifteen minutes, Warsaw in twenty. A terrorist bombing back in '61 put it out of commission, and it's been abandoned ever since.

At least that's what we thought, but seismographs don't lie. Someone has spent a lot of money secretly renovating the tunnels. I think I have an idea of what they're shipping, and it doesn't add up.

I feel the inertial bob as my aircar slows to a hover, and then the slight jolt as it sets down in the shattered, puddle-strewn expanse of the station's parking lot. The engines shut off, and the rain seems to pick up its tempo.

The three other aircars land in their assigned locations a few hundred meters away, and through their external cameras networked with my eyes, I inspect the three squads of soldiers pounding down the hinged loading ramps into the midnight storm.

Their helmets and powered armor make them look like beetle astronauts, but they're Blue Cobras, a Special Missions Unit assigned to me through the United Nations' Oversight Office. A larger force would be ideal, but trusting something this clandestine to PMCs or (Allah help me) Moscow Police would be counterproductive--if not suicidal.

Even as it is, I half-expect to be stabbed in the back before this is over.

After the soldiers come the drones. Three Mustangs, light UGVs that look like giant spiders fucking headless horses. Won't win any beauty contests, but they're versatile and more agile than they look. More than what we'll need, hopefully.

Forty-seven seconds since touchdown. We have to hurry. I stand from my seat, though I'm not stepping outside. I want to. I want to gear up, grab my carbine and share the danger. But those days are long over. I'm an officer and a robot-operator, and I'm more useful here.

My aircar can carry twenty men, but all it holds aside from me is Lieutenant Caza, four Noir-Class bodyguard bots and my fellow ops, Lieutenants Zutter and Bless.

Those two are already reclined in overly padded feedback chairs. Zutter is a hard brick of a man. He looks as if he would be better suited as a front-line commando than a bot-jock, but then, others have said the same thing about me. Bless, on the other hand, is a straight op stereotype: mousy, pale and petite. She'd be a cute if it weren't for all those tribal brands.

They're both younger than me, their brainware newer. I pace to the center of the cabin where I enjoy free range of motion. While they merely dream to drive their machines, I must dream and dance.

~Systems synced. Good to go, messages Bless.

Zutter follows with, ~Checked and green. Ready to go when you are, ma'am.

Implant-to-implant speech removes all trace of accents, giving the Germans an almost sleepy cadence. As I check the status of my sync suit, I shake my head at the absurdity of using telepathy within a couple of meters of each other.

"Jam-bots on. Hawk-hovers in the air. Prisoner transport in standby. Car router amped," Caza says aloud from the pilot seat. He looks at no instruments: the data rolls across his brain. "No heavy EM from the station, so shouldn't be any interference. Unless they're masked, of course."

"Thank you, Lieutenant," I say, slipping on my HUD visor. You'd think that'd be redundant, but my bionic eyes date to the early seventies and lack the latest semantic-compression capabilities.

One minute, six seconds since touchdown. We're behind schedule.

~Spider Maroon, this is Rooster Crow. You are free to let slip the hounds, I message.

~Spider Maroon One to Rooster Crow. Will comply.

I don't wait, but say: ~Rooster Crow to Teams Daisy, Fox and Silver. Proceed.

I'm still seeing through the aircars' cameras. The rain-swept scenes of soldiers jogging towards the station play as vivid imaginings. I focus, feel the network accept my touch, and suddenly I am in control.

I am Mustang-2. Bless is Mustang-1, Zutter Mustang-3.

I flex my index fingers, and Mustang-2 moves with the Cobras across the parking lot. Through both it and my own ears, I hear the distant cacophony of Team Spider Maroon's demolition charges, followed immediately by the night-splitting roars as hundreds of kilometers of vacuum tunnels start sucking Moscow air. If the Muskva-6 Vactrain Station was active before, it's not anymore.

You know the old saying: "Wherever the United Nations go, sexual slavery follows." That's been true since the twentieth century, but it was only about six years ago, after a series of exposés revealed its epidemic proportions and a few sensory sims allowed viewers to fully appreciate the trade's latest nightmare fuels ("p-zombies" and "brain hulling" being particularly high-octane), that the usually apathetic public reached the critical threshold of outrage.

Scandals begot scandals. Heads rolled. The Security Council President resigned. It was the biggest circus since the Pope's arrest. Needless to say, the General Assembly found this a little embarrassing--they still do: some of the high-profile trials are ongoing--so they brought in people like to me to clean house.

Aside from my past days in the GIGN, I'd already made a recent name for myself in the National Gendarmerie's Criminal Investigation Division, though in truth my team deserved most of the credit. Still, busting an army-run pedophile ring is always nice on a résumé.

