46 – Changing the Game As Tony approached the door, he was startled when his comms came back online and Glitch’s voice came through. “We’re on the local net, using encrypted data. It’ll take them hours of sifting to notice our traffic. Sorry, I should have thought of this when we were talking a minute ago, but my head was reeling.” “So you can give us a heads-up. I mean, unless they jam us.” Tony replied. “Exactly. The Boxer troops are heading into the building, and they have drones. Two stayed with Ross and the lady.” Tony nodded. “So that leaves ten?” Tony looked at Beef. “Get all that?” Tony reached for the door, visor still facing Beef. When the big man nodded, he pulled it open, and Beef pushed forward, rifle pointing downrange. When he’d cleared the door, Tony followed and moved to the left side of the hallway, keeping pace with him, but two steps behind. More glass windows were coming up, and he had a feeling that the last two security guards would have a surprise for them— Beef took an extra step trying to come to a halt, but it was good enough; he was still a meter from the trap. “What?” he asked, as Tony pulled his coat, tugging him back. Tony pointed. “Shaped charge.” It was a clever trap; the gray rectangle matched the plastic-lined wall almost perfectly. He wondered if it was part of the design; maybe the surface mimicked what you placed it on. He continued backing up and switched his SMG for his shotgun. The battery was down to just a few more shots, but he figured he ought to be able to mess up that charge with it—blow out the sensors or maybe trigger the firing mechanism. As he lifted the gun to his shoulder, he said, “This might be loud.” Tony dialed the impact pattern down to match the charge, then depressed the trigger. The gun whined and zwapped, and then twenty marble-sized indentations appeared in the shaped charge, peeling away the malleable explosive in long grooves. It almost fell off the wall, so Tony aimed and fired again. This time, a shower of sparks rewarded him as the backplate clattered off the wall and the deformed bomb slid down the hallway. “I think that was the primer going off.” Beef looked at him, frowning. “It didn’t blow?” “I mean, I tore a lot of the explosives away. Maybe the contact wires came loose.” Their further speculation was interrupted by the staccato blap-blap-blap of semiautomatic fire. One of the windows shattered on Tony’s left, and he felt the impacts of bullets on his hardened, carapace-like chest plate. Beef immediately returned fire. Tony also did, using his SMG after a hasty swap, but Beef was first on target with his new rifle. His quick response kept Tony from having to duck for cover; the guy stopped shooting, and Tony advanced, pressing the attack with steady semi-automatic fire, scanning left and right, trying to find the last of the human guardians. He knew where one was—he and Beef had him pinned down. Where was the last— The right-hand window shattered, and the exploding glass was followed by a small gray object that Nora highlighted in bright yellow—grenade. “Frag!” he yelled, diving back toward the doors. He saw Beef turn to run out of the corner of his eye, and just as Tony hit the deck, the grenade popped. Hot gases billowed over him, but his ear implants dampened the explosion so that he kept his wits about him as the force wave sent him sliding toward the doors. He was up in just a couple of heartbeats; proof that his new armor had saved him from any shrapnel that hadn’t blown over top of him. As he spun, already lifting his gun, he saw Beef slumped against the wall, his leather duster nice and shredded. Tony didn’t have time to assess the damage—both their assailants were angling toward the broken windows, ready to open fire. Tony took his SMG in his left hand and unloaded toward the guy on the left, trusting the virtual reticule Nora projected to help him stay on target with his offhand. At the same time, he pointed his fist at the shooter on the right and fired his Widowhook at him. Several bullets impacted his armor before his response had an effect. Nora helped immensely; she knew when this hook hit home, and she started retracting it violently that very instant. The man he’d speared was ripped through the broken-glass window, his arms pinwheeling as he dropped his gun and tried to stop his progress. The hook was set deeply, though. It had bitten into his breastbone, and Nora didn’t hold back from delivering an electric charge. He screamed and came through. Meanwhile, Tony’s barrage of rounds had driven the other guy back again, so he stomped forward and finished his magazine, drilling eight rounds into the helmet of the guy he’d pulled through the window. Rather than dig out another mag, he let the gun hang and ripped his pistol out of the holster. He continued toward the broken window on the left. He held the