Code Breakers: Beta (8 page)

Chapter 11

—
Activating martial protocols. You need to get us out of here,
Mags said.

The martial protocol was one of a suite of instruction sets given to him by The Family. There were limits imposed of course, but as usual with The Family they underestimated him, and he spun reams of Helix++ code to override the restrictions, meaning he could boost his energy, push his muscles and heart farther.

The limits were designed to keep him operationally efficient. But screw efficiency. He was in a damned war zone and needed to save his ass before he could do anything else.

Feeling the blood rush to his muscles, and the nano-machines increase his strength by a factor of three, he kicked out a boot with everything he had. The door refused to give, but something cracked within the mechanism. The adrenaline flooded his system now, and he kicked out again, and again, denting the door, pushing it outwards, until finally something popped and the door flung open.

The sound of gunfire, screams, and some foreign language assailed his ears, while the stench of burning oil, ionised gas, and gunpowder filled his nostrils. He dampened the incoming audio to reduce the reverberation in his head and darted for cover behind the corner of Enna’s building: a square blue-grey box of strengthened alloy and Polymar™. Even with its incredible strength, it had taken a battering. First things first: Gerry had to assess whom the enemy and what the situation was.

A brief visual sweep of the settlement soon got him up to speed on the battleground.

There were four Jaguars circling the entire place. They were similar in style to Enna’s but with white and grey camo design and red Russian lettering on the side. The Jaguar aircraft appeared to be directing the flow of the battle, filling in when necessary, and drawing fire to the perimeter.

In the maelstrom of the battle for GeoCity-1, which was always an ambitious name given it was made up of just ten buildings, Gerry counted six ATV hover cars working their way in and out of the narrow spaces between the buildings. Throughout these gaps and heavily concentrated into the open square in the middle of the city a fiercely fought melee broke out between white and brown robed women with red scarves around their necks, and the wildly dressed Bachians.

Gerry recognised some of the gang members from the last time he visited.

To the rear and outside of the city, three heavily armoured trucks using conventional hydrogen fuel engines waited. All of those vehicles he knew didn’t belong to the citizens of GeoCity-1 or the Bachians. Two were sat stationary, water vapour coming from their exhausts. The third had the rear shutter pulled down and locked before moving off. For a brief second, Gerry thought he saw Bilanko, the so-called Queen of GeoCity-1 and her prized server ‘Old Grey’ being bundled to the front of the truck’s hold.

Of the melee he counted fifty-three Bachian fighters. Eight were manning the machine gun turrets, of which there were five, attempting to keep the Jaguars at bay, but their shells were no match against laser and particle weaponry.

It was easy to segregate the numbers of insurgents. They all emitted a unique short-range radio signatureobviously their own proprietary communication system. Gerry tagged the IDs and used his AIA to present them on his HUD display. The concentration of the fighting took place in the middle of the town, turning it into a bloodbath. With the narrow streets and the main gates to the front and rear of the city closed and guarded by the Jaguars, there was no way out.

A stray particle bolt crashed into the compound just above his head, sending a spray of debris down on to him. Using that as cover, he sprinted from the building, and sticking close to the rear city wall, ran across to the other side where the buildings were more tightly packed and offered more cover within the alleyways.

Over his VPN he heard Malik’s voice.

“Sir, are you alive?”

“I’m here, Malik, what’s your status?”

“Alive, just. I don’t think they’ve seen me yet.”

“Hold your position and hide. Stay out of the way.”

“What’s going on?”

“Let’s leave the briefing for later if we make it. Keep your head down and you might live. Out.”

Gerry cut off his VPN wanting to keep his attention focused on his HUD as the various figures and vehicles moved around the display. If he could get to one of the vehicles he might be able to hack their systems, give the Bachians time to organise their defence.

The alleyway between the next two buildings appeared empty. Using his stealth protocol he eased round and into the darkness. The buildings were a food store and a residential dwelling. Both shot to hell with various sized holes in the exteriors, but they would act as good enough cover for now.

In the middle, and amongst the dust, he got a closer look at the attackers: they carried modern-looking shotguns and large single-handed sickles that appeared to be both a cutting and a stun weapon.

