The Strikers recovered as Jack went for his gun. They split his focus by zipping left and right. He tracked one and popped a localized substutter over him. The Striker slowed fractionally, then escaped the field-his mobility rig rendering him largely immune.
While Jack was diverted, the other Striker flashed in from behind and smashed his rifle like a club into the back of Jack’s legs. Which was when Jack realized the weapons were unloaded-show models.
Jack went down hard as the Technician closed in with cuffs. Jack warped forward, cannonballing her legs out from under her, rolling into the stutter shield he just dropped as she snapped a shot off after him.
Okay, her firearm was loaded.
The bullet impacted the shield, caught. Jack stood, his knees feeling cracked, side by side with unmoving Martin Hatch.
Jack’s energy levels were low, running out of zip. The Strikers didn’t seem to be having the same problem.
They were wearing him down.
Beth exited the crowd and looped around the left side of the stage.
Irene was waiting for her. “Hey there, chicken.” Knife out, combat-gripped.
There were no innocents behind Irene, so Beth drew her gun.
Irene leaped right, under the stage.
Jack stayed under the shield, played up his difficulty standing, and let them come to him: one Striker to the left and another to the right. The Technician dead ahead with her gun leveled. Two Juggernauts behind, but he had to assume the auto-cannons were for show.
The Strikers communicated something to each other, then one warped in hard, slowing a little as he hit the shield. Enough time for Jack to fold into a submoment, blip backward, grab the Striker’s back unit as he passed, and pull. There was an alarming crack of energy, and reflexively Jack blip-kicked the Striker out of the shield where he crashed into the back of his partner. The first detonated almost instantly in a corona of yellow-hot energy, setting off the chronon pack on the second-an eruption that sent him rocketing over the audience, where he exploded and locked. The Technician got caught in that first blast, was thrown backward by the eruption… leaving all three actors frozen in a catastrophic ballet, mid-air, as their rigs shorted.
Jack ran out of charge. His shield flickered and vanished.
Beth cornered around the rear of the stage in time to see Paul Serene drag Sofia toward one of the two western elevators. The second elevator opened and twenty heavily armed and rigged goons poured out.
Paul glared at his security and shouted, “Stop her!”
Beth dove under the stage as two of them opened fire, three-round bursts chipping craters out of black Italian marble.
“Hey chicken.” Irene was back.
The blade came out of nowhere, sliced the top of Beth’s right shoulder-a line of white pain dangerously close to her carotid. The space was tight and low under the stage, interlaced with diagonal supports. Irene went for a second strike, Beth reflexively fired-no target, but the sound was enough to make her opponent flinch.
Beth twisted away from Irene’s messed-up second strike, aiming her left shoulder toward the floor, firing twice as she went over. But Irene had followed through on the momentum of her aborted strike and used it to roll clear and vanish into the mass of shadow, half-formed shapes, and scaffolding. Beth sent two more shots after her, hoping for the best.
Adrenalized and breathing hard Beth rolled back to her knees, ignoring the blood on her hands and legs and headed for the audience side of the platform. Slipping out from under the black cloth, she kept low and got back among the statue-crowd-equidistant between the two Juggernauts who were now moving into the open space on either side of the stage.
Hatch was still frozen onstage. A Striker was paused behind him, mid-explosion, as was the Technician he had slammed into. Above Beth’s head a second Striker was airborne above the first row of the crowd, his back unit rupturing. Jack was onstage, breathing heavily.
“Jack!”
He saw her. She motioned: get after Paul, then ran deeper into the unmoving crowd, firing her pistol twice into the air. Every unit present, save the Juggernauts, went after her like it was their mission.
Jack ran into the wings, headed for the elevators.
Beth bolted through the reception area-open bar, servers, trays of champagne-and beyond that into the far third of the atrium. It was all business here. The area was divided into nine islands, each island showing off a subsidiary or two of Monarch Solutions: Innovations, Industrial, Pharmaceutical, Multimedia, Technology, Business, Energy, Financial, Security, Childcare, Aerospace, Agricultural, Human Resources, Protective Services, Automotive, L &T, Consumer, Construction, Entertainment, and Communications.
Even passing the displays at a run it was easy for Beth to see how Monarch was becoming ubiquitous. Hatch and Serene had a finger in every pie going. Superpowers and foreknowledge went a long way.
Her pursuers entered the reception area as she jagged behind a giant display for a gaming console Monarch Entertainment was releasing next fall. They opened fire on her, rounds fragmenting and sparking off frozen bystanders and objects. Those bullets that sailed past eventually slowed to a halt. When the stutter broke they would continue on their deadly course.
“These people are investors, assholes!” she shouted.
Thankfully Hatch’s demo had pulled almost every person in the atrium toward it. The display area was mostly people-free and she was running away from bystanders.
Her pursuers weren’t listening. She caught glimpses of twenty Technicians fanning out, Chronon-1 bringing up the rear-monster-faced Gibson super pissed.
Gibson knew what Wilder was up to. She was falling back to the eastern elevator bays, pulling attention from Joyce’s pursuit of Mr. Serene and Dr. Amaral.
He rounded on C-1, headed double-time back the way they’d come.
“Top floor. Now.”
The reinforcements fired at Beth with little fear of hurting anyone, but Beth’s firing line included the demo crowd on the other side of the atrium-directly behind every asshole that was coming after her.
Fuck it. She’d been telling Jack she couldn’t die. Time to put her money where her mouth was.
Three five-man squads crept down an aisle a piece while the fourth hung back covering. Beth waited behind the Medical display at the far end, leftmost aisle. In moments fifteen armed men would be in her firing line as they passed the final displays.
She swung out when she heard the nearest squad just around the corner.
The stutter broke.
A Striker in front of the stage arced out over the audience, back unit exploding, before flailing heavily to smash through tables and glassware. Onstage, a Striker detonated as he flew into that nice Technician lady in the jumpsuit. Gunshots rang out simultaneously onstage and beneath it. Reanimated bullets whipped to life in the display section and blew a Monarch GMO display to pieces.
Hatch, however, was gone.
People freaked the fuck out.
Beth shot five goons in the legs and ran for the nearby eastern elevator bays. The middle squad moved to assist their injured comrades while the third and most distant squad opened up, perforating a 3-D-printed concept car as she fled.
Jack felt the stutter quit as his elevator arrived on the fiftieth floor.
The elevator purred: “Good night, Dr. Amaral.”