gun ready but didn’t shoot, and, as soon as the other guy, his helmet and visor scarred by bullet impacts, poked his head up, Tony pounded several high-pressure, armor-piercing rounds into his face. Both targets down, he held the gun close and turned in a slow circle, looking for any more hostiles. As Beef stirred, groaning, something moved in the corner of the lab on the right. Tony drew a bead, but didn’t fire—it was a figure wearing a white coat, and he had a familiar face. “Why are they so quiet?” Addie asked Glitch, afraid to speak into comms lest she somehow startle Tony and Beef at a critical moment. If she’d had more experience with combat comms, she’d remember how Tony had explained to her that a good PAI wouldn’t let that happen. The tidbit slipped her mind at that moment, though, and she looked at Glitch expectantly. “At first…” Glitch said, her voice trailing to a mumble as she tapped her keys. “At first I thought they were just busy, but, Ads, I think those soldiers brought a jammer into the building. My pings aren’t getting through.” Addie stared at her for a long minute, her mind racing through a thousand scenarios. Finally, she shook her head and stood up, drawing her needler from its holster. “This isn’t going to work.” “Wait a minute, Ember—” “Nope. Tony and Beef aren’t going to find a spot to hide down there. Come on! You said the soldiers brought two drones in with them.” Glitch nodded, slowly. “Yeah. They’re definitely geared-up to find someone.” “Kwon, no doubt, but I’m sure they’ll look around carefully, if they find him dead.” Again, Glitch nodded, her shoulders slumping in defeat. “Yeah. I don’t know, Ember. I’m sorry, but it looks like a losing game.” “So we need to change the game.” Addie moved toward the van's back door. “I’m going to see what I can do about the people in those vehicles, but you have to start figuring out a way to hijack their signal. Do you think they have techs on-site or are they working remotely?” Glitch spaced out for a moment, her visor moving slightly left, right, up, and down. When she looked at Addie, she smiled. “Remote. Nice fat data stream heading toward mid-Blast from those drones hovering around the building.” “So? Can you hijack it?” “Driftjack’s already in place. I just need to put the right daemons online. Shit, though, my Boxer hacks are more than a month old…” She shook her head. “I’ll figure it out! What are you going to do, though?” “I don’t know. Something clever and brave, I hope.” Addie lifted the lid to the metal chest Tony had installed in the center of the van and dug around until she found the visor he’d purchased for himself before he’d gotten his helmet. When she lifted it to her head, she had to pull the strap quite a bit to tighten it, but then the little pressurized gasket conformed to her face, and JJ announced he was pairing with her new device. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. “Don’t get yourself killed, Addie!” Glitch said, reaching out to grab her wrist. Addie gently disengaged. “Just do your thing, Glitch. Don’t let those corpo jackers get the better of you.” The gentle prod was enough; Glitch’s face got serious, and she turned, straightening her visor as her fingers began to fly on her crystal-glass. Addie pushed the door open and slipped out of the van. Before she moved, she pulled up her Dust report: Dust Purity: Impure – 1.71 LIR Dust Capacity: 4418/5000 Gain Rate: 22 units per 60 seconds Current Dust-tech Drain: 0 Despite using Humpty pretty hard, she’d still gathered more Dust since the last time she’d checked. Smiling and holding her needler close, she skulked along the sidewalk, hugging the line of parked cars. She hurried toward the corner and the street that would lead her back to the abandoned office building. She wasn’t sure what she’d do, exactly, but she knew that she could do a lot with more than four thousand Dust. Nᴇw novel chapters are publɪshed on 𝕟𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕝✶𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖✶𝕟𝕖𝕥 As she ran, she checked the visor's settings. Everything looked right—the facial scrambling array was lit up green, indicating it was active. Addie scanned the sky, looking for the Boxer drones, but there were too many up there. She supposed they’d be lower than most of the ones flying to and fro, but she couldn’t spot them. On second thought… “JJ, use my visual input to locate the drones most likely to belong to the Boxer unit we’re dealing with.” “Just keep your vision tilted toward the building and the sky around it, Addie.” Addie did so, and almost immediately, two small black dots without any visible lights were highlighted on her AUI. “Those should be the ones.” Addie picked up her pace to a jog. “Let me know if they look like they’re swooping toward me to investigate.” Addie smiled. JJ was ever