The Covert Academy, Page 2

  She fired up her HUD and scanned the selection of week old fruit on display, casually blending with the crowd. At least she had been able to keep one of her own human eyes. A fair trade, she mused, as she scanned the fruit for everything from bacteria to ripeness, took thermal imaging of the shopkeeper for any concealed weapons, and held a picture-in-picture conversation with Master Casey Jayne out of the corner of her metal eye.

  More like “Headcase”, Sarah thought, while he talked inside her head as he was now. She just called him “Case” to his face, which was close enough.

  ‘Do we need to go over the mission parameters again?’ the Headcase was saying.

  ‘Funny. I could ask the same of you,' she replied. 'I thought my orders were for radio silence to minimize chances of interception until I get a visual of the target.’ Sarah knew the Headcase couldn’t resist military chatter from a pretty face, even if it was only a video-call.

  ‘Yeah, well, in case you hadn’t noticed, the shadow of the Tower says you’re runnin’ late. You’re still four blocks from the rendezvous.’

  ‘Sigh,’ Sarah pointedly said the word out loud. ‘I’m blending in...’ The shopkeeper gave her a strange look as he handed her a kiwifruit.

  ‘...For a smoothie,’ she finished for his benefit, giving him an old beat-up packet of cigarettes in return. He smiled toothlessly and went back to smoking whatever foul smelling substance he had tucked under the stall. He was probably more impressed she had access to enough electricity to power a blender. These markets would have been right at home in the dark ages.

  ‘I expect you to follow my instructions no matter how smooth I really am,’ the Headcase piped up.

  ‘Okay alright, I’m on the move,’ Sarah said. ‘You can tell Richard I’ve picked up a souvenir for him.’ She was in no mood for their usual tête à tête.

  ‘Wilco, Casey out.’

  The kiwifruit disappeared into one of Sarah’s pockets as she wound her way to the fringes of the market. The fruit wasn’t really meant for eating, it was a test, or maybe more of a game, since she enjoyed it so much, to see if she could bring it back to base in one piece. Like the classic school-children’s task of decorating and babysitting eggs as an experiment to see if they could handle a child of their own, Sarah saw this as an extension of her own missing childhood. That, or she enjoyed showing off after every successful mission. This was the life she had chosen for herself after all, and she really did enjoy it, even milk runs like today.

  The plan was as simple as it got:

  1. Infiltrate a Confederate laboratory on the outskirts of the Colonnade.

  2. Make contact with an Academy sympathiser and hear him out.

  3. Await new orders, or return to base if it turns out to be the wild goose chase it promised to be.

  Why Casey had chosen to send Sarah was the only baffling part. The Academy received dozens of offers of assistance a day from people hoping for a reward, or a ticket out of whatever dump they were stuck in at the time. Very few were genuine and fewer still ever turned into useful intel.

  Casey should have sent Ryan, Sarah thought. The new guy was young and inexperienced, but smart and strong and ready for a simple mission such as this. He'd only been training with them for a year, but already he had been mouthing off that he could handle anything the trainers cared to throw at him.

  Sarah had been doing this most of her life. She briefly imagined Ryan squeezing through the laboratory air conditioning system in black tights and reconsidered with a chuckle. Maybe she was the better choice for infiltration, but hell, even Richard could do this one, and he rarely stepped outside his cockpit.

  Once she had crossed the river, the crowd quickly got too thin to provide any decent cover from the eyes in the sky. Sarah pulled her jumpsuit's hood up over a hastily tied ponytail. A few loose strands of the fiery auburn hair fell down over her smooth fair skin and keen blue eyes.

  She turned onto what was once Franklin Street, at least that's what the bent and faded street sign told her. With no public or private transportation available for the masses, street names had become almost useless. People had to rely on their own two feet. The postal service was a distant memory.