And so when the UN's Oversight Office offered to make me a Special Investigator and ship me off to this kleptocratic, semi-balkanized hellhole, I accepted. I'd be lying if I said this wasn't at least partly personal--after all, my ex-wife grew up in a Strasbourg brothel-- but really, I enjoy my work. I like hunting down monsters, and Moscow is full of them. Some of them wear blue hats.

My current investigation is one that hits a mother's instincts and knots my guts. Twenty child abductions in three weeks. Ages five to seven. Low-income homes. No ransoms, no bodies. Peacekeepers and Moscow Police have nothing, which only means they've been paid off. Scanning the usual suspects didn't turned up anything, but a Bayesian analysis of what few sightings there were suggested the kids were being taken to the city's North-Eastern Okrug--territory of the Ten' Ekipahz, the "Shadow Crew."

And then we learned Moskva-6 was active. Someone's shipping little kids west, but nothing arrives in Minsk. I don't like mysteries.

With a thought and a roll of my thumbs, I halt Mustang-2 fifteen meters from the station's Terminal 7A wall, which is a kaleidoscope sprawl of overlapping Cyrillic graffiti. The eight Cobras of Team Silver spread out to tactical entry positions and unfold their arm-mounted ballistic shields. Absurdly, I think they look like iron sculptures as they stand so still in the rain. I focus and twitch my trigger fingers; Mustang-2's dorsal grenade launcher scatters debris as it blasts a two-meter wide hole in the building's brick hide. I follow by shooting through a peeper, the tiny flying bot adding a new eye in my already cluttered consciousness.

Before the smoke's faded, I message to Team Silver: ~All clear, and gallop my Mustang-2 towards the interior. Part of me monitors the feeds from Teams Daisy and Fox; Bless and Zutter have already breached, entered and are engaging hostiles. Multi-camera scenes of two separate gun battles play dreamlike in my mind. I watch their brain-controlled bots incapacitating bad guys with precision e-laser fire.

And they do it faster than me and all without twitching a muscle.

I may have been hot stuff in the seventies--and experience still counts for a lot--but bot-ops is a young cyborg's game. I could upgrade, of course, but I'm leery of adding more gear in my head. My ex says I'm being like one of those technophobes back home, but maybe the bridge between man and machine shouldn't be too sturdy, the wall between thought and action too thin. And there's been incidents. Just in the news the other day there was that autistic scientist in that Atlantis city-state tax-shelter. Half his brain was metal. Turns out he was a kiddie-diddler. Went nuts and kidnapped his niece.

I may be old fashioned, but I don't want to end up like that.

Fingers dancing, arms rolling a slow swim, I lead my drone into Terminal 7A. Light enhanced vision bleaches the corridor into washed-out pastels that flicker in the dying strobe of the occasional florescents. Brown-stained ceiling tiles droop like pregnant bellies and drip rainwater. Soiled, mildewed blankets are piled in a corner where a long-gone vagrant once built his nest. I'm glad this bot can't smell.

Team Silver follows behind Mustang-2. I see them through the posterior eyes; if I focus, I can also see Mustang-2 through their helmet cams. I am all points-of-view, but I reign it in. Omniscience can be distracting.

Boots and hooves crunch across the paper cups, food wrappers and broken glass which blanket the floor like geologic strata. We pass the open doors of trashed offices, navigate around smashed computer equipment and overturned plastic chairs.

My peeper is the first to hear the Russian whispers. They're not far. The steel-jungle beats of Slavic-techno pound from a sound plate somewhere deep in the station. The drone is the size of a fly, but I land it on the ceiling anyway.

~Three hostiles ahead, I message, though I have it covered.

Mutang-2's arm-cannons are already ready when they turn the corner. The Shadow Crews are the usual scabby sort with spiked, greasy hair and scowling rat-faces. They grip old-school Kalashnikovs in dirty hands. One of them is shirtless, live-tats playing pornographic clips across his acned chest.

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In the heartbeat before they react, I scan them for dangerous implants, see they're clear and zap each with e-lasers. Blink-and-you-miss-it bolts of lightning send them tumbling into trash where they flop with seizures. Blue Cobras run up and slap their wrists with paralyzers.

Their limp bodies and slack expressions make the Shadow Crews seem unconscious, but as we pass them by their eyes follow Mustang-2's soulless faceplate and gently flailing spider arms. They know the reckoning has come. I am the monster to monsters.

