“They stopped it somehow. Shit!” Leo slammed his fist against a plastic elevator panel.
“Do we try the shaft? Do we get out here?” Juliet was asking herself, Leo, Angel, or even Frida, hoping for inspiration.
“I don’t know. Look at the ceiling. Not sure we can even get a panel open to get out; I mean, this isn’t an action vid!”
Angel was a lot more helpful. “Juliet, you’re just a little higher than level B9. They’ve done something to physically disable the elevator motors, but I can open the doors, and you can drop out.”
Juliet yanked her Texan out and dropped to the floor, lying on her belly, ready to shoot through the opening. “Get ready, Leo! My PAI’s gonna pop the door.” Leo had been in the midst of picking Estes back up, but he dropped her, eliciting another muffled groan, and drew his pistol, squatting in the corner of the elevator on the left side of the door.
“Do we come out shooting? What if it’s not synths . . .” Juliet started to ask, but Leo had a quick answer.
“These corpo-sec goons will be wired to the gills, ready to kill something. The shit these synths are putting them through—let’s just say they aren’t going to ask questions before they start shooting.”
Juliet nodded grimly. “Right. Well, let’s hope we can slip by. Open it, Angel.” Instantly, the chime sounded as the doors began to open, revealing the elevator shaft for the top two-thirds and a gap on the lower third, right in front of Juliet’s face, where she could see the lobby on B9. It looked like a scene out of a horror movie, even worse than the mess Juliet and Leo had left on B31. Bodies and dismembered limbs were strewn all over the place. Arcs of blood spray on the walls and ceiling told the tale of high-powered rifles and thrown body parts. Angel scanned the charnel scene, highlighting bodies in blue and green.
Before Juliet could wonder what the colors meant, Angel said, “The green highlights are human.” Juliet frowned, looking down into the mess, her optics compensating for the flickering, damaged light fixtures. She counted eleven human bodies and four synths. Nothing moved.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper despite the fact that she still wore her helmet. She slid through the opening and landed lightly on her feet, revolver ready. When nothing came charging through the broken, bullet-riddled doors leading out of the elevator lobby, she looked up to see Leo pushing their prisoner’s limp body through the opening. It looked like he was just going to drop her to the floor, so Juliet wrapped one arm, enhanced by the flex-plate armor, around her waist and hoisted her down. Leo hopped down with a soft grunt, and she helped him sling the doctor over his shoulder again.
A yellow line appeared on her AUI, showing her where to go as Angel said, “The stairs are nearby, just through that closed access door and down a short hallway.” Juliet saw the door and realized she’d seen a similar one on B31; it looked like a nondescript closet, but, sure enough, just to the right was a plastic symbol showing a staircase. She took two steps toward it, reaching for the handle, when, with a clatter and scrape, the doors leading into the sublevel began to open. Leo, either due to fried nerves or because he’d seen something Juliet had missed, began to open fire on the gap between the doors, his nine-millimeter barking in rapid staccato.
Juliet whirled and leveled her Texan, watching and waiting. Her vision flickered briefly as Angel scanned the darkness beyond the door. A second later, the PAI drew an outline of a very large individual on the far side of the door, hunched behind the metal as though using it for cover.
She lifted her crosshairs, lined them up with the outline's head, and smoothly pulled the trigger. The revolver thundered, a big hole appeared in the door, and the silhouette staggered back, its head snapping away from the door. “Hit him,” Juliet said, then turned, ready to run for the stairs. She grabbed the handle and yanked, and then Leo’s gun started firing again.
“He’s not down!” he yelled. “Jesus! What the hell is this thing?”
Juliet whirled, saw the doors flung wide, saw a hulking chrome and flesh monster of a man, and watched as Leo emptied his mag into him. The nine-millimeter rounds punched into the fleshy chest of the giant, skipped off his chrome-plated head, and, generally, only seemed to piss the guy off, not that he wasn’t already furious-looking. He was covered in blood, some fresh and some dried.
As Juliet took him in, her hand lifting her gun, part of her mind took aim, while another part sat in stunned horror at his appearance. He was mostly nude, wearing scraps of blue clothes around his waist and shoulders. Mismatched flesh covered parts of his augmented body, and bloody, half-scabbed-over wounds covered him, including the dark gap between his legs. His glowering, bloodshot right eye looked human, but the other was a bloody hole. His lips were twisted in a snarl beneath a scabbed-over nose-hole as he stomped toward Leo.
