“I know,” she said, already moving again. “Let’s just make sure I don’t have to.”
Only fifteen meters to go. But they were the worst fifteen. No cover, just the slick white tiles underfoot, and the only shelter the flat of saline canisters just this side of the doorway. And they had to cross the whole width of the lab to reach those canisters.
As they started across, the first two guards skidded around the corner. One of them had Catrall’s carbine in his hands and was trying to override the DNA lock. The other had a sleek, expensive-looking firearm that Li’s oracle identified as a .308 Kalinin with Vologda optics.
She dove forward, head down, and slammed into the first guard at knee level before he had time to react.
She kept driving with both legs as she hit him and felt his knee give out with a wrenching snap.
Before the other guard could swing the Kalinin’s long barrel around to bear on her, Li jerked the injured man to his feet and jammed the Beretta to his temple.
His partner froze. The Kalinin’s black muzzle wavered.
Li smiled grimly and hoisted her hostage up, keeping the Beretta pressed to his skull. She started toward the shelter of the saline canisters. If they walked out of here alive, someone was going to catch hell for that little piece of bad housekeeping.
Two more guards appeared in the doorway. Like the first pair, they wore unmarked coveralls and carried top-shelf weaponry. Li heard them shouting to the hostage to get his head down.
“I don’t think that’s good advice,” Li said. She tightened her arm on his neck, both to keep his head up and to remind him what a Peacekeeper’s wire job could do to flesh and bone.
Her internals were going crazy, targeting alarms screaming on and off as the gunmen’s range finders fixed on her, lost her, fixed on her again. If they were willing to shoot her hostage to get to her, she was finished. Anyone Li had trained would have pulled the trigger the instant she made the grab and accepted the risk of shooting a friendly for what it was: unavoidable. But so far these guys were acting like amateurs.
If her luck held, she and Kolodny would escape because of it.
She got behind the canisters and threw her hostage against the wall. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t have a clear shot on your friends, but I sure as hell have one on you. So let me tell you what you’re going to do.”
A moment later he was inching out from behind the canisters toward Cohen.
By the time the guards at the door figured out what she was doing, Cohen was already making the crossing behind the hostage, Kolodny’s carbine shoved against his rib cage. It worked, at least until they got halfway across the lab. Then Cohen stopped for no clear reason and slackened his hold on the guard’s neck.
‹Watch it!› Li said down his channel.
But even as she thought the words, she felt him blowing off the link like leaves on a hard wind.
‹What the hell?› Shanna said from the corridor. Then the link went down for good, and Cohen was gone.
Kolodny stumbled and fell, unable to keep her bearings when the AI went off-shunt. She knelt in the lab’s central aisle, slack-jawed, shaking herself like a diver coming too fast out of deep water. “Kolodny!” Li shouted.
For a moment that must have lasted less than a heartbeat everything ground to a halt. Li saw the bloodshot whites of Kolodny’s eyes as she turned to stare at her, a faint stain on the left sleeve of her uniform, the fading burn mark where she’d scorched her hand on a hot pulse-rifle barrel at target practice.
Then the hostage backed away and the guards at the door fired and Kolodny staggered to her feet, fell facedown and lay still.
The rest of the raid was just a series of isolated snapshots.
Running down the corridor under flickering emergency lights with Kolodny slung across her shoulders. Rushing the stairs in a ceramsteel-enhanced tendon-snapping burst of speed and charging head-on into a skinny kid in civilian clothes armed with a cheap pulse rifle. A hundredth-of-a-second blink in which Li knew that things had spiraled too far out of control for it to be about anything but surviving.
Then enhanced reflexes kicking in, wetware and ceramsteel filament driving Li’s body faster than human flesh was meant to move. The kid’s shocked look when her bullet shattered his neck before he could even start to pull his own gun’s trigger.
A final dash across the endless expanse of grit-scoured concrete. A lightning strike of pain from elbow to shoulder.
Then nothing.
Her last memory was of flat gray sky, wind, rain on her face. Kolodny lay next to her, eyes open. Smoke curled lazily above them, and Li smelled something that she recognized with bemused detachment as her own flesh burning.
Dalloway appeared above her, leaned over, and grabbed her beneath the armpits.
“Kolodny first!” she said, but he just shook his head.
She passed out again and came to with flight-deck plating under her back. Someone was fussing with her legs, lifting them up and shoving things under them. A medtech pressed something into her left hand —an IV bag—and told her to squeeze it.
She kept trying to tell him she was right-handed; but her right arm was off somewhere outside her peripheral vision and didn’t seem to want to obey the orders her brain was sending. So she lay there holding the IV, slipping in and out of consciousness while the hopper labored into a sky gone dead and cold as Kolodny’s eyes.
SYSTEMS WITH ONE DEGREE OF FREEDOM
Section (2). The registration requirement of Section (1)(a)(2), and such additional registration requirements, travel restrictions, and other restrictions as may be prescribed by relevant administrative regulations pursuant to this Resolution, shall apply to:
(a) all citizens of Syndicate-controlled systems, as defined in Section (2)(c) below;
(b) any United Nations citizen more than twenty-five percent (25%) of whose geneset, as defined in Section (2)(d)(ii) below, is comprised of proprietary genetic material included in the Controlled Technology List pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 235625-09, as hereafter amended.
51 Pegasi Field Array: 13.10.48.
‹14,000pF›
‹27,000pF›
‹DPLprompt›
Her own breathing woke her—harsh, panicked, the sound of a child waking from a nightmare. The memory of Metz was so close she could smell it. Everything else—name, rank, age, history—was darkness. She’d lost the part of her mind that remembered those things, and every time she reached for the pieces they skittered away like quicksilver.
‹Status,› she queried her oracle across an interface that felt distorted, alien.
No answer.
She opened her eyes and saw nothing. She spat out her tongue guard, tried to speak, and realized that the buzzing in her ears was her teeth chattering. She sensed a wall in front of her and put out hands stiff and brittle as sticks to feel it. Her fingers tangled in feedlines, dislodged biomonitors dabbed with adhesive jelly. Wrists and elbows knocked painfully against cold metal, feeding her rising claustrophobia.
Coffin.
She pulled the word out of some unexpected reserve of soft memory. It placed her, anchored her. She was in a coffin in the cryobay of a Bose-Einstein transport, waking after a jump. There must have been some malfunction, some glitch in the ship’s systems, or her own, to pull her off ice so early. But it hadn’t been a fatal malfunction, or she wouldn’t be lying here worrying about why she couldn’t remember her own name until her oracle booted.