enthusiastic when it came to helping her. When she reached the area where the van had previously been parked and could see the rusted-out, abandoned vehicles in the office building's lot, she slowed and crouched there. So far, it didn’t seem like the drones had taken an interest in her. She was still a good fifty meters from the lot, but she had to be raising some suspicions. Frowning in concentration, she reached her consciousness into her chest, grabbed up a bunch of Dust from her reactor, and spread it out over herself. She knew how to fade; she just didn’t know how to move when she’d done so. It only cost her about a hundred Dust to do it, and, if nothing else, it would keep the drone from focusing on her while she tried to figure out her next step. The trick was something she’d done a hundred times, usually while lying in bed, trying to make herself sleepy, so it was an almost instant thing for her. The Dust encompassed her body, and then, with a brief concentration, she slipped away, into the space between—the veil. Her perception of the world changed. Everything shifted into tones of blue, and she knew that, if she could figure out how to move her body, she’d pass right through the objects she could see. The manual she’d gotten from the defunct institute that tried to pioneer the training and employ of Dust empaths hadn’t had a very robust section on fading. The theories outlined in the book all indicated that she needed to focus her intention on moving. Pyroshi had hinted at something else, though—a pattern that would make moving much easier. The problem was that he hadn’t given it to her yet. Still, if the people at the institute had thought intention was the key, did that mean some of their early subjects had figured it out, or at least a kind of brute-force workaround? Addie had more than four thousand Dust. There weren’t any empaths with reactors that robust back when the institute was operating. So, if they had managed to move while faded, Addie ought to be able to. She thought about how she reached out to Humpty. She thought about how she grabbed onto his hooks. What was she doing that with? Her brain? A kind of psychic muscle? Was that the key? Did she need to move differently? Staring at her hand in the blue shades of the veil, she imagined it was the mental manipulator that she used with Humpty. She imagined it could grasp hooks and— It moved! Her fingers closed into a loose fist. Addie wanted to whoop with excitement, but she forced herself to focus. Moving some fingers wasn’t going to do it. She needed to move her body. Again, she performed the movement, and this time it was easier. She opened and closed her fingers several times. Each time, she tried to memorize the feel of it, the way it was different from moving her fingers outside the veil. It all seemed to boil down to her sending a bit of her consciousness along with the impulse to move, just like she would if she were doing something with Humpty. Mentally nodding, she tried the same thing with her arm, and it worked! She lifted it. “Easy,” she said, and, amazingly, her voice echoed strangely through the veil, which was otherwise eerily quiet. She could still hear the physical world, but everything was muted and distant. With renewed confidence, Addie straightened her legs, rising from her crouching position beside the old car. A smile spreading on her ghostly face, she took a step, and then she was in the car. “Oof!” she grunted, not having meant to move so far. A sudden panic struck her, and she almost lost her concentration on the Dust that was coating her body. If she did that—if she lost the fade while she was walking through something— The panic continued to rise until she forced herself to concentrate and move her legs, slipping through the strangely insubstantial metal and plastic until she stood in the middle of the street. Another alarming thought came to her, and she hastily looked at her Dust display: Dust Purity: Impure – 1.71 LIR Dust Capacity: 4133/5000 Gain Rate: 22 units per 60 seconds Current Dust-tech Drain: 18 units per second “Eighteen a second!” as she watched, though, the number gradually shifted down to three. It seemed that standing still was much less costly. Nevertheless, she had to move. Addie focused on the lot where the two Boxer vehicles were parked, and then she started walking. She forced herself to build the habit of glancing at her Dust reading with every step, and when she stood—right in the open—ten meters from the two guards that had stayed behind to watch the execs, she’d run her counter down to 3809. Addie knew her needler wouldn’t do a thing if she fired it from inside the veil, but she also knew, thanks to Cold Mary, that her Dust abilities would work. She moved close to one of the guards, a bulky man leaning against an overturned, abandoned ambulance. The vehicle had been