Brain Storm (US Edition)

Copyright 2012 by Nicola Lawson

The right of Nicola Lawson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

An Ennessell Publication

No part of this book may be reproduced or transferred in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Prologue

Trapped in a world devoid of sensory perceptions she was a mind without form. Thought was all that was and all that ever had been. She knew nothing of the physical world, the
real
world, the one that would assault her with torment and pain.

At first there had been nothingness but now there was something. Things were different now. She was no longer apart and detached. It had changed. Although she had no language to properly understand what it was that she felt, she knew instinctively that this was how it should be.

She felt that she had skin, cold air brushed against it. For the first time she could feel the liquid that had pressed against it but only because it was starting to slip away. And there were sounds and smells, things she had no context for assaulted her. There was brightness beyond her eyelids.

For the first time she tried to open her eyes. It was the first time because up until then she had not known she had them or that such things could be done. It was a natural process occurring with little conscious thought. She wanted to see the brightness and so removed
the barrier between her and it.

********************

A pair of figures stood in the glow of a giant tele’ screen. The room around them was concealed by inky blackness. The artificial light on the screen gave both figures an unnatural appearance, they changed color depending on what images the director decided to put out and shadows leapt up and faded away at irregular intervals. The scene playing out behind them was of a large grey statue in the middle of a public park. The base of the statue, up to the figure’s hips, was surrounded on all sides by a wall. The picture changed to a multitude of police and other security forces milling around on the perimeter of the park. Parked among the police cars and vans were televisions vans and crews. The image shifted back to show the statue again with its hands held high above its head clasped together as a symbol of unity.

"You let them send an agent in," the figure on the left, the slightly taller of the two, said.

"They wanted to mount a full scale rescue operation but I convinced them to limit it to one agent," the figure on the right replied. "It is highly unlikely that she knows anything about the project."

"Her existence in itself is a threat to the project. Our person on the inside has not yet had time to find the location we require. It will not do if this agent interrupts before we have what we need. Do you have a contingency in place in case the agent somehow manages to locate our operative?"

The other figure nodded although both had their attention firmly on the screen. "The security mechs on station with the forces surrounding the park will develop a fault that causes them to identify her as a threat if we give the signal. They have also been programmed to identify the other one if she is brazen enough to put in an appearance."

The figure on the left turned away from the screen and his entire face was plunged into shadow. He placed the palms of his hands together in front of his chest and then touched fingertips.

"Excellent."

Chapter One

Sara Fox sprinted across the clear ground as quickly as possible. She stayed clear of the intermittent lamps which weakly illuminated the path that cut lengthways along the area. In better days this area around the statue would have been populated by tourists even at half past one in the morning, but now Sara had to stay hunkered down to avoid being spotted by the terrorists who had taken over the statue and the surrounding area for their nefarious purposes. Her feet threatened to slip out from under her as she left the redbrick path and rejoined the wet grass. The lawn's sprinkler system had activated ten minutes earlier and finished its cycle only five minutes ago.

Pounding footsteps thudded rhythmically along the path, coming from around the corner of the wall surrounding the base of the statue towards her. She made it to the wall and ran to the cover provided by the nearest rose bush growing beside it. She ignored the thorns clutching at her clothes and tearing her skin as she pushed her way inside it. By the time the reprogrammed security mech came far enough around the wall to have her in its line of sight she was hidden.

The security mech, a robot just over man high that consisted primarily of two thick highly mobile legs mounted either side of a 'head' that was an oblong box of sensor and weapon systems,  came from the direction of the front of the statue. Not surprisingly that was the area where the terrorists had placed the majority of their security. It was the only direct access to the statue, being ordinarily used as a tourist shop
and visitor centre when it wasn't occupied by a bunch of murdering thugs. That was also where intelligence said that the hostages would be located.

According to her truncated briefing members of the CDM, the 'Capital Dispersion Movement' a relatively new group whose mandate was to secure the equal spreading of wealth throughout all member States of the European Confederation, had decided to call attention to their cause by taking over the Statue of Unification. They claimed to have had access to high explosives and to have rigged the statue to blow. They had taken as hostages the statue
's cleaning crew and the people who staffed the tourist shop. The tourists who had been inside the statue at the time had been released as evidence of the terrorists’ good faith.

All reports indicated that the terrorists themselves were well armed and they had added to their arsenal by reprogramming the trio of security mechs which had initially been sent to root them out. Two of those mechs had been posted at the front of the statue
, one at the base of the stairs and one at the top beside the doors leading inside. The CDM had also stationed a pair of human guards at that entrance. The third mech made regular patrols around the perimeter of the statue and was at present passing at the closest point it would get to Sara's hiding place. She resisted the urge to shift position to try and get better under cover, the mech would be guaranteed to hear the noise and investigate further.

The mech plodded on and Sara didn't breathe easily until it rounded the far corner and its heavy footfalls faded away. Even then she couldn't move in case she was noticed by the pair of CDM operatives who made their patrol in the mechs wake. Both appeared to be relatively alert, holding their weapons at the ready and not wasting energy on idle chatter, but their attention was focused outwards in the direction of the edge of memorial park in the centre of which the statue was located. Around the perimeter of the park the police and visible agencies of the European Confederation had set up their units maintaining a visible, and hopefully intimidating, presence.