The part of Juliet that wasn’t paralyzed with horror aimed at his face and squeezed her trigger, but he lurched with surprising speed, throwing off her aim, and the fat, polymer bullet hit the side of his metal skull, denting it and forcing him to veer sideways, but not killing him. Leo scrabbled backward but could only go so far, and his back came up against the partially open elevator doors.
While the brute was fixated on Leo, Juliet sidestepped, trying to get behind the synthetic goliath, examining the visible parts of his chrome head for vulnerability. She didn’t see anything. Instead, she lowered her crosshairs, and as smoothly as she could, she began firing rounds into his spine, aiming for the base of his skull. The Texan roared, and perhaps adrenaline or panic made time move differently, but it seemed she only pulled the trigger twice before it began to click—empty.
Meanwhile, the giant man hadn’t fallen, hadn’t even slowed. He reached a hand for Leo, and the mercenary displayed an impressive agility as he leaped to the side, ducking under the monster’s arm. Or, he would have if not for his burden. Estes’s butt, jutting up from Leo’s shoulder, caught against the giant cybernetic arm, and Leo stumbled, falling to the floor and releasing the doctor so he could try to roll free. The synth might have been distracted by the doctor flopping to the ground and moaning, but he only had eyes for Leo. He darted after him like a giant, muscular cat after a wily mouse.
Juliet had spent a lot of downtime back on Callisto messing with her Texan, practicing loading it from the ammo on her belt. Her right hand was nimble and precise in a way her left hand couldn’t match, so she’d learned to pop the cylinder, eject the empty casing, and then swap the gun to her left so she could, in a blur of efficient movement, snatch the bullets out of her belt and stuff them into the cylinder. As she slid the seventh round into place, she twitched her wrist, slamming the cylinder shut, and lifted the gun, stepping closer to the brute as he cornered Leo, arms wide, ready to grab the mercenary if he tried to slip away again.
She lifted the barrel, aiming the crosshairs on a dent in the back of the synth’s skull. Like a machine, she pounded one, two, three, four hot polymer slugs into that dent. Each impact sent the synth’s head forward like a sledgehammer. Each impact stunned him for half a second before he lifted his head and focused his ire on Leo again. Each impact deepened the dent in the thick armored plating, and finally, the fourth bullet punched through and turned his brain into slop. He collapsed with a wheeze that sounded far too human.
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Leo peered out of the corner from behind arms held in a defensive position, eyes wide with stress and disbelief. “Holy shit! You did it! What a monster!”
Something told Juliet that the monsters were the ones who’d created the killer. Something told her that if she’d read his thoughts, it would have ruined sleep for her for years. Then she noticed something disturbing and pointed to the back of his caved-in skull and the bright red blood drizzling out to pool on the floor. “He wasn’t a synth.”
“Jesus! Look!” Leo prodded the back of the giant’s waist where his belt held the scraps of his pants in place. Juliet squinted and saw what he meant—the belt had a Life-Ultra corpo-sec logo. “He was one of the responders!”
“Guess he went nuts? Maybe he was in there,” Juliet jerked her thumb at the doors leading further into the level, “and had a nightmare fight with the synths—pumped too many stims.” She automatically started reloading her pistol as she walked to the other door. “We gotta move. Is Estes still alive?”
“I’m alive,” came the slurred, raspy reply. Juliet whirled on the scientist and pointed her reloaded Texan at her.
“I ought to put your lights out right here!” She stomped over to the doctor, still sprawled on the floor, struggling to get into a sitting position. Juliet pushed her down onto her face and holstered her pistol so she could pull out her data cable. “Angel,” she said into her helmet, trusting her to know she meant the words for her alone, “put a watchdog on her.” She stuffed the cable into the doctor’s data port and waited for Angel to give her the go-ahead.
“It’s installed.”
Juliet stood up and yanked her cable out, provoking a grunt of pain and outrage from the doctor. “Don’t try to send any more purge messages, you psychopath!”
“How . . .”
“Look around. This is your doing. How many people did you kill with that protocol?”
“Nobody innocent! I’m not the only one with the trigger code, by the way! That’s a company directive!”