  Sarah didn’t need a map to tell her how close she was to the Tower and Colonnade. She could see the elevated train line that had once been the famous Chicago Loop, long since converted into an outer wall and patrol route for the guards of the Colonnade inside.

  Her iPC’s Head’s Up Display told her she was less than 100 metres from the laboratory. As far as she could tell, it was close to the Tower, but outside the Colonnade at least.

  Could be worse, she thought.

  The rear-view on her HUD showed a solitary drone peel off from the Colonnade wall and start towards her.

  ‘Crap! I’ve got a metal tail,’ she said under her breath.

  Casey was instantly online and all business.

  ‘Are you made?’ he asked. The mission would be over before it began. Sarah quickly checked her rear-view again.

  ‘Negative. It’s just one.’

  ‘You there!’ Now a human guard had spotted her too.

  ‘Verpiss dich...’ she lapsed into German, but quietly. This was not Sarah’s day. Had she underestimated the security? She was still a block away from the Colonnade.

  ‘Focus Jensen. You’re a lost foreigner. The simplest lie, right?’ The Headcase had his moments.

  Sarah composed herself and put in a contact lens to hide the silver metallic tint from her iPC. It rendered the iPC useless, but she preferred to try to play this one quiet anyway.

  A pocket sized map appeared in her hand from nowhere while she stared blankly around the area. The perfect stranger.

  ‘Stop I said!’ The Confederate guard rushed up in his red and white striped body armour, helmet faceplate open with a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, and brandishing an ancient but powerful looking rifle. He was there to be intimidating, not fight a war.

  Sarah played the part, choosing to start out in her rusty French and switching to English randomly, looking as helpless as possible with a map that unfolded a hundred times. The guard looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but there.

  Sarah held no sympathy for the man, who had chosen his side long ago. This man, like every other Confederate, had given up everything that made them human save for their bodily functions. He had been trained to use lethal force without repercussions. He was essentially a robot, and would have no hesitation gunning down a helpless foreigner in the street if he so chose.

  Sarah would have taken him down long ago if that damned drone hadn’t caught up to her. It watched the exchange, hovering a short distance away, not wanting to interfere or leave until the situation was resolved. At least the drones could be relied on for that much, they still deferred to human input. That very “human input” was coming close to smacking Sarah with the butt of his rifle, just to shut her up.

  ‘Okay Jensen,’ the Headcase was back. ‘Enough playin’ with the poor fella. You’re on the clock here.’

  Sarah wrapped up her performance with a coup de grâce. She pulled in close to the guard, with her most sexual, pouty-looking face.

  The fairer gender has its advantages, she thought, as she brushed up against the hapless guard with a well-hidden feeling of disgust. In the space of a heartbeat, her iPC ejected the contact lens, then hacked the security system of every fruit stall she had visited, simultaneously setting off their alarms. The drone instantly turned and hummed softly but swiftly away to put down the expected resistance fighters amongst the confused stall owners.

  The guard had just enough time to suck in a breath and try to call for backup when Sarah caught his arm and swept his leg in one deft move. The guard fell at her feet and Sarah stomped down hard on his throat with the heel of her boot.

  That was easy.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, get outta the street!’ Casey hadn’t even finished the sentence by the time Sarah had tapped the sleeve of her jumpsui
t at her wrist, shooting a length of Casey’s own ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, or “rope”, as she preferred to call it, hurtling at high velocity towards the nearest overhang. The claw on the end sank its teeth into the ceiling and immediately the cord retracted, pulling her up off the ground in a blur of motion to the corner of the street. In mid-air, she tapped her middle finger down to her palm and made a sliding motion up the inside of her glove. Microscopic hooks emerged from the surface of her suit, allowing her to stick to the ceiling like it was Velcro.

  In seconds, she'd activated her jumpsuit’s active camouflage with a swipe of her right middle finger. The suit changed from a static dark blue to actively shifting microscopic reflection panels, bending the light around her to blend perfectly with the concrete and approaching night.

  She heard Casey slam down a fist.

