A Motive with a Universal Adapter 01

"There's a spotlight on the Herkimer we can use," Owl offered.

"Perfect," I acknowledged. "Here's the plan. When that blimp drifts overhead, we'll use it as a distraction. Abby, you'll help Owl flare the camera lens. Try to make it look like the blimp's fault. When you give the signal, I'll make a dash for the front door."

"No way!" Abby protested. "We had a deal. I get to follow and film."

"Cool your jets," I chided. "I'm not going in. I'm just going to make sure no one else comes out. Once I get back you can follow me through the gates of Hell. Owl, I'm gonna take that Maximum Mike's goodie bag we packed."

"Okay. Cool."

A Mallplex gun store shouldn't be dealing in military-grade explosives. Not legally anyway. Assault rifles, sure. That's personal protection. What's a few more dead bodies? They just mean more room for the living. But mines and grenades and C6 tend to cause a lot of collateral property damage. The city's board of directors and the N.C.P.D. frown on that kind of expenditure.

Maximum Mike's must have an off-brand outlet here in the Zone somewhere. The crates of explosives Owl found in their storeroom indicated they move a lot of merchandise. I just hoped the Black Queens weren't regular customers.

Hugging up against cover, I crept as close to the front door as I could and waited for Abby's signal. A short sprint brought me to the Black Queens' front door with the Gibson Fashion jingle playing from the blimp above as my soundtrack.

My meat leg had started to shake and my cyber-leg was starting to lag.

Holding my rifle at high ready, I leaned back against the wall and forced myself to count to five, to listen for any sign that I'd been spotted. I couldn't wait much longer than that. In a few minutes, the blimp would pass by and be gone.

Mines and explosives were never my specialty, which is why I like the claymore's big, friendly letters that read "Front Toward Enemy". With Owl's caulk gun, I ran a heavy bead of thirty-second adhesive against the brick facade right next to the door plate. I mounted the mine and attached a short tripwire so the first person to open the door would get a nasty surprise.

The heavy door plate might still protect anyone else behind the unlucky corpse though. Those folks would probably be a little more cautious and try to push the door open with a stick or something. So I set a second claymore mine about two meters out in front of the door and attached a tripwire with enough slack that it wouldn't pull taut until the door swung fully open.

It's a dirty trick, but an effective one.

I waved to Abby and when I saw Owl's spotlight flash the door, I made a run for cover out of the camera's field of view hoping my legs wouldn't give out.

"Alright Rhoades, if you're ready, we're going in the back door."

"There's a back door?" Abby asked, snapping a chunky microphone boom onto the side of her camera and checking the battery charge.

"There had better be, because no one's going through the front. Owl, wait here. If we're not back in an hour, go home. Tell Jayden I quit."

"Okay. Cool."

"And here, take this." Abby handed Owl a small handy-cam. "Can you film anything that happens out front?"

"I'll try," Owl agreed, scrutinizing the controls. "I've never really used one of these before."

"You'll do fine," Abby assured him hastily as I headed down the street. "There's plenty of tape. Just point it at the building and let it run."

Thank god, there was a back door. It opened onto a small parking lot off the back alley where the Black Queens kept an up-armored muscle car, a couple of motorcycles, and a gas-powered generator. It was illuminated by a pair of floodlights above the door.

There was a sentry standing watch.

He hadn't spotted Abby and me tucked around the corner in the shadows. If he'd had thermo-vision he'd have seen us plain as day. I could see his head and torso glowing red and orange and yellow in the Kiroshi. His legs were green and cyan, but his arms were a barely-there indigo. Cybernetics.

Abby hovered over my shoulder—a distraction I did not need, but a deal's a deal.

"You have night-vision on that thing, right?" I whispered. "Can you tell if that's our guy?"

"...No, that's not Nero," Abby replied after studying him in her viewfinder for a moment. "How do we get past him?"

The oblivious sentry pulled a cigarette from a pack and snapped his fingers, igniting a white-hot flame in the lighter built into his thumb. His distraction was my advantage.

"Violently."

My left arm had begun to spasm again, but I braced the rifle against the wall we crouched against and held the quivering reticle over his center of mass long enough to will the Ronin to fire. In rapid succession, three shots cracked over the rumble of the generator engine. Three bursts of red appeared in my vision, hot blood—belly, sternum, shoulder. Lousy grouping, but the sentry went down, so I'll take it.