Leo growled and grabbed her under the armpit, hoisting her to her feet. “Like that makes it better. Come on, get up. I’m sick of carrying your ass.”
Juliet glowered darkly at the scientist as she avoided eye contact, looking anywhere but Juliet’s face. “Nobody innocent? You saying everyone who worked down here deserved to get murdered by their coworkers?”
“What?” She finally looked at Juliet with wide eyes, comprehension dawning on her face. “No, no, no. That order was supposed to trigger a few specialized synths to take out a few key scientists and wipe the server decks. You mean . . .” She looked at the bloody room. “This is from the purge?”
“Every synth in the sublevels is going nuts, killing everyone. And yeah, it started when you sent the command.”
Estes gasped, clutching her shirt collar, squeezing and scrabbling her fingers at her neck, as though the answers to this nightmare would come to her if she could just breathe a little easier. “Then someone at corporate altered the protocol! That’s not what we were trained on!”
“Welcome to corpo life,” Leo said, jerking her arm to start her walking. “Let’s go!” Those words were directed at Juliet. She nodded, turned to the door leading to the stairwell, and pushed through. Just as Angel had promised, a short hallway led past a couple of maintenance closets to another door with the universal emblem for stairs. She jogged forward, trusting Leo to keep track of Estes and call out if there was any problem. As she approached the door, her vision flickered as Angel fired off her terahertz-scanning capabilities, and then a huge, blinking stop sign appeared in her vision.
“Don’t open that!” Angel cried, and Juliet halted, centimeters from grabbing the handle. “There are people in the stairwell fighting! Some appear to be civilians—unarmed. Others are clearly synths. I think some survivors are trying to get out.”
Juliet looked at Leo, at the woman cringing beside him, and at his empty hand—he’d holstered his gun after emptying the magazine. She drew her Texan and flipped it to hand him the grip. “There’re some synths killing people in here. Stand back.” As he took the pistol, he nodded his head.
“I’ll back you up.”
Juliet frowned at him and shrugged. “Okay. I’m going up. Make sure nothing comes up behind me.” Then, she drew the sword Tanaka had given her, smiling as the metal sang, sliding through the high-tech sonic sharpener built into the aperture of the scabbard. “Angel, I’m counting on you. Help me keep my form perfect and moving fast—push it to the limit.”
“I will. The bio-batts for your enhanced reflexes are at sixty percent. Your flex-plate batteries are at eighty. Open the door when you’re ready.”
Juliet held the sword ready, reached down, yanked the handle, and stepped into chaos. Blood smeared the concrete steps, lights flashed from amber to red and back again, and screams and grunts echoed hollowly up and down the space. Directly in front of her, on the short flight of steps leading down from the landing, a man was struggling with a synth, trying to pull away as it stabbed a scalpel into his shin, gripping his ankle with a hook of a hand, three fingers missing and spewing white fluid. Juliet didn’t hesitate; she darted forward, thrust the sword out, and impaled the synth through the crown of its plasteel head, punching the hardened, razor-sharp metal through the thin shell. The synth thrashed and bucked, falling still as Juliet twisted the weapon, widening the hole and quadrupling the damage as she yanked it out.
“Th-thank you!” the man gasped, holding out a hand for Juliet to help him up.
“Get out if you can,” Juliet said, her voice cold and hard in her helmet’s speaker. Then she turned and started up the steps like a prowling tiger on the hunt. The synth must have marked her and warned its comrades above because she could hear a pack of them stomping down the concrete steps. She got to the next landing and waited.
As they flung themselves down the steps at her, they suddenly seemed to be caught in molasses, hurling themselves through the air in slow motion as Juliet, faster than most people could track with their eyes, danced between them, hacking the deadly blade through necks, kicking bodies away from her, and thrusting the sword through eye sockets, to penetrate the synthetic brains of her would-be assailants.
Her boots struck the synths, heavy as they were, like lead-filled hammers, in one case, flinging a synth over the rail so it fell in slow motion into the depths of the tower. Her cuts were precise and perfect, her follow-throughs perfectly executed to avoid unnecessary movement, and her foot placement was exactly right for the follow-up hacks and thrusts—all thanks to Angel.
