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Mitchell
always used to do this sort of thing himself. Naturally, now they were keeping
him out of the public eye. Wild had volunteered immediately. Mitchell was
hesitant at first, then relented. He had no idea how good Wild was at this
sort of thing, but that was the idea. Wild didn't want him to know.
Wild stood in a walkway, half a kilometer above the city. These walkways, connecting one building to another, were common on this planet, forming their own second set of streets high above the ground.
Data scrolled, imposed upon his vision from the tactical scanner. Fourteen people were moving within the immediate vicinity. He noted each visually, attaching a description with a tag to each blip, that way when they were out of sight, his tac scanner would keep track of who they were. That one was the man in the gray jumpsuit. That one was the mother with the baby carriage. That one was the old man with the limp. He continued tagging the blips as he strolled along the walkway, looking out the glassteel walls.
Epistle was a backwater world by almost any standards. Still, as he walked along the walkway, a half a klick above the city, he could almost picture the place as the Capital itself.
He watched the VT vehicles flying by, above and below the walkways. These cars and vans, able to hover or fly through Vectored Thrust turbines, were the main form of transportation on the free world. The autopilot handled the difficulties of controlling a flying car, and left the citizens to swoop or fly as they liked.
He spotted his contact's reflection in the glassteel. He tagged him on the tac scanner. He could feel his holdout blaster in the spring sheath along the inside of his arm. That was enough. Let the man think he was sloppy. He feigned great interest in watching the VT cars and vans fly by. Daily bustle.
"You're early," his contact said. He was a dark, greasy man. Not the sort of person that inspires trust.
Wild acted like he was startled. He looked embarrassedly out the window, then back at his contact. His grin was sheepish.
"Uh, my boss always says to get to a place early. Scope it out."
"Yeah. Good job." He was humoring him. Good. "What do I call you?" Wild asked.
"Call me the Mole."
Angels and ministers of grace, Wild thought, protect me from fools and wanna-be's!
"Nova!" he exclaimed. A common enough slang word, he hoped it would make him appear young and stupid.
"Let me check you. Standard procedure, you understand." Mole pulled out a bug sniffer.
After a moment of studying the display, Mole nodded and put the thing away.
"Let's start moving," the Mole said. "It's more difficult to eavesdrop on us when we're moving."
"Nova. Really?" He said. Keep playing the rube ...
"Yeah, see if they don't have a bug on us, they have to point parabolic dishes at us. That's hard in a moving crowd."
About as hard as tying my shoes, you idiot, Wild thought. What he said was, "Nova! You know a lot."
"I've been doing this a while, kid."
They were moving along the walkway now. Wild faked interest in the view. The blip he had tagged as the woman with the baby carriage was following him. Would they be that obvious? The woman was the first one he had suspected.
No, if they were any good, she was a diversion. Keep looking.
"You got the stuff?" Wild asked.
"Yep. Usual deal? I give you an unescorted convoy, you give me 15% of the salvage."
"Sure thing. I mean, if yer lying then you get sucked along with the rest of us."
"Yeah. Here you go, then." He held out his hand. Wild could see the memory disk palmed inside.
"Right out here in the open?" he whispered, feigning distress.
"Just act like we're shaking hands."
"Oh." Wild reached out and shook hands, palming the disk.
At that moment, Wild's tactical scanner went crazy. Acquisition warnings blared inside his head. Someone had locked onto him. A sensor lock could mean only two things, and he doubted that someone was attempting to fire a surface to air missile.
His reflexes took over. He grasped the Mole's hand and spun. As he threw the man against the transparency, he reached forward and thumbed the man's belt buckle. He then held the man, struggling as his belt shield activated.
Then the glassteel of the walkway shattered into an explosion of tiny crystal cubes and wind howled through the hole. The seeker round, barely slowed by the glassteel, crashed into the Mole's force shield, losing energy. Then it tore though the Mole's torso, turning it to a bloody pulp. It caught the shield on the way out the other side, deflecting down and to the right. When it crashed into Wild's arm in an explosion of pain and spray of red mist, it had lost most of its energy.
Wild had been lucky. A seeker round, fired from a high-end sniper rifle, would go through quite a bit. If he hadn't guessed right, that the Mole was playing him as well, and keeping him near the glassteel so the sniper would have a clean shot, he might not have thought to trigger the barrier shield that any self-respecting Imperial agent would be wearing in his belt buckle. Standard issue.
Wild took off to the side, flinging the corpse of the Mole in the direction of the woman with the baby carriage. He could feel the hot slickness of his wound, running down his arm. Internal diagnostics flickered across his vision. Forty-four seconds before he lost use of that arm. Hardly enough time.
Problem was, they'd have both exits to the walkway guarded. Well guarded. That left one direction.
As he dropped a grenade into his hand, a charge pulsed through the air, making his hair stand on end. He dove to the side, even before seeing the blaster beam, cutting across the walkway at him. As he rolled across the carpet, he heard the screams of the pedestrians, sliced in half by the beam.
He glanced down, calculating the travel time for a grenade. He could see the woman there, baby carriage on its side, assault blaster in hand. Odd, that. Imperials rarely used blaster weapons. Must be a new Renaissance.