Abby and I dashed for cover behind the generator. My legs were trembling like raw scop.

"Are you okay?" Abby hissed. "You're shaking!"

"Yeah, sucks for me," I snapped, jabbing the generator's kill-switch with my elbow.

The floodlights and the building's few glowing windows flickered out leaving us in near-darkness. The ambient light pollution from the patch of sky above would be enough for star-light optics to see clearly though.

"We don't want to be behind this generator when they start shooting," I told Abby and nodded toward the customized muscle car with the all terrain suspension and the heavy armor plates. "Go!" I covered her as she ran and then I followed when she turned to film me.

The back door was flung wide and bees buzzed past as I dashed for cover. I mentally squeezed off another burst from the Ronin—reckless suppressive fire just to make them keep their heads down.

The gunshots reverberated in the dark alley. To me, they were muffled by the active noise suppression Uncle Sam had wired into my ear canals. But the rest of the building must have known that a battle was heating up outside.

"Why are you shaking?" Abby insisted over the pop of handgun fire and the ping of ricochettes.

"None of your business," I growled. "You know people are shooting at us, right!?"

My legs had gotten so bad, I could barely stand. I braced the rifle next to the 'Special Pursuit' logo on the car's hood as much to support myself as to steady my aim. Another red and yellow blob of heat filled my crosshairs and collapsed after the Ronin spit three more rounds.

There was a shout from the building, a male voice yelling something about shooting up his car. The Ronin barked again and the shouting stopped abruptly, but the incoming fire increased.

A ping behind me from a bullet hitting a motorcycle alerted me to the sniper taking shots down from above. I ducked back behind cover and risked a quick glance upwards. He was shooting from a fourth floor window. The Black Queens had us pinned down, but if they did the smart thing, that wouldn't last much longer.

"Ritz, what are you on?" Abby demanded, finally deducing my situation.

One of the goons swung wide around the parking lot trying to flank our position. Even though my left arm was trembling like a jackhammer, I put another burst on target but he didn't drop. Great. This one was wearing body armor.

"Lucidrine!" I snarled. "Happy?"

"...Holy shit, we're gonna die," Abby muttered with more detached calm than I could have managed.

He returned fire, a pair of shots scarring the asphalt in front of me. Since I didn't need to aim down the barrel to shoot straight, I had the rifle braced against the ground. He had shot at my muzzle flash. He couldn't actually see us.

I lowered my aim, switched to full auto and strafed across his blue and green legs. He collapsed screaming and I emptied the magazine into his head and the tops of his shoulders.

Ejecting the empty clip, it took me three tries to get the new one lined up and snapped in.

"What the hell are you thinking?" Abby cried. "Do you know how many people commit suicide over Lucidrine withdrawl?"

"Yeah, I have an inkling!" Last I heard, I was one of only three members of my platoon who were still alive after the war.

The suppressive fire wasn't letting up. Since I was on the ground anyway, I rolled under the jacked-up muscle car to get a look at the opposition and to get out of the conversation. Three hostiles were huddled around the back door. I assumed the sniper was still in the window.

As I lay on my belly trembling under the car, one of the gang pointed right at me and shouted to his boys. Yep, cold spots in his head. He had some kind of night vision built into his optics, same as me.

I put three rounds on him and heard him scream "I'm hit!" as his friends lowered their aim and I scrambled back from under the car.

"Why would you get hooked on that shit?" Abby picked up right where she'd left off. It hardly seemed like an appropriate time to be vetting my reliability as a source.

"Uncle Sam didn't give me a choice!"

Just then the night was shattered by an explosion on the other side of the building.

The gang had finally gotten smart and sent someone out the front door to circle around our flank. That plan hadn't gone so well, thanks to my claymores. The shooting stopped and there was a scramble as the goons retreated back inside, slamming the heavy door behind them.

The ringing in their ears would make it tricky to plan a new counter attack.

"Wait here until I get that door open," I ordered Abby, pulling myself to my feet with the steadiness of a drunken sailor.