Everything she did was something she’d learned from Tanaka, but none of it was anything she’d truly perfected through practice. Juliet knew what she wanted to do, but only Angel’s adjustments kept her from overcommitting, from twisting slightly wrong, from tripping herself up in the chaotic movements of her opponents, or from stabbing or cutting into a non-lethal bone or piece of clothing.
Only a handful of seconds passed from the moment that pack of aggressors descended to when things sped up again, and the falling synth’s doom-filled wail fell away. She stood over four twitching or completely still synthetic bodies, and, rather than soak up her conquest, standing there, waiting for the next shoe to drop, she charged up the next flight of steps, calling out, “Hurry up, Leo!”
She came upon two more survivors, urged them to hurry, and kept moving. At the doorway to B7, she found a corpo-sec utility officer trying to weld the door shut while something on the other side pounded against it, each blow deforming the metal slightly. He didn’t even spare Juliet a glance as she flew past him. She powered past B6, noting that the door was ajar and the space beyond was utterly dark. Smoke lingered in the air, and Juliet couldn’t imagine that was a good sign. She paused by the door, pushing it shut with her foot, waiting for Leo and the doctor. “You coming?” she asked in comms.
Leo’s voice, grunting and breathy with exertion, replied, “Just passed B7. Carrying the doc; she’s slow as shit.”
“I’m waiting at B6. One more to go. You got this.” Twenty seconds later, Leo appeared on the flight of steps below, his face red, Juliet’s pistol tight in his fist, and the doctor bouncing on his shoulder, grunting and complaining with each jolt.
“You keep whining, and I’m tossing you over!” he growled.
Juliet smirked and started up the steps. “Frida, we’re almost to the garage.”
“Team Three is waiting. They had to clear some corpo-sec.”
Juliet didn’t like the sound of that, but she didn’t like anything about the situation. She was just glad they had a ride waiting. When she reached the door to B5, she saw the sign indicating it was a garage level and almost wept at the beauty of it. Even though Angel scanned the door and didn’t paint any silhouettes for her to worry about, Juliet darted forward and kicked her boot against the crash bar, sending the door flying open.
She charged out, sword ready. The scene wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d imagined. There was some blood on the concrete, and she could see drag marks where some bodies had been hauled away behind vehicles, but that was it. A low, black SUV idled not far from the door, and she could see Tanaka standing by the open rear door.
He was geared for combat—flexible-looking black pants and a pullover shirt, tactical vest, low-profile combat shoes, and, of course, a scabbard jutting up from his left hip that could only contain a monoblade. Juliet turned to the stairs just in time to see Leo stagger up the steps. He turned, her Texan thundered, and then he darted for the doorway. “Close it!” he yelled as he charged the waiting SUV. Juliet slammed the door shut, not sure what good that would do—she didn’t have a way to seal it. Angel solved that puzzle, though, when the lights on the access panel began to flash red, and the words FIRE SEAL scrolled across its display.
Juliet jogged over to the SUV and slipped into the back seat. Tanaka shut her door and, almost nonchalantly, climbed into the front seat and fastened his seatbelt. Dora Lee was driving, and Juliet barely had time to wonder where Barns or Hawkins were before Leo said from the back cargo compartment, “Can this chick be tracked?”
Juliet shook her head. “Not with the watchdog I put in her head. I mean, unless she has a tracker on her body somewhere.”
“I don’t,” Estes cried.
“Use the scanner in the toolkit, Applebaum,” Dora said, smoothly driving the SUV up the exit lane.
“Right,” Leo said, digging through the plastic box of drawers.
“Well,” Tanaka said, turning to look back at Juliet. “It looks like this mission got a little messier than you planned.” For some reason, he was smiling, a genuine smile and a pleasant expression that Juliet had never seen on his face.
She met his smile with a scowl. “What are you grinning about?”
“I see you made good use of my sword. We’ll have an interesting debriefing on Monday, but for now, I have some people at LCC headquarters awaiting delivery of your witness and the evidence we’ve gathered.” Despite everything in her experience with the man saying it was impossible, he continued to smile, and she could see it reflected in his eyes. Half her brain was stunned by the incongruous behavior, while another wrestled with what he’d said—LCC, or Luna Corporate Consortium, was the de facto ruling body of the moon. Who were Tanaka’s contacts there?