The Far Shores (The Central Series) (60 page)

From behind the ruins of
an abandoned car, Alex and Katya exchanged fire haphazardly with the Operators
concealed in the building in front of them. Katya used a bolt-action carbine,
forcing the barrel through a breach in the car’s undercarriage and choosing her
shots carefully, while Alex fired off panicky, aimless bursts each time he
worked up the courage to work his rifle around the back fender. Min-jun, in the
meantime, had exhausted the grenade launcher portion of his rifle, and was instead
attempting to provide suppressing fire as Mitsuru stood fearlessly in the
confines of his barrier, ignoring incoming fire while discharging two pistols
with uncanny accuracy.

Counting Etheric Signatures,
Haley estimated that less than half of the original force arrayed against the
Auditors remained in the fight, discounting the incapacitated, wounded, and
dying. Despite their losses, the Ghouls and the Weir charged relentlessly,
seemingly without fear or regard for their own safety, ignoring the gunfire and
rapidly diminishing the distance between them and the cover that sheltered the
Auditors.

Haley! The Operator
in the right-side building has the angle on Alex and Katya. Take him.

Haley responded to
Mitsuru’s order with an affirmation and dove, passing through the aluminum and
drywall of the building without resistance. There were three Operators in the
room, all taking cover beside windows or hunched behind their rifles. Her
target was a brow-haired man with deeply tanned skin and a jumble of tattoos
covering his exposed arms. He wore a flak jacket and carried a Dragunov, the
sniper variant of the infamous AK rifle, carefully adjusting his telescopic
sight. Haley allowed the momentum of her dive to take her directly into his
head, aiming at the small bald spot forming at the very top.

There was a moment of terrifying
dislocation while both of them struggled to comprehend their current situation
and assert control. Information flooded Haley’s system, as he struggled to assert
his identity in the face of the alien occupying his cerebral cortex. Fortunately,
Haley was experienced and trained to deal with the circumstances, while she had
to assume that possession was a new and terrifying experience for the man. She
couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of sympathy, all the while intuitively
overriding a variety of neurological connections, paralyzing some segments of
his cerebrum, while hijacking other areas of the cerebellum, picking and
choosing the few facts that she needed from his thoughts. His body felt to
Haley like a set of dominos, building in momentum as systems were co-opted.
First to go were involuntary movements, as the man discovered abruptly that he
could no longer breathe or blink his eyes without conscious effort. Subverting
these systems was merely a precursor to what was to come, distracting his
neurological defenses by forcing his attention to the autonomic nervous system.
Haley bypassed his psychic defenses with ease, as they were designed to prevent
external telepathic or empathic interference, not a revolution from within.

The reach of her
protocol expanded, subjugating his muscular system, hijacking his perceptions,
superseding conscious control of his body, and then finally sequestering his
bewildered consciousness to an isolated corner of the mind normally reserved
for the storage and recollection of memory. She had no need of his memories,
after all, and Haley found that her possessions were more effective if her host
was trapped and captivated by a world composed entirely of his own memories,
rather than becoming the equivalent of a backseat driver in their mind,
screaming and attempting to wrest control of the wheel from her.

The process took twenty
seconds – longer than usual, given his nanite-enhanced system and implanted
psychic protections. Haley was in control of Trevor Mann.

One of the other rogue
Operators was shaking Trevor, trying to jar him from the fit that had left him
drooling and convulsing, bent over the rifle that had held Alex firmly in its
crosshairs only moments before.

“Trevor? Are you okay?
Were you hit?”

Haley made his face
smile, struggling to operate the unfamiliar facial muscles.

“I’m fine,” he/she said,
pausing to spit out the mouthful of bile that his stomach had kicked up during
their brief battle for control. Incidentally, Trevor had also soiled his
underwear, bit his tongue severely, and suffered a series of small strokes that
would forever impair his ability to walk without dragging his left foot, but
Haley didn’t think that would be much of an issue, given how soon he would be
dead. “I think they tried something telepathic?”