After the mech passed out of sight the human patrol increased their pace obviously comforted by the presence of the heavily armed machine. When they followed it around the corner of the wall Sara extricated herself from the bush's barbs. She took a moment to listen for sounds that would indicate she had been heard and then checked her body and clothes. She taped over tears in her black body suit that could flap and make noise or catch on herself or other objects with matte black tape. She pulled the glove off her left and dabbed the back of her hand on her face. She could feel newly formed scratches from the bush but when she took her hand away there was no fresh blood on it. That was good, fresh blood could drip and give her away. She pulled her glove back on.

Keeping her back pressed against the wall she sidled up to a nearby waste bin. She shifted the bin until it was directly below a point where the wall surrounding the statue dipped slightly lower than the rest. Reaching into the small pack on her back, knowing by training and experience exactly where to reach, she removed the mini crossbow and a dart with a line of thin wire. After loading the bolt into the bow she fired it at a point just under the dip in the wall. The bolt bit into the stone where
it hit and the wire trailed down hanging against the wall and stopping just above the top of the bin. Even as the bolt buried itself in the stonework Sara had jumped off the top of the bin and landed silently on the grass beside it. She shifted position so she was crouched in the bin's shadow and waited to see if her activity would cause one of the guards the CDM had patrolling on top of that wall beside the statue to come and investigate.

She waited several heartbeats and then climbed on top of the bin again. She couldn't afford to wait any longer, she had timed how long it took the security mech to make a circuit and she had to be out of sight by the time it rounded the corner again.

Sara climbed the thin line with professional ease and held herself flat against the wall as she lifted her head over the edge. She scanned the area on top of the wall. The wall itself was several meters thick and the CDM operatives positioned on it had brought several large crates up from somewhere possibly to use for cover to shoot at the police or anyone else who might try and charge them across the open ground of the park. When the CDM had first taken over the statue they had stationed a sentry at each of the four corners the wall created around the statue. At least two of the sentries they had on duty there at the moment were not very disciplined and one of them had left his post. Sara could see the two sentries at the corner to her left there was a flicker of flame and then a pair of glowing points marked where the two terrorists held cigarettes. Thin blue-grey smoke curled up from their position lit faintly from the lights on the path below.

Sara pulled herself over the edge of the wall, sliding her lithe body through the depression so that it created only the slightest extra height over the wall proper. She slid down and lay where the raised edge of the wall, half a
meter extra height over the rest, met the flat platform. She had detached the thin rope from the bolt in the wall when she passed over the edge and spent a moment coiling it up and replacing it in her pack. She could make out the clumping of the security mech as it returned on its rounds below.

One of the crates the terrorists had positioned to give them extra cover was about twenty
meters ahead of her between her position and the two smoking sentries, it was another ten or fifteen meters between that and them. Sara meticulously shifted her body to let her bring her neck and head around to see behind her. The terrorist who was hanging out with his friend at the corner ahead of her must have come from the corner behind her because there was no sentry stationed in that position. Sara took advantage of this lax discipline and wriggled her way back to that corner. The surface of the wall underneath her was smooth for the most part but not abnormally so, the concrete still had a roughness to its surface that rubbed against the front of her body suit where it touched the surface.

Her heels reached the base of the adjacent wall and Sara brought herself around so that she was lying against that wall but with her head facing forwards to where the sentry at the far end maintained his watch. There was a crate near to her position pushed up next to the wall. It was close, but not so close that it was still immediately visible from where the two other sentries stood smoking, the bulk of the statue blocked it from being in their line of sight. Sara crawled forwards to that crate and used it to shield her from
view where the sentry at the far end stood.

She could barely make out the sentry in the darkness, but when he shifted position, even slightly, the body
armor and weapon he carried reflected glimmers of light enough that she could make him out. Knowing that he would be unable to make
her
out from such a distance Sara crawled out around the crate and back beside the wall.

Keeping in a crouch to hide much of her sha
pe against the wall, but aware that she needed to be able to move fast so that she couldn't crawl along flat on her stomach like before, Sara advanced on the sentry. He was looking down over the edge of the wall at the front entrance to the statue. He had to figure that that would be the most likely direction for any assault to come from. The array of police and security forces stationed on the edge of the park was stationed most thickly in that direction. Sara reached a point where she could see the other end of the wall to her left past the statue and the last remaining sentry. She could only just make out his form from the light reflecting from his weapon and armor and knew that if she was fast he would never notice what she was about to do.

Sara crawled ahead until she was so close that she could hear the
terrorist’s soft breathing and then she exploded into action. She stood up directly behind the man bringing her left hand up to cover his mouth while she jabbed her right hand, and the sedative injector it contained, into the side of his neck. He collapsed on to her immediately and Sara struggled to support his weight. His weapon slipped out of his limp grasp and Sara plucked it out of the air before it could clatter down and reveal her. She took the guns strap and placed it awkwardly over his head while she continued to hold him up. With that done she reached back into her pack and pulled a small cylinder the size of her hand. She clipped the device to the back of the terrorist’s rigid body armor and then hit the button that extended a pole over one and a half meters in length from the small cylinder. With the prop in place so that the unconscious terrorist appeared still to be standing Sara was able to release her hold on him and take cover in the shadows of the wall again.