“Our resistance would do well to ensure this man gets away,” Kayoko said, gesturing at Delagarza. “Come with us. We’ll fight our way out together.”
Delagarza flashed her his most charming smile, ignoring the tiny pang of guilt that stabbed his chest. “No offense, Nanny, but you’re kind of a bullet magnet right now.”
Cronos looked at Delagarza like he had shot Kayoko himself. Kayoko merely snorted.
“Don’t worry, Cronos. Everyone serves the Edge in their own ways. Let’s strive to draw all the bullets away from Hirsen’s path. His time will come, too, as it came for us.”
Delagarza left with the transmitter, the chip, and her laughter drilling at his ears.
TAIGA FOUGHT AND FELL. Delagarza passed a flaming tank, its structure caved into itself by an invisible projectile. Small, distant explosions sent waves raking his bones and made him fear for the dome’s air supply.
He rushed, head low, along tight streets with ash raining around him, the low gravity making it look as if gray soot slowly danced through a transparent liquid.
Keep to the shadows, Hirsen advised, and try not to look like a target.
“I know!” Delagarza shouted. A squad of rebels, a couple of which still had neon Mohawk hair, passed by him, ignoring him, headed toward the explosions with their weapons at the ready.
They went Delagarza’s opposite direction, which he took as a good omen. Maybe he still had time.
He saw the first amphibian squad halfway through to the private lifts out of Taiga.
A glint of metal behind the busted windows of a nightclub. A hint of a heavy footstep crushing glass. Delagarza ducked and went to ground behind a couple trash bags and peeked out, adrenaline coursing through his body.
They have heat vision, Hirsen warned.
Delagarza cursed and turned off his reg-suit before Hirsen had time to suggest it.
Cold seeped into his body faster than he could’ve expected, Dione’s true overlord draining the heat out of him like a vampire feasting on a jugular.
They can still see you, Hirsen told him, if they look close enough.
But he would look different from all the other signatures around. Perhaps they’d mistake him for the dead or dying, or maybe they’d pass him by. He remained very still and watched.
One of the rebellion’s tanks appeared down the street, its threads raking a cloud of dust as it went. Back at the nightclub, an insect-like helmet, antennas, red visor, hard angles, and black matte armor insinuated itself against the glass. Arms just like the helmet inched out of the window, carrying a rifle more at home in a tank’s hull than in a man’s arm.
The infiltrator waited for the tank to draw closer, closer, until it passed right in front of the nightclub. Delagarza’s teeth chattered despite his best efforts. His fingertips felt clumsy and distant. The rifle roared, a string of continuous, muffled explosions that came too close together, like the revving of a chainsaw with oryza for fuel.
The tank’s flank was bent by dozens of holes about the size of Delagarza’s fist, if not bigger. The tank kept going straight for a second, then simply slid left, away from the nightclub, and smashed the front of a high-end Italian restaurant two hundred meters away from Delagarza. Flames licked at the tank’s threads.
“Fucking hell,” Delagarza muttered.
Don’t move, Hirsen said. Wait until they confirm the kill.
In Delagarza’s opinion, the kill was already confirmed as fuck, but neither the agent nor the infiltrator shared his evaluation. The rifle stopped firing, disappeared back into the window’s darkness, and came back not two seconds later. It fired again, that revving sound filling the street.
Delagarza brought his hands under his underarms, desperate to keep the fragile fingers away from the bite of the cold.
When the rifle stopped firing, this time it didn’t come up again.
Hold on for a minute, Hirsen said.
“I’m dying here,” Delagarza said through gritted teeth. His eyes wouldn’t leave that tank. What would the inside look like? Whoever had been in there, had they had any time to figure out what was happening?
Thirty seconds later, he turned his reg-suit’s power back on, and sighed in relief as the warm orange light bathed his face and the internal pumps distributed artificial heat around his body.
He kept going. He reached the lifts just in time to see the battle’s aftermath.
The lifts were on fire, their structure folded around itself like a car crash. Bodies littered the surrounding surface, spread in a semi-circle, young men and women Lotti’s age. Hell, maybe she was somewhere in there.
She’s smarter than that, Hirsen said, a survivor just like us. Worry about my hide, Samuel. Remember the stairs that lead to the tunnels?
“Yes,” Delagarza said, walking among the corpses, the survivor of some silent apocalypse. Whoever killed them, they had kept going, diving into Taiga, hunting for Kayoko and the rebellion’s higher-ups. Thank Reiner for small favors.
Hirsen laughed bitterly and explained that wasn’t true. The tunnels were sure to be watched. Knowing the enforcers, all exits had been covered by security personnel and enforcers while the amphibian infiltrators did the heavy killing themselves.
Maybe it’s Major Strauze himself, holed up in there, safely tucked away from all those pesky bullets, waiting until Vortex’s infiltrators take Taiga for him. Then he’d stroll up and take the credit.
“Well,” said Delagarza as he scurried to the stairs, eyes peeling left and right, scouting for movement. “I hope you fight as good as you talk, agent Hirsen.”
THE FIRST COUPLE security officers never saw him coming. Delagarza took them down near the tunnel’s entrance, a two-man patrol too busy with their smuggled vodka flask to watch their surroundings. Said surroundings came crashing on them in the form of a pipe tube, rusty and heavy, which collapsed the first officer’s skull and came up for a second strike at the other jaw before he had time to scream in surprise.
As they both stumbled to the floor, Delagarza and his pipe confirmed the kills. He stood panting above the crumpled forms as blood coalesced in a puddle around his boots and wondered why he felt nothing at all.
Selective empathy, said Hirsen, Newgen’s greatest advance in genetic engineering. Makes for a highly effective killer, works much better than just turning empathy off altogether.
“I’m starting to hate that Newgen you keep babbling about,” Delagarza said as he patted the corpses down.
That’s what tipped you over the line? Man, you haven’t heard the half of it.
Their rifles were DNA-locked, so there was no use in stealing them. He found an ugly pistol with a leaping tiger painted on the grip. Nine bullet clip, no extra ammo. He also found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Those he welcomed more than the gun.
The tunnels were too big for the enforcers to secure altogether, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t tried. Delagarza avoided several patrols by dodging into dead-ends and taking cover behind pipes and machinery. No one expected rebels at this side of the tunnels, not after the carnage outside.
Listening to the radio talk of nearby enforcers, Delagarza found out Kayoko’s leadership, her included, had found themselves in the receiving end of a smart-mortar strike. Infiltrators were currently sifting through the wreckage, matching the mangled corpses’ DNA signature with the records in Vortex and Alwinter’s databases.
The rebel leaders hadn’t had time to fire a single shot.
And yet, Delagarza felt nothing. He wondered if that was the selective empathy at work, or if he was just that much of an asshole.