He triggered the grenade and set off his internal timer. As it hit the proper moment, he threw.
Toward the ceiling, not the woman.
There were too many civilians in the walkway. He couldn't make a stand here. Enough were dying already, and they had never done anything to anyone.
The grenade flew into the air. As it hit the top of its arc, just centimeters below the ceiling, it exploded. He had timed it correctly.
The screams of the civilians were mostly screams of fear. He tried not to notice the screams of pain. Losses. Unacceptable losses.
He leapt hard toward the ceiling. His internal diagnostics gave him the seconds of strength left in his left arm. More than enough.
He caught the jagged metal and swung his legs up, throwing himself through the hole he had made. On a good day, he would have landed on top of the walkway on his feet.
But this was not a good day, and he sprawled across the top of the walkway, prone. He saw the blaster stream burning up through the hole, even as his acquisition sensor started blaring again.
Throwing himself over to the side toward the sniper, he rolled off the top of the walkway and into free fall. The sniper fired.
Seeker rounds were subsonic, so as to not cause a sonic boom as they passed. They had a tiny, reactionless drive to add punch to the hit, giving them the impact of a high velocity round, but they only traveled one meter per second less than the 'speed of sound.
As he fell, ever so slowly, the temperature came unbidden to his mind. 5 degree's Celsius. At five degree's Celsius, the speed of sound in Epistle's atmosphere would be 23.6 meters per second. That meant that the round would be traveling at 239.6. His tac scanner had pinpointed the sniper at 6.2 meters, beyond its normal range, but it was easy to track a sensor lock back to its source. It was lower temperature up there, so the speed of sound was less. That meant the earliest that bullet would hit was 2.A9770712r283540 seconds, probably a bit longer.
All these figures flashed through his head in a split second. In the Epistle gravity he fell at 10.5 meters per second per second, a little more than a standard G. That meant less than half a second before he was falling past the hole the first round had made.
His right arm lashed out, catching the jagged edge and swinging him under the walkway as pain sensors screamed in protest. He reached out with his left arm and with a hand, red with dripping wetness, caught a girder.
Not quite far enough. He let go with his right arm and swung, ape-style, farther under the walkway. He caught and held with his right hand. He hung there for precious moments before he gathered enough presence of mind to pull himself into the safety of the girders.
There was a thunderous clang as the seeker round, adjusting its trajectory as best it could, blew through two of the girders before it stopped, half a meter from his head. Thank God physics demanded solid supports to handle the weight of this walkway.
The wind roared past him as he thought. No good way out of this one. The winds were approximately 70 kilometers per hour up here, gusting to 90. That made an exit strategy difficult. He sent off a transmission, but he prayed that he didn't need to use that backup plan.
He needed to think. His tactical scanner could make out all sorts of movement in the walkway. He couldn't hear them over the howl of the wind, but he could tell from their movements they were trying to form a plan. Hell, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
What a nova sucking place to be, he thought.
His acquisition sensor went off again. Three seconds later, the girders rang with another impact.
He had asked specifically to meet on the walkway. It made his backup plans easier. He hadn't counted on the wind. What was he going to do?
He received a signal, telling him that his backup plan was in place. He sent some correction instructions, then cursed as his left arm bled dry.
He was one-armed, clinging to the bottom of a walkway a half klick in the air, dealing with roaring and barely predictable winds. On top of it, he had a sniper out there, locked onto his head with seeker rounds, firing like they grew on trees. Too bad they didn't make these struts and girders out of sensor opaque material.
Suddenly, he noticed something on tac. All of the agents, that is everyone who wasn't down and injured, were clearing out of the walkway. They were evacuating, or else they'd leave guards on the holes. That could only mean one thing.
They were going to blow the walkway. No wonder the mole agreed so readily to his meeting place. These bastards didn't give the slightest damn about the people that lived in this city.
The sniper had him pinned down. They were going to blow the bridge. He only had one option. He tried to get a feel for the wind.
When the time was right, he let go.
His tactical sensor registered the rapid approach of the acquisition signal. The sniper had fired again. The seeker round came in fast as he fell, exposed. He'd only have one shot at this.
The wind changed at the last moment, and he was almost blown past the VT Van he had hovering in position. Luckily, it blew the van as well and he crashed into and through the roof, curled into a ball, before the autopilot had a chance to correct.
He had carefully calculated his fall. He had to have exactly enough velocity to blast through the roof of the van, but not enough to blow through the bottom.
Internal diagnostics flared and skittered with data as he hit. He had less than a second left.
"Computer, engage escape program."
The VT Van took off, a half klick in the air, even as the bullet pierced the side and blew away the left half of Wild's head.
And then they were away.
He reviewed the internal diagnostics. Hydraulics on the left arm were redline. Major structural damage throughout his endoskeleton. Most of his head blown away.
No damage to vital systems.
He was lucky. If the sniper had targeted the seeker rounds on his torso, where his gyro, hydraulic plant, and braincase were, he'd never have survived.
It seemed the god of androids had smiled upon him this day.
The van was headed for a location where he had stashed his repair equipment. He needed to be all right, at least visibly, before he got back to the ship. It wouldn't do to have the doctor try to heal him.
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