Originator (57 page)

Jane crashed through what was left of the window and took the lead, rushing through corridors, while Sandy brought up the rear. They continued like that, moving fast through buildings, changing floors to mix it up for their pursuers, and sometimes changing direction. Talee followed up adjoining streets, not game to rush the buildings, and knowing they'd probably be too late anyway, at the speed the humans were moving. If the Talee had heavy weapons, they didn't appear to want to use them on their own buildings, and within what was essentially a giant underground cavern, there was no airborne surveillance or armament to be seen.

Sandy and Jane's greatest vulnerability was in jumping across roads, but the Talee were having difficulty getting people into good fire positions to hit them in their leaps. At first they put people exposed on the street, but those were quickly shot, so the next took cover farther away but weren't quite high-enough designation to hit a leaping target at sixty-plus meters that was only exposed for a second at most. There were unarmed Talee on the streets now, some running, others ordering or directing—Sandy and Jane only fired on those who were armed and apparently hostile. But the buildings they moved through were clearly residential, with furniture, display screens, and wall art, and a few times they encountered Talee in the buildings, unarmed and frightened, whom they simply ignored.

A hail of bullets announced their approach to the target tower, Sandy immediately skidding for cover behind a support wall as fire kicked over furniture and splintered doorways. Jane covered nearby, then rolled into an adjoining room to peer briefly through a window on a new angle.

“It's a block away!” Jane announced. “They've stacked up the defences.” And rolled again as fire came close, punching through walls.

And they'd opened fire too far out, Sandy thought . . . though another two meters and she'd have spotted them anyway. Maybe they were right to try their luck. Suddenly her vision flashed, and she half-flipped into cyberspace, internal visual showing a massive barrier assault . . . but Cai's defences were responsive and kicked in with some fast adaptations that absorbed what was thrown at them and put up new barriers to replace the ones torn down.

“Jane!” she called as her vision cleared. “Jane, you feel that?”

“Yeah, I'm okay. I figure it'll get worse as we get closer. We gonna flank them?”

“You jump over to the next building, we crossfire the defences, draw fire for each other, I think they'll only take the shorter-range shot.”

“Gotcha.” And Jane rolled, then crawled, then ran as she reached the hall and back the way she'd come, then down some stairs, searching for better cover to get to the next building. Sandy went left, incoming fire seemed random, she didn't think they'd seen her and were just shooting at shadows. A thump told her someone had come down on the roof—counter-manoeuver, she hadn't seen much of that yet. Intense fire from ahead told her someone had spotted Jane's leap and opened up, but her hearing gave her the position down to a meter, and she rolled to a good window angle. Popped up and nailed a head shot, then rolled and scampered away as return fire shredded walls and windows around her. Behind a support wall, she pulled her pistol and aimed it around the corner . . . the targeting sight engaged another fire source in half a second, and she rapidly compressed the trigger, putting five rounds on target, saw another head snap back.

These Talee were fast and deadly, but she could see the lines of possible fire well before they did, and their numerical superiority only gave her more targets. They presumed to use their superior firepower and so weren't taking sufficient cover, looking instead to get the first shot off without realising that exposure only got them killed before they could do so. No one was as fast as her or Jane, not even Talee synthetics, who were theoretically the same designation . . . but not only was she the same technology, she was shaped and advanced by a thirty-year war that the Talee had not gone through. The Talee had all the tech but struggled to put it all together, like a football team filled with star players but no coach and no game plan. They guessed what came next. She
knew
.

Charges blew the ceiling down the hall behind her, and she dropped the first Talee who fell through the hole, then raced low across to the building's far side and dropped another one coming down a corridor as she flashed across it. That brought her to stairs, and she leaped down a floor, then braced against a supporting wall to look diagonally across the street at the defences now facing Jane. Jane's fire opened up on the defences facing her, each of them covered against the targets closest to them, and the Talee lost another four soldiers in a few seconds.