  ‘Nice recovery, Jensen!’ he whooped. ‘Heck I might even buy you a beer when you get back. Well, I’ll subsidise it... Well uh, I’ll put in a good word with Ryan he owes me a round...’

  Sarah cracked a grin as she reoriented herself to her upside down world. There was the market in the distance with the drones swooping underneath, and the Colonnade wall with the guard’s cohort, completely unaware of the ruckus she had caused. She looked up at the ground above her.

  ‘Uh... Casey?’

  ‘...I mean, I’d make sure he gave you the round, probably. You know I’ve got a lot of favours I need to start calling in, I can’t keep track...’

  ‘Case!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I think I found the target.’

  Not four metres below, the most frightened looking, egg-headed laboratory scientist stood, mouth agape, staring up at Sarah.

  Sarah stared back down from her spider-pose on the street corner ceiling. She gasped as she saw his ID badge.

  “Dr. Prewett PhD.

  Indentured Worker Class 2

  Withers Labs Dept.”

  Chapter 3

  Joshua’s first thought was that this would definitely bring the rats back. He was a slave to his stomach like everyone else, but once they were seasoned properly rat really wasn’t all that bad. He shook himself to clear his head.

  ‘Buddy, that was a hell of a fall from grace,’ he said to the body. He stole a quick glance back up at the top of the Tower. ‘You must have something useful on you though, let’s see here...’

  Quick as a flash, Joshua leaped up into the dumpster and squatted down next to the General. With hands as steady as a surgeon, he turned the corpse over and started rifling through the decorated military officer’s pockets.

  The search turned up only a cracked and broken e-diary, and a few pass-cards, but Joshua had no idea what they opened. They would be useless now anyway since the twisted mess in front of him had obviously pissed off someone with enough power to take out a General. But there in the coat pocket was Joshua’s prize: a mashed up sandwich. He took off the wrapping and wolfed it back.

  ‘Ohhh...’ he let out a satisfied moan. This was a rare luxury. He'd have to trade a month's worth of rat carcasses for this at the market.

  Joshua sat back on his haunches as he let the sweet feeling of real high quality meat, cheese, lettuce and bread wash through him. The General stared up at him from the bottom of the dumpster.

  An eye twitched.

  ‘Holy sh-!’ Joshua jumped out of his skin and backed up into the side of the dumpster.

  ‘Come on get a grip man... what the...?’ Joshua crept back up to the General and looked back into the twitching eye. It was definitely made of the same type of brownish material as the drones, but it looked more... organic. Alive.

  ‘That’s got to be the find of the goddam century,’ Joshua said with a smile creeping over his face. ‘A General’s iPC! I bet you’d fetch a nice price.’

  In one swift motion, he whipped out a nasty looking blade. It was a well-balanced hunting knife with heavy signs of repair from use on city game over the years. Not very useful against metal enemies unless you got close enough to stick it into their internal wiring. A theory Joshua could do without putting to the test.

  He flipped the knife around in his hand and stuck it in the General’s hybrid eye like an oversized scalpel.

  The eye fizzed and sputtered as though it were still alive, the last organ of the General’s body clinging desperately to life. Gently prying it out of the socket, Joshua could see the trail of wires and electrodes in place of where the optic nerve should be for a normal eye.

  They wouldn’t budge. Joshua stopped and weighed his options. He could cut the wires, but without knowing exactly how it interfaced with his patient’s brain, he might lose valuable data.

  As he made to dig deeper with his knife into the socket, a slight twitch in his ear from the smallest of distant sound waves caused him to look up. Clomp, clomp, clomp. Confederates. But then, softer still, was: Hmmm, hm, hmmm.

  Confederates with drones.

  They had to be looking for the General. Not him. Joshua meant nothing to them, just another faceless urchin dirtying their streets. He pictured being questioned by a Confederate patrol. They could get any answer they wanted out of him eventually, but they’d be happy with none of them. He didn’t know who this General was, or what they would want with his corpse. The General certainly wasn’t going to get up to any funny business in the state he was in, with half his head smashed in.