Who the hell were these people? And where did they get all the weapons?

The Bachians were holding their own in hand-to-hand combat—for now. Gerry recognised a particular dervish in the middle hacking limbs and heads at a frightening pace: Cheska, one of Enna’s transcendents. Gerry was pleased Enna had got her all fixed up, and seemingly upgraded. What a sight she created, and yet the numbers were too many.

Even someone such as she couldn’t stand up to shotgun blasts. But still, she hacked, moved, slashed, and dodged her way through the fight, leading her group, keeping their enemy on the back foot. A particularly fierce-looking robed attacker pulled away from the central melee and raised her weapon, aimed at Cheska’s back.

Without thinking, Gerry launched himself into combat mode, sprinted across the battleground like a cheetah, and shoulder-charged the woman holding the shotgun, crashing her to the ground. Before the woman could react, Cheska spun, bent, and grabbed the shotgun. She pulled the trigger, spraying the woman’s skull and brains into the blood stained dirt and dust.

Gerry stood back-to-back with Cheska as she continued her death-walk, pulling the trigger again and again, clearing a path through the melee. Two robed women ran towards them, screaming some phrase with their sickles held high. Their screams were short lived, punctuated with that short, dull blast of the shotgun.

While they were free for a second, Gerry spun, grabbed Cheska by the arm, and pulled her to the side of the battle, their backs against the buildings where, via his HUD, he could keep an overview of the attackers and buy precious time.

“Cheska? It’s me, Gerry. What the hell’s happening? Who are these people?”

A bullet struck the ground in front of them. Cheska pulled Gerry further back into the passage. Her olive skin shined beneath a thick layer of blood and gore. She looked as though she had been dipped in paint.

“Holy crap! We thought you were dead!” Cheska said.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. Who are these people?”

“They call themselves the Red Widows. Mad-as-hell fanatics. They came on us all at once, we couldn’t cope.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gerry said. “Where’s Enna?”

Cheska’s fierce expression sunk. She dropped her chin. “Taken.” She pointed to the Red Widow fighters. “They took her, and Bilanko, and Old Grey. They took them, and all of our tech. They’re slaughtering us one by one.”

“I thought I saw Bilanko. I didn’t realise they’d got Enna too. Why are they doing this?”

“Dunno, Gerry. It’s something about the servers. They want them for some plan. They’re crazy. They’re gonna kill us all. I tried to stop them taking Bilanko. They dragged us all from the Spider’s Byte. I tried, Gerry, I really tried to stop ‘em, but there were too many.”

Gerry pushed Cheska away from him, knocking into the opposite wall of the alley.

A laser beam shot between the gap. The heat warmed his face as it crashed into a dwelling across the town. One of the ATVs had eased round the buildings. A wide-eyed brunette with a now-familiar red scarf wrapped around her mouth and neck sat inside the cockpit.

Before the woman could get another round off, Gerry had dashed like a blur until he was just a few meters away and fired the last round of the shotgun towards the cockpit of the vehicle.

The driver took a portion of the blast, and fell forwards onto the dashboard.

Taking advantage of the confusion, Gerry vaulted onto the open-topped vehicle, reached down and took the sickle from the woman’s back and struck it hard and true into the back of her neck, killing her instantly. The act made him want to vomit, but he choked it back and took action.

He kicked the Red Widow out of the car and set about hacking into their network. Despite it being in Russian, when he stretched his mind into the system, bits were bits, and assembly code was king.

He manipulated the flow of traffic across the communications channel to and from the ATV. He organised the flow of traffic, analysed the data. It was all so much easier and quicker than before his upgrades. Or maybe it was the experience and knowledge of what he was and what he could do. He passed a bunch of tasks to his AIA while he focused on encrypting the peer-to-peer protocol connecting the vehicle to the rest of the Red Widow’s forces.

“Gerry!” Cheska shouted.

He instinctively ducked and watched a particle bolt take a massive hunk of masonry off the two low buildings sheltering him and Cheska. She ran towards him and jumped into the empty seat. She took the controls for the hood-mounted gun.