Sandy put three grenades in quick succession into the opposing wall and
took a running leap across the road and into the blinding dust and smoke. Crashed into a half-demolished wall and bounced up, moving fast and crouched down the hall and shooting another Talee in a passing doorway who simply wasn't fast enough. She could hear them shouting now, could hear the fear—even a people as heavily uplinked as synthetic Talee resorted to vocals in panic. This was instructive for everyone—Talee synth-tech had been taken by humans, and instead of getting worse, in this one lethal respect it had gotten much, much better. They hadn't realised soldiers could be this dangerous, that warfare against them could be this lopsided, and now came the oldest horror story, the fear of dangerous aliens that no local technology could stop . . . only here the aliens were humans, the most deadly species in all known space.

The defensive block of buildings before the control tower breached. Sandy skipped and ducked down hallways, crashed out another window to bounce across a low roof, then jumped for a higher window as shots hit the wall beside her. The far window now showed the tower, just a low thing, barely twenty floors but with glassy sides and a mid-level garden alcove directly opposite. Sandy took a risk and leaped, and was immediately hit by tracking fire from below, multiple rounds through the right-side armour as she covered her head with one arm and tracked with the other, finding two of them on the street corner and felling both before she fell twisting into the grass and seating on the tower's garden.

She rolled and scrambled back to the edge, scanning as fast as she could for other targets, knowing that exposed like this she couldn't see everything . . . but there was nothing, and Jane came crashing through a nearby window and chose instead to hit a window meters to Sandy's left and disappear within. Sandy pulled back and ran, kicked through a glass door, and slid into a corridor junction, but it was empty. Up the corridor and there in an open-plan office to one side, amidst an odd arrangement of ergonomic chairs and midair displays, Jane was picking herself up awkwardly.

“Jane!” Jane came staggering toward her, armour breached in several places, particularly on her right side. Sandy caught her, but Jane gestured her to move.

“Upstairs,” she said breathlessly. “Looks like the control point, laser coms to all points.”

Sandy took the stairs, not game to try the elevators when the Talee could commandeer building systems. She leaped up one flight at a time, kicking off walls on the way up with force enough to fracture concrete and bend the steel railings. Smart to booby trap the upper floors, she thought, and paused with two levels to go to take her nearly empty mag off her rifle and throw it a flight ahead. The explosion rocked the stairs, showering all below with debris and blinding smoke. It made perfect cover as she continued, shot the first Talee through the stairwell doors above, flipped another grenade around that corner and went low into the chaos of its explosion.

Moving fast through that chaos she came to new reinforced doors, entrance to a secure room, now with two more bodies at the base. She ramped up her armour's power to max and put a fist into the middle gap. Then she pulled, received fire from the far side, stuck her rifle's grenade launcher into the gap, and fired with the charge set to airburst. Rammed the door the rest of the way open and went in low.

Stairs and a spiral climb. At the top, a 360-degree view of the cavern city, ringed with a bank of displays and chairs. Amidst them, three Talee, all unarmed, all terrified and hiding as best they could. It was impossibly exposed, but being the highest point in the city, no sniper had a view down onto their floor. The cavern walls and ceiling were higher, of course, but those looked mostly smooth . . . save for the lighting setup on the ceiling, which was quite close from here. But sniper line of sight went both ways, and anyone getting up there would find the accuracy at this end was superior. Internal chronometer told her barely five minutes had passed since she and Jane had begun moving this way. Three hundred meters, perhaps eight urban blocks, never reaching street level, through heavy defences, and all without tacnet. She and Jane together were impossibly lethal. No wonder Taluq had not even considered the possibility that she'd turn him down. What could she possibly have in common with organic humanity anyway?

Jane crashed up the stairs behind and hit the base of a display terminal back first, reaching for first aid in her webbing. Blood was seeping through, which was never a good sign with GIs, given how much less they bled.

“Bad?” Sandy asked her, staring across the displays and controls.