Inside the room, she
could see how cunningly the building had been prepared. Though the outside of
the building was little more than oxidized metal and peeling latex paint, the
interior was metal lined and effectively bulletproof. Each of the three rogue
Operators had a mobile shooting rest established next to one of the windows,
firing out of precut slits in the bulletproof Lexan that had been installed in
place of the glass, along with enough ammo to fight a small war. It was no
wonder that Katya’s well-aimed shots had no effect on them.

“Are you sure? Your
voice sounds weird, and...are you bleeding?”

The Operator studied
Trevor Mann with a mixture of concern and suspicion, and Haley felt the vague
tingling that signaled the onset of a telepathic probe. Time to move.

Trevor Mann placed the
muzzle of his Colt against the stomach of his concerned companion, at the point
where two Kevlar plates almost met, and pulled the trigger three times, armor-piercing
slugs tearing through his flak jacket and bursting out the back, blood
splattering against the ceiling of the reinforced room. The man coughed and
tumbled forward onto Trevor, sending both of them to the ground.

The other rogue Operator
abandoned his rifle in confusion, reaching for his own pistol while he tried to
sort out exactly what was going on with his two companions. Trevor Mann struggled
out from beneath the body of the dying man at Haley’s insistence, his movements
clumsy and uncoordinated. She forced him to stand, and Trevor nearly tumbled
face-forward, reeling across the room like a drunken man, his face frozen in
the rictus of a cadaver, with blood and saliva leaking from the side of his
rigid mouth.

“Trevor...what the fuck,
man?”

Three meters. Haley
forced him to lurch forward, struggling to keep him upright as Trevor Mann fought
to reassert control over his subverted body. He had little success, but he did
make controlling the unfamiliar body more difficult.

“Stop right there,” the
Operator ordered, leveling his own Colt. “I’m serious. Another step and I
shoot.”

That suited Haley just
fine, so she continued on, a pistol clenched in Trevor’s right hand. The
Operator opened fire, and Haley felt the impact of the slugs in Trevor Martin’s
chest and stomach, partially blunted by the flak jacket, but still bruising
flesh and chipping bone. While Haley felt the impact, she felt none of the
pain; she had left that particular sensory input for the body’s original owner.
Trevor Mann cried out, trapped in a corner of his own mind, assailed by pain
and memory, while Haley drove his body relentlessly forward in the face of
gunfire. Her possessed body absorbed another round that tore away his right ear
and blinded one eye, and another that mangled his left shoulder, shredding bone
and ligament. Then she was close enough to half tackle, half fall on the other
Operator, taking another shot to the chest in the process, this one penetrating
partway through the Kevlar plate. Under normal circumstances, Trevor Mann probably
would have blacked out, but Haley was not dismayed.

She forced the Colt
against the Operator’s throat, and then pulled the trigger until the gun
stopped firing, and the Operator was left gurgling and clutching at his torn
esophagus and the blood spurting from his severed jugular. Haley ignored him,
rolling over and studying Trevor Mann’s belt with his remaining good eye,
finding what she was looking for after a few moments of struggling to focus his
blurry vision. The last few movements were relatively simple, then she
abandoned his body, floating out and up toward the ceiling like a cartoon
illustration of the soul leaving the body.

Trevor Mann regained his
senses and control of his body just in time to realize that he was holding a
live grenade to his chest.

The bulletproof room did
a good job containing the explosion.

***

Alex fired until his magazine was
depleted, then tossed it aside and slammed another home, accidentally burning
the side of his little finger on the hot barrel. He was firing mostly blind, as
he could not risk sticking his head far enough out of cover to use the reflex
sight. Katya seemed to be picking her shots more carefully beside him, lying
prone with the barrel of her gun carefully threaded through a hole in the body
of the car, but he hadn’t thought to find any such vantage before the bullets
started flying, and he was too panicked to do so now.

A few meters away,
Min-jun’s barrier absorbed the brunt of the fire from the occupied warehouse
while Mitsuru calmly picked her shots from behind it. Despite the situation,
Alex found himself remembering the night she had saved him from the Weir, in
the park not far from his high school, under an ugly jaundiced moon.