"Ritz, no! You're in no shape t--"

"Not gonna get another chance," I silenced her, slinging the rifle over my shoulder and unslinging the Militech M/P shotgun. No time to switch jacks, but the shotgun didn't need such careful aim.

In the brief respite, I staggered toward the rear security door. The gang had been clever enough to cut a gun port through it. By the time I noticed the barrel poking out, it was too late. Lucky for me they were only using a light submachine gun and spraying fire wildly in my general direction.

The shots stung like hell, but after graduating Basic Training the government started infantry soldiers on a course of nano-injections that wove subcutaneous kevlar micro-fibers between our cells. The skin weave basically left us invulnerable to any soft projectile, nine millimeters or smaller.

But they still stung like hell.

The shooter pulled the muzzle of his weapon out of the gunport to reload. Dumb. I thrust my own shotgun barrel through after it. Physically pulling the trigger with my finger, I sent a cloud of buckshot to clear the other side of the door. With my other hand I clung to the door frame to hold myself steady.

There was a pop from above me and my legs were peppered with asphalt dust. The sniper was back.

I looked up and back over my shoulder and spotted him leaning out the window to get a better angle on his next shot. The targeting reticle on the Kiroshi hovered near his head and it only took an instant for me to remember that I still had the Ronin jacked in. It was slung over my shoulder with the barrel pointing up.

A slight shrug was all it took to center the sniper's head in my sights. I imagined pulling the trigger and put a bullet through his skull.

Now I just had to get the door open.

With a thought, the servos in my ankle swung my whole foot assembly up to my knee and out of the way. A pair of hardened steel shims were left where my heel had been. One good kick wedged the end of my cyber-leg into the seam between the door and the frame.

Back in the war, we had to penetrate a lot of bunkers more heavily fortified than this, and explosives weren't always an option. My unit humped a lot of gear—chop saws, cutting torches, Haligan bars. The hydraulic spreader was my personal albatross. After that IED blew my leg off and Uncle Sam fitted me with a cybernetic replacement, a clever tinkerer in my outfit figured out how to build the spreader into my shin.

I had to endure a lot of jokes about Ritz spreading her legs, but it was worth it. The leg carried itself.

Blindly firing another one-handed blast from the M/P through the gun port, I mentally engaged the hydraulic system and pushed the pressure to five thousand kilopascals—over a metric ton of force exerted on that door. After a second, the door frame buckled with a metallic groan, exposing the deadbolts. After another second, the bolts popped and the door swung open.

I took cover around the side as bullets whizzed past me through the opening. It would take a few seconds for my foot to reset. I looked back to see Abby circling wide around the fire zone with her camera still rolling. She came up across from me on the other side of the door frame and thrust her camera around the corner just long enough to get a peek.

Risking a quick thermograph glance, I saw two cooling orange-yellow bodies on the floor just inside. The purple contours of the hallway led straight to the foyer about forty meters away, one door on either side about halfway down. The doorway on the right sheltered one hostile. Two more hostiles had taken cover on either side of the front foyer.

I didn't have enough resolution to guess what sort of weapons they were using, but the popping gunfire sounded like small caliber rounds. My skin weave should protect me, but I wished I had some heavier armor.

"So what's next?" Abby asked, her camera back on me again.

"I don't suppose you noticed if we already killed Nero, did you?"

She shook her head. "I haven't seen his face yet. I've been checking."

"You'll tell me if you see him, right?"

"Of course!" She almost looked hurt.

"Alright then. In we go."

Hoping they'd duck and give me a moment of respite to charge the first hostile's position, I tossed a fragmentation grenade down the hallway. After the boom, I pushed the shotgun around the corner, fired a blast down the hall, and followed my weapon through the door.

Lurching down the hall on unsteady legs, careening off the left wall then the right, I fired another suppressive shell as I went.

A small round hit my arm, another my chest, a third my ribs. My back slammed against the left-side apartment door, the door frame providing some small cover. The first hostile retreated a step back into the room across the hall and I could almost make out the expression of terror and wrath on his face as he thrust a pistol at me with both hands and fired desperately.

Bracing the stock of the M/P against the door behind me, I fired a shell into his chest at near point-blank range; at that distance I couldn't miss. The punk took the full brunt of the shot and staggered backwards. I fired again and he collapsed.