“Yep,” said Jane, shooting spray foam into the twin holes in her right-side armour to stop the bleeding. “Went straight through.” Meaning whatever hit her was very high calibre, to breach both armour and synthetic muscles. Which meant internal injuries. “Can you break into this system?”

Sandy knew it was hopeless even as she looked at it. The three Talee cowering behind terminals weren't going to be any help, not sharing any language. The controls would be similarly alien in language and design.

“I'll have to wireless it,” she said. “If I can activate their coms, I can send a signal to Fleet, they can come and find us, get the organic Talee what they're looking for.”

“You make uplink contact here, they'll hack you faster than you can blink,” Jane retorted.

“Gotta risk it. I've got Cai's protections, I'm the most network-advanced of the two of us. . . .”

“Cai's protections are a patch. They're not going to stand up to Talee systems in their backyard.”

“Got a better idea?”

“Yes, I'll do it,” said Jane.

“You're not as good at it as me. . . .”

“No, but if they blow my killswitch you'll learn something, possibly you'll even learn enough to avoid them the next time.”

“No.” A shot went through the tower glass, heavy calibre, spraying them with fragments. “You're not using yourself as bait just because you found religion and want to atone for your sins.”

“You give me too much credit,” said Jane, popping a painkiller against her wrist and blinking hard against the pupil dilation. “I suggest it because it's the only way to do it.”

“Your life's worth as much as mine, Jane!” Sandy almost surprised herself by how much she meant it. She hadn't realised she did mean it until she said it.

Jane smiled crookedly, checking her weapon and her remaining torso rotation with the injury. “Sure,” she said. “But Danya, Svetlana, and Kiril make four. Do your maths.”

Sandy stared at her with dawning panic. Another round hit a terminal and sent pieces spinning across the control room. Pretty soon someone would
decide it was better to destroy this place than risk the humans accessing its coms. “Jane, you can't . . .”

“Just shut up and do it!” Jane snarled with sudden temper. Their eyes met. “Okay, sis?”

Sandy smiled weakly. “Sure, sis.” Jane nodded once and closed her eyes. Sandy took a deep breath and felt the rush of external code establish a space around her . . .

. . . and with a snap of sudden pain, the control room disappeared.

She stood in a city. It was an alien city, with nice architecture. Lots of glass and steel and greenery, with cubist spaces and differentiated levels. Like a much larger version of the Pantalan underground city.

The streets were full of Talee. They walked on the sidewalks and sat eating food in a garden square, as road traffic hummed around them and air traffic whined by on overhead skylanes. It was not so different from Tanusha, save that the sun held an orangish tint and washed the tower glass with more red light than her eyes were accustomed to filtering. There were displays that might have been advertising, and lots of strange, scrawling script that changed into shapes and pictures. As though the Talee used a writing script that was conceptually 3D. Intriguing possibility that was. Could it be connected to a dual-brain psychology?

Talee crossed the street about her, and she realised she was standing on a traffic island in the middle of a road. Obviously this was VR. She wondered if Jane were here, or somewhere else, and what the hell was going on. It didn't feel like defensive VR. Defensive VR trapped users in smaller spaces, closed loops that limited external access. Or that limited the ability to kill oneself in VR, which usually broke the trap.

She turned, and on the pavement across the road saw Cai. He wore human clothes, jeans and a jacket, as she'd seen him wear in Tanusha. And he was looking at her.

At a break in the traffic she jogged across the road and stopped before him. “Hi,” she said.

“Hello, Cassandra,” said Cai quite calmly. “What do you think of the city?”

“Um . . . it's nice. Where are we? The Talee homeworld?”

Cai nodded. “Yes. One of many cities, much like Earth. Billions of people. A little over three thousand years ago, before the second Catastrophe.”

Sandy nodded slowly, looking around. “Well, the problem, Cai, is that one of us is dead. Or possibly both. I'm not entirely sure right now.”

Cai smiled. “That would be me,” he admitted. “I gave you a lot of systems to boost your defences when you finally ran into my people. This is one of those systems.”