stripped to its rusted frame, but it seemed a perfect spot for a bored corpo-sec officer to take a load off. Addie stepped up right behind him, hardly believing her fade was working so perfectly. She steadied her needler in her hand and pointed it right at the nape of the man’s neck, aiming it up under the flange of his helmet. It was loaded with botu-rounds, which were supposed to paralyze a target, but she had no idea if it was safe to shoot someone in the skull with them. She hoped so. She looked at the other guard, a woman smoking a vape near the cargo door of the nearest Boxer vehicle. With great concentration, Addie grabbed some more of the Dust from her reactor and pulled it along the matrix to her left hand. Then, as a migraine began to form behind her eyes, she wove it into the pattern for the little trick Pyroshi had taught her, wrapping the invisible lines around the woman’s wrists. With a final flourish, she finished, and the woman yelped as both her arms were jerked over her head. At the same time, Addie dropped her fade and squeezed the trigger on her needler twice. The beautiful, sleek little gun coughed—pfft-pfft—and the male guard grunted and slapped a hand toward the back of his neck. Before he could utter another sound, he collapsed, falling to the dirty pavement amid shards of broken bottles, bits of plastic, and refuse. The woman was dangling a dozen centimeters off the ground, and Addie walked toward her, taking aim at her throat—she had a good angle under the chin-guard. Pfft-pfft went her needler, and two tiny silver prongs erupted from the woman’s black turtleneck. When she slumped, Addie canceled her “Hands-up,” and the corpo-sec officer fell to the pavement, joining her compatriot. Before taking another step, Addie spread more Dust over herself and faded. Even as fast as she was, it took several seconds. She was sure the execs inside the vehicles would come out, but they didn’t. Had they failed to notice? Were they hiding? She looked at her Dust counter: Dust Purity: Impure – 1.71 LIR Dust Capacity: 2833/5000 Gain Rate: 22 units per 60 seconds Current Dust-tech Drain: 78 units per second The drain was alarming at first, but it rapidly normalized. The reactor was simply trying to cope with the spikes of usage she’d just put it through. She could hear the outside world, but her comms to the outside weren’t working. It was like being jammed, so her desire to ask Glitch for an update went unrequited. Addie moved to the first vehicle, peering at the dark windows—cobalt blue in the veil—but didn’t see anything. After a moment, she chuckled and leaned forward, pressing her face through the glass. The vehicle was empty. Sudden panic entered Addie’s mind. Had she missed one of them fleeing? She shook her head. No. Why would they sit and wait in separate vehicles? She moved around the transport to the other one. When she stood beside it, she once again put her face through the glass, peering inside. While she would have liked to say she was surprised to find Ross and his female coworker leaning close, breathing heavily as they kissed with hands amorously exploring, she really wasn’t. Still, it relieved her of the fear that they’d seen her take out their guards. As she stood there, trying to think of the perfect way to handle them, Addie was all too aware of the ticking clocks she’d left behind her—the guards. She could hear Tony’s voice in her head, “These say they’ll put someone down for up to two hours, but don’t believe it. Any operator worth a damn will have some kind of counter—nanites most likely. Someone with bugs like mine? I wouldn’t be out for two minutes. Anyway, in the Blast, you can probably count on most people needing a few minutes to get moving again. I mean, unless they’ve got nothing, and then, yeah, you’ve got hours.” Addie’s first impulse was to fade her whole body through the vehicle and then shoot them. She was worried about her legs, though. She was standing on the ground. If she faded into the center of the transport, how would she get to the proper elevation? She didn’t know how. She did think she knew how to unfade just her hand, however. If she pushed her hand with her needler into the vehicle, then unfaded it, she ought to be able to shoot them, right? The whole concept made her wonder how her needler and clothes were in the veil with her. There had to be some trick to it all… Shaking her head, Addie pushed her arm through the side of the van and then her face, too, so she could aim. Praying that she wasn’t wrong, that she wasn’t about to unfade her whole body by accident, she peeled back the dust from her right hand, all the way to her wrist. If they’d been paying attention, Ross and his companion would have seen a disembodied hand holding a sleek chrome pistol appear in mid-air. Then, they would have heard four little coughs—pfft-pfft-pfft-pfft.