As his companions down the hall continued to shoot, I flung myself across the hallway and through the door after him, tripping and landing hard, my hip slamming against the steel and plastic of his cyber-leg. I didn't have time for the pain though.

"They're inside!" I heard someone down the hall scream.

I rolled to one side following the shotgun muzzle and scanned the room. No hostiles, but two doors they could be behind. No time to clear the room. The two down the hall were probably closing in already.

"Who the fuck are they?!" another voice yelled over the staccato suppressive fire they were wasting.

Scrambling backwards along the floor I put my back against the wall behind the open door. Just in time too, as a hail of automatic weapon fire tore through the doorway perforating the far wall.

"They got Dicer!" the shooter called from just outside the door.

The gunman stuck a chunky submachine gun around the corner and blindly sprayed a burst of fire in a wide arc, hoping to hit anyone that might be in the room. He made it about half way through his pass when the weapon jammed.

Seizing my opportunity, I shoved my shoulder against the open door with enough force to splinter it against his arm. With the barrel of the shotgun pressed against the wood, I pulled the trigger hoping his torso would be on the other side. But either the door was sturdier than it looked or the duster he wore had an armor rating.

He slammed the door open hard enough to knock me backwards. My legs were too slow. Tripping on the body of the guy he'd called "Dicer" I sprawled back on my ass and the M/P slipped from my grip, skittering away across the blood-slicked concrete.

Standing over me now, I had a chance to get a look at him. His eyes, right arm, and right leg were all indigo cold; the barrel of his weapon was white hot. Forgetting the obstructed action in his fury, he pointed the submachine gun at me and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

In the half-second while he was confused I aimed a kick at his meat knee, hoping to either dislocate it or at least propel myself toward my shotgun. I wasn't as fast as I needed to be, and he danced back out of the way, but I was able to use the momentum to roll back to my feet while I drew my pistol.

He saw me coming up though and swung the malfunctioning smeeg at me like a club. On Lucidrine, I'd have dodged it easily, dislocated his shoulder, and put two rounds in his skull for good measure. As it was, I was lucky that he only knocked the pistol out of my trembling hand.

I took longer than I should have to find my balance and the goon yanked a link cable out of a wrist jack on his cyber-arm and tossed away his jammed weapon. The indigo outline of his hand clenched, and I heard the metallic "sssnk" of a long blade sliding out of his forearm and locking into place like a katar.

With an angry grunt, he lunged forward stabbing wildly at my face.

It was so badly telegraphed that I sidestepped the attack despite my sluggish reflexes. As he plunged past me I should have been able to jab an elbow into the back of his neck, but I was too slow for that.

He turned on me, now between me and the shotgun, and I drew my boot knife from its sheath. He feinted and I let him. I took a swipe, hoping to maneuver us into circling each other, hoping I'd be able to reclaim the M/P. Any minute one of his buddies could show up and end this dance real quick.

"Who the fuck are you?" he snarled, and followed his distraction with a long, sweeping slice that could have ended me if I had still been there. The kevlar woven into my skin cells was a lot more effective against soft lead than sharp steel.

"Doesn't matter," I told him. "You're not the guy I'm here for."

He tried an aggressive series of stabs, each more powerful and futile than the last. Having a blade and knowing how to fight with one are two very different things. I managed to drag my knife across the plating of his arm, but I doubt I did anything more than scratch the finish.

I had him circling at least, each of us sidestepping around the other, looking for an opening. If I could just maneuver close enough to the shotgun to make myself an opportunity to grab it.

Unfortunately, he was thinking the same thing. He slashed at me trying to force me the other way. I dodged the blade and if I'd been on my game, I'd have used his momentum to throw him away from the shotgun with his back to me.

But I wasn't on my game.

As I swung backwards out of his line of attack, my feet slipped out from under me and I fell face down on the ground. I scrambled forward on my stomach to try and grab the shotgun, but he was faster and smart enough to press his advantage. He twisted the weapon out of my grip and swung the butt around to whack me across the face.

"Guess you're never gonna find whoever it is you're looking for," he taunted, standing over me. "Any last words, bitch?"

He swung the M/P around and pointed the barrel at my face. Pushing myself up to my elbows, I looked up to meet my end eye to eye.