It takes less time than I expected for my teams to clear the station. These clowns never had a chance. Most of their augments are first or second generation--chromepunk limb-grafts and eye-scopes and other tacky crap obsolete since the sixties. Their one combat bot was older than I am. I was concerned with having to deal with BLEDs--Bio-Linked Explosive Devices--but those are found more among out-and-out terrorist groups like the Caucasus Emirate and the Dagestan Liberation Front. The Shadow Crew aren't so hardcore.

There's only nineteen of them, and most never get off a shot. No casualties for us, but we have to kill two of theirs: one a bear of a man who's sub-dermal made him too resistant to e-lasers (a Cobra downed him with 4.1mm caseless), the other being a scrawny junkie who's heart popped at the shock. I'm not too worried. If we move fast, we can get their brains in a SPECTer for a data retrieval.

We search every room and corridor. We send peepers through the now air-flooded vacuum tunnels. Our Mustangs m-ray the walls. We finds the detritus of a dozen different gangs who've roosted here over the years, but no children, no cages. In fact, the Shadow Crew here don't seem to have a illegal business at all. No guns, drugs, slaves or 'wares. It's as if they spontaneously decided one day to hang out in a spooky old train station.

But the Vactrain system had been repaired: the controls and maglev systems meticulously replaced. These punks certainly didn't do that. But who did? And why would they spend billions to snatch a few poor kids?

Time to find out why.

~Good job, I message as I call for the waiting transport to land. Gather up the prisoners and meet at Extraction Point Alpha.

I've barely finished my thought when it happens.

~A prisoner's having some sort of seizure, Bless says in my head.

Sergeant Drews, one of the Cobras, adds, This one is too. And this one. Oh shit, they all are!

One of Mustang-2's cameras zeros on one of the punks. The paralyzers keep him from moving, but blood drools from his nose and mouth. The scleras of his violently twitching eyes have turned bright crimson. I hear wet grinding from his skull.  I check the bio-readings, but my heart sinks as I remember the scare in Paris a few years back. And of course, there's the Yankee Stadium Attack. We all know what this is: a nanovirus. A remote-activated nanovirus.

~Suit check, I message. Everyone sealed?

My multitasking-enhanced mind subconsciously counts the twenty-four affirmatives. Good, that means no one's compromised, though if they were they'd be dead by now. "Caza," I say aloud. "Pick up a trigger signal?"

Lieutenant Caza speaks from the aircar cockpit two meters from me, his voice carrying by radio to the teams.

"Yes, ma'am. Whoever did this had to boost and flex to bypass our jammers, but they did it through relay nodes." He pauses, and though his back is turned to me, I can imagine his goateed frown. He continues, "But just before it happened, there was a very slight EM swell here."

In my networked mind's eye a rendered map of Moskva-6 spreads before me, a red circle appearing over one of the station's passenger luggage loading bays.

"A good place to start as any," he adds.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," I say. To the teams I message, ~All right, send detachments to converge on that area. Use extreme caution.

I disregard the dying prisoners. The nanovirus has been tailored to applesauce their brains. Some of that's already gushing out their eyes. Any knowledge they might have is already beyond information death.

Difficult to detect and with a theoretically indefinite "incubation period," nanoviruses are a common boogiemen for doomsayers. One of my son's favorite ORPGs uses them for its zombie-apocalyptic premise. The truth's not so dramatic--released nanite anti-virals usually keep things from getting too out of hand--but they are scary. And very expensive. Not to mention outlawed by the Geneva Protocols.

Someone went to a lot of effort to make sure their goons won't talk.

"It makes no sense," Bless says aloud, out of team-chat.

"Yeah, this is more than a few crooked peacekeepers," Zutter replies. "I don't know what it is, but we might have stepped into something we shouldn't."

"None of that talk," I snap. "I don't care if the President of France is behind this: we've caught a big fish and we're going to reel it in. That's what we're here for, right?"

"Yes, Ma'am," they say in unison.

After some careful probing with peepers, Mustang-2 and three men of Team Silver arrive at the source of the trigger signal. Mustangs-1 and 3 show up a short while later, chaperoning their Cobra detachments.

No working florescents, so we switch to infrared which transforms the bay into a blue-fogged cavern specked with yellow heat residue. The ceiling is low and cracked. Scores of squat plastic cargo pallets make a knee-high rat maze  of the wide floor. On the far side of a long, convex wall is one of the vactrain tunnels, the windows to its interior so dark that it may as well lead to outer space.

We already searched here during the initial clearing, but I run a multi-spectrum scan.

~Not picking anything up, Bless says, speaking once more through telepathy.