  Then it clicked. Literally. In Joshua’s hand, the metal eye clicked as it rotated to look directly into Joshua’s face. It had scanned him.

  Self-powered... not any ordinary iPC then, he thought. But who was controlling it now that the General was dead?

  Under normal circumstances, when the user died so did the power for their intra-Personal Computer, or iPC for short. A self-powered one would be worth a small fortune if he could sell it to the right person. All the food that money would buy was worth risking capture by the Confederacy. Joshua licked his lips at the thought of a life without searching through dumpsters for food.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw the shadow of a guard crawling over the far wall, inching closer. A pale red light washed over the alley corner. He was out of time. Trying not to damage the fragile eye, he sliced the wires tethering it to the General’s skull with his knife, yanked it out, and pocketed it.

  ‘Halt!’

  Joshua turned to count five Confederate soldiers and two drones hovering above them. He ran.

  The perch on the fire escape was as good a start as any to try to throw his pursuers off. Joshua sprinted the short distance down the alley and launched himself up to the lowest rung of the raised ladder, twisting around in the same motion to get a better idea of the Confederates’ movements. He saw three of the humans immediately break into a run to follow his path. The two others split up to try and outflank him. One reached a drainpipe and started up it like a cat, the other kicked down a loosely boarded up door to enter the building and prevent Joshua from doubling back that way.

  But it was the two drones that made straight for him that would be the challenge. They could skip the heavy work of climbing and fly straight to him. Most likely the drones would try to incapacitate him with a heat ray so the soldiers could simply come and collect him. Joshua’s only comfort was that they would want him alive. They probably didn’t know the specifics about what he had taken and would have been instructed to be careful not to damage his valuable cargo. The heat ray would still put him in enough pain to wish for death.

  He took in all of this in a few seconds, then hauled himself up the ladder, legs dangling below. The first of the three Confederates made a jump for them. Joshua felt a slap on his boot but he reached the base of the fire escape unharmed.

  Breathe. He gasped for air and clambered up the steps, around and around two at a time, heading for the roof. He glanced over at the soldier scaling the drainpipe. He had reached the top and was pulling himself over. The soldier could just kick him in the head when he came down from above. Time to change the g
ame.

  One of the drones was hovering in the middle of the alley, keeping its red tracking light fixed on him. The other drone moved in for the money shot.

  On the fifth landing of the fire escape, Joshua stopped and turned to face the drone, the red light glaring. He took a step back, then pushed himself forward into mid air, just as the soldier above dropped down to where he had been standing a second ago.

  Joshua reached out and grabbed the drone with the fingertips of one hand, while the other pulled his hunting knife free from its sheath. Pivoting on his arm, underneath the drone, his knife-arm arced around in a loop with the blade pointed outward. The knife swept cleanly through the guts of the drone. His momentum sent it spinning.

  He released his grip at the apex of his swing and continued to fall, smashing through the window of the building opposite. He scrambled on his knees to get out of the room and turned to see the drone slowly sink to the ground. It was damaged but not dead, like a helicopter with the tail rotor blown. The short drop wouldn’t destroy it, but it was now out of the race.

  With that, Joshua had bought himself a slight head start. Now to disappear, he thought.

  The remaining drone turned to track him, but its pale red light shone through a broken window into an empty room.

  Chapter 4

  Sarah leaped across a chasm between two low buildings, not pausing to look down. She might not die from this height, but she certainly wouldn’t get up after a fall. She tapped her sleeve again, sending the ninja rope shooting forward into the approaching face of the next building.

  With no time to run the distance, she retracted the ultra-thin rope, quickly pulling herself onto the side of the wall. She had been sprinting at her top speed for five minutes, and even after a three-story climb up this building, she still wouldn’t be breathing hard.