“Fuck!”

Katya’s swearing jarred
him back to the present. He glanced over at her, and was horrified to see that
she was clutching her left hand, blooding dripping from a wound just above the
wrist.

“Oh, shit! Are you okay,
Katya?”

Alex stumbled to the
opposite side of the car, crouching over her protectively. He leaned forward,
past the limited protection the wrecked car provided, and shouldered his rifle.
He sighted on the charging Weir, flipped the fire selector to automatic, and
opened up, firing a long burst and then readjusting the rifle to compensate for
muzzle climb. He dropped the first Weir, then started in on the second. When
that one fell, he turned the weapon on the warehouse, expending the rest of the
magazine on the unseen shooter that had wounded Katya. He did not retreat back
behind the car until the clip was spent. Then he fell back under cover, his
back to the car and his shoulder pressed against Katya, tossing the rifle aside
and tugging the first-aid kit from a pouch at his belt.

“Are you okay? How bad
is it?”

Katya grinned at him,
her face pale.

“I’m good. Went through
the meat,” she explained shakily, holding up her hand so he could see the
rounded chunk that was missing from the side of her hand below her little
finger. “I’ll live.”

“Fuck. I thought...”

“I know. It’s cool. Calm
down.”

Alex realized what he
had done, leaning out into the field of fire, and was almost sick on the spot.
He fought back dizziness and nausea with an effort, not wanting to lose
whatever points he had just gained by throwing up in Katya’s lap.

“Did they stop shooting?”
Katya cocked her head, as if she could hear anything over the racket that
Min-jun’s rifle made. “I think they stopped.”

“Holy shit,” Alex said,
glancing at his discarded rifle. “Did I get them?”

Mitsuru might have yelled
something. There was no time to be sure.

The Weir leapt atop the
wreck of the car they crouched behind. It was silver and transformed into a
monstrous wolf-human hybrid, matted coat covered in intermingled blood. It
vaulted from the wreck and dove down at them, all claws and teeth.

Alex grabbed for it, one
hand latching to its shoulder, the other clenching around the Weir’s ear. He
pulled sideways and shifted beneath, wrenching the thing as hard as he could. The
Weir landed half on top of him, one shoulder hitting him square in the chest,
while the other slammed into the pavement. The air was forced from his chest in
one agonizing blow, but Alex held on to the Weir, twisting the ear and digging
his thumb into the hollow of its shoulder, searching for a pressure point,
while attempting to drive his knee into the Weir’s exposed genitals.

The Weir howled and
struck at Alex with its free arm, claws tearing through three layers of Kevlar
and dragging painfully along the top of his sternum, without quite breaking
through to pierce the skin. It lunged forward, attempting to bite out his
throat, and Alex twisted its ear, trying to force its head back. The Weir
twisted and its teeth snapped shut short of his throat, the beast close enough
that Alex could feel the foul warmth of its breath on his face. He abandoned
his hold on its shoulder and fumbled for the knife sheathed at his waist.

It snarled and again
tried to tear out his throat, claws digging into Alex’s upper arms, and again
he twisted the ear. In a horrifying moment, Alex felt something give, and
realized that the ear had torn free of the Weir’s head in the struggle. The
Weir howled and Alex tossed the severed ear aside in disgust. The Weir lunged
for him again and Alex just managed to get his arm up between them in time, the
powerful jaws closing on his forearm. The Weir’s teeth embedded in the armor
plate on the top of his arm, but sank freely into the soft flesh on the
underside. Alex cried out as he found the hilt of his knife, tugging it free of
the sheath and bringing it up to his chest. The Weir shook its head, teeth
shredding Alex’s forearm and splattering him with blood. Then the Weir released
its bite, digging its claws further into Alex’s shoulders while it raised its
head. Before it could attack his exposed throat, Alex shoved the knife up with
all the force he could summon with his shoulders pinned, driving the point
through the bottom of the Weir’s jaw and up into its mouth. The Weir reeled,
and Alex freed his other arm, putting more force behind the knife, attempting
to force it up into the Weir’s head.