And it's true. Aside from Mustang-2's €10 million suite of vision modes, M-rays alone can see through over a meter of concrete, and if anything's blocking that besides grids of rebar, I'd know. But the bay is bare. No hidden doors or transmitters. Not even a residual EM pattern.

"Caza, how certain are you this is the right spot" I say aloud.

"The swell was there. I bet my right nut, Ma'am."

I think back thirteen years ago, to Mecca during the Saudi Intervention. I'd just been in bot-ops a few months and was leading a GIGN team into a prince's penthouse in one of the old Abraj Al Bait towers. He was a sneaky little bastard, kept a snuff dungeon in a "hidden floor" shielded to not only absorb heat and scans, but reflect back false readings. It was crude and didn't fool us long, but points for effort.

Materials science has passed a few generations since then.

I turn cameras downward, set Mustang-2 for pattern recognition and accelerate my own oracle implants. And then I see it: thin wheel grooves in the floor's dust, weaving between the plastic pallets. Most of the paths lead to the vactrain airlock. They all originate from a bare stretch of wall.

M-rays and spectroscope say the wall's concrete, at least a meter and a half thick. Ambient temperature is vaguely skewed, but the deviation is not statistically significant.

I don't bother explaining. ~Stand clear, I message as I red-mark the wall in their HUDs.

I wait just long enough for them to kneel and unfold their ballistic shields before I twitch my fingers and fire a low-yield concussion grenade. The smartmatter drops the masquerade as it blasts into gray ash. As I suspected, the "meter and a half" is closer to four or five centimeters.

Smoke fogs my infrared, but I gallop blindly through the breach, Mustangs 1 and 3 behind me. I switch to standard vision. It's a dimly lit laboratory, empty submersion tanks along the wall. I blank out the twenty tiny bodies on twenty metal tables and focus instead on the thin man in baby blue scrubs standing not three meters away.

M and t-rays reveal his heavy augments, mostly in his skull. My HUD takes special care to highlight the BLED near his brain stem. I hold my e-laser fire. I know he's rigged to blow if I zap him. He watches me with wide dark eyes that are as bionic as my own. His tight sliver of a grin tells me he's steeled himself and has nothing to lose.

"It doesn't have to end this way," I say through Mustang-2's speakers (~Stay back, I tell the Cobras). "You tell us who you're working for, we can cut a deal."

He glares at me balefully. ~You've made a grave mistake, Chef d'Escedron Ahmed, he messages in French, cutting effortlessly through our telepathy encryption. The machine is in action. You won't leave Moscow alive.

The blasts claps my ears, knocks wild static into my cameras. A second later, my vision returns. The lenses are shrapnel-scratched and gore-splattered, but otherwise intact.

~Status check, I message. Everyone's fine.

Now, to deal with this mess.

In my career, I've witnessed unspeakable evil: mass rape, torture, mutilation, brain-slaving . . . I've taken the meds to keep the bad dreams away, but it's good that I remember these atrocities, that I know the depths of the abyss.  What I see now, as bad as it is, it not the worst I've seen. It is the most inexplicable.

The explosion overturned and scattered the autopsy tables, but the bodies are mostly intact. Shining floodlights from spider arms, I zoom on a child sprawled by Mustang-2's hoof. He's about five or six, and I recognize him as Yurian Fedorov, who disappeared five days ago. He's been dead long enough for purification to set in, pale on top, purple and black along his backside. Like all the others, the top of his head's been sawed away, revealing an hollow red bowl where his brain should be.

It doesn't seem that long ago when Alex was this age. I imagine what it would be like to find him like this, and then try to chase the vision away but can't. I haven't seen him in four months. He turns fourteen next week. I should be there. Buy him something nice. Hug him and kiss him and embarrass him in front of his friends. That's what mothers are for.

"Ma'am, are you all right?" Bless asks aloud. She's looking at me from her seat.

"Yes," I say, blinking at the wetness in my eyes. It's a good thing my HUD visor's tinted.

"What are we looking at here?" Zutter asks in disbelief. "Organ harvesting? Why would they want with brains?"

I examine the computers, but of course they've already been slagged. Most of the submersion tanks were shattered by the BLED, but I can see they're meant for preserving tissue. The brains are gone, no doubt whisked away on the vactrain, but maybe the children aren't really dead. I find this thought less than reassuring.

Even though I'm not really in this laboratory of empty children, even though I'm actually in an armed and armored aircar hundreds of meters away and my teams have taken no casualties, I suddenly feel very vulnerable.

But I remember my duty, remember who I am. I am a hunter of monsters, and today I've found the trail of a big one.

~Everyone gather what you can and head to Extraction Point Alpha, I message. We've got work to do.