“Turn this boat around!” she screamed.

Gerry did as she requested, all the while his cracking programs tore away the layers of the Red Widow’s encryption and rewrote the assembly code for the ATV’s central processor.

A Jaguar hove into view, tipped its front, and spun up its machine guns.

Shoving the vehicle into reverse, Gerry snaked it left to right to avoid the spluttering gouts of shells before spinning a hundred-and-eighty degrees and gaining cover from the last building on the side of the city compound. They sped down beside the high perimeter city wall and across the battlefield.

The Jaguar took up a higher altitude position to get a fix on them, but Gerry was too quick, strafed the vehicle into the melee, knocking down two Red Widow fighters as he went. When he was in the middle of the dust, he flipped it around so it faced the city gates. The Jaguar hovered above them, its downdraft creating a vortex of the dust.

“Fire!” he screamed.

Cheska fired off two laser pulses. The first missed the Jaguar but the second hit its left rotor, sending it into a lopsided death-spin.

A cheer went up from the Bachians. They trained their machine guns on an approaching Jaguar. It crashed down before it could get enough altitude. The tide had turned.

Gerry brought the ATV to rest by the front gates. As he scanned for cover, the final layer of encryption tore away leaving their network completely open to him, exposing their entire communications topography and command structure. A node icon represented each vehicle, and every fighter had a VPN to and from the nodes, meaning they could all give and take orders as well as exchange data as the battle unfolded.

“Cover me!” Gerry said. “I’ve gotta save someone.” He jumped from the vehicle and climbed the gate. The thing was a mess of various pieces of metal, girders and sheets all welded together haphazardly. It was ugly and crude, but strong.

A third Jaguar swung round from the left side of the city and hovered in front of Gerry as he ascended to the top and straddled the gate. Before Cheska could fire a shot, an explosive round smashed into the gates, sending Gerry crashing ten meters to the ground. He fell to the side of Malik’s downed and burning shuttle.

He hit the ground hard, probably breaking some bones along the way, but the combat mode had pain suppressors running, so he picked himself up, dashed across to the smoking shuttle and dragged Malik from underneath the wreckage. He threw Malik up onto his shoulders, ran past the gate, away from the Jaguar, and headed for cover around the other side of the city wall. He got fifty metres before the Red Widow pilot caught his movement and manoeuvred the craft to hover over his head. It tipped its nose and aimed its weapons.

Crap!

Gerry jumped his mind into the network and saw a traffic stream from the nearest node, which he assumed belonged to the Jaguar. At the speed of thought he rerouted the instructions from the control board to the weapon’s system. He opened his eyes.
Still alive.

Malik said something, but Gerry’s mind stretched out into the system. He found the CPU and its main instruction set. Using a Helix++ translation layer to convert his thoughts to assembly code, he created a package made of terabytes of junk data. Thoughts and elements of his subconscious could quickly spiral into colossal amounts of random data made up of images, video, and audio. He dumped it into the system to overload the processors. He programmed a loop into its boot sequence and rebooted it. Although normally a complex task, he managed this in a fraction of a second, the upgrades installed and calibrated by Jachz working perfectly.

Something shook his arm. The sensation pulled him out of the network and disconnected his connection.

“Holy mother! Would you look at that?” Malik jumped about, his hands on his head. He pointed at the craft, laughing, shock clearly affecting him.

The Jaguar’s engines stopped. It fell from the air, crashed to the ground, and exploded into a ball of fire, fuelled by its damaged hydrogen tank. The heat wave rushed forward, slamming Gerry and Malik to the ground. Its eager need for fuel sucked the oxygen from the air. Gerry’s lungs burned with the effort to breathe.

Malik dragged Gerry’s body away from the flames. Once the initial explosion had died down, he could take a breath again. His head buzzed as if it were full of wasps. A wet patch behind his neck made him reach round. Warm blood trickled from a cut down into his back. It was just a small wound. He’d take that as payment. Better than getting blasted by a laser.

Malik turned to Gerry, grabbed him by the shoulders before hugging him.