Division Zero: Thrall (61 page)

Kirsten glanced at the empty passenger seat, then at the center console.

“Agent Wren?” an anonymous black helmet appeared floating in hologram.

“Yes, who are―”

“My designation for this operation is Whisper 3. I’m in position over the target location. Please follow this waypoint.”

Damn Div 9s, think they’re better than everyone.
“Understood.”

She clung to her anger at Konstantin as she guided the car along the neon yellow stripe that arced through the air to a point on the roof of a corporate tower. She throttled back, lifting the nose as the patrol craft settled in for a clean landing near four other black hovercars. The only visible difference was their lack of a light-bar. She glanced at the altimeter.
Why do we call them all century towers? Some are taller than a hundred stories.

Kirsten cut her emergency flashers and got out, approaching a black-haired woman in a light, sand-brown coat. The heavy side-buckled boots she wore looked quite similar to Kirsten’s. The woman turned at her approach. A spark of familiarity glinted in dark blue eyes set in the face of a black-haired porcelain doll about four inches taller than her.
Don’t offer a handshake first. It’ll make you look like an eager rookie. Nina’s a lieutenant.

Kirsten saluted.

“Thanks for coming, agent.” Nina returned the salute. “Are you okay? Heard you had a rough night.”

“I’m fine, Lieutenant. I just kinda feel a bit out of my league. Oh, did that info I sent you a week or so ago help? That body looked like the work of the sick freak you’ve been looking for.”

“Lieutenant Duchenne, we’re in position,” shouted a man by the roof access.

Nina showed no outward emotion. “The scene was cold. Too much time passed. Bertrand is a slippery bastard. I think he’s hiding in The Beneath. Look, if you run into another one of his victims, can you ask them to stick around and help us find him?”

Kirsten blinked.
Someone in Division 9 believes in ghosts?
“Uhh, sure… but I can’t force them to.”

“All I ask is that you ask. I still owe him.” Nina glanced at the door, waving her arm around in a circle. “Okay, people, in we go. We have a Zero along for the ride in case we run into something we can’t explain.” She lowered her voice. “Just stick to me, we’ll do the heavy lifting.”

“Seriously? You expecting a psionic?”

Nina leaned on the wall by the stair access. The security code flashed from red to green without her touching it. “If we run into anything fucked up, Agent Wren gets to give orders until the scene is unfucked. Everyone understand?”

A series of affirmatives filtered over the comm. channel.

With that, Nina went through the door and descended four floors. At the bottom, another access panel opened on its own. Kirsten eyed a cam bubble in the ceiling, wondering if someone back at Div 9 Net Ops was with them virtually.

“We’re in position.”

Kirsten suppressed the urge to shiver at hearing Nina’s voice without seeing her lips move. Knowing it was the result of metal inside her brain unnerved her the way most people felt about telepathic messages.

“Copy that, Lieutenant,” said a man. “We’re going in three… two…”

At the one count, Nina shoved the door open and shot three men before any of them even reacted. To Kirsten’s perspective, the woman had waved her arm from left to right and fired a three round burst. Somehow, each man had a bullet hole center mass.

“No warning?” Kirsten blinked, offering an apologetic look at three confused ghosts.

Nina moved up to a corner, firing two shots into an armored man thirty meters further ahead. As his body slumped against the wall, she glanced at Kirsten. “They abducted a law officer with intent to kill. They are, according to your statements, responsible for manipulating government and corporate officials via paranormal means, and he is a foreign national.” Another man rushed the corner, blades sprouting out of his forearms. Nina swung her arm into a clothesline move, crushing his body from shoulder to rib. The corpse convulsed on the ground, most of the bones in his chest shattered. “So, no. No warning.”

“How can you assume their entire security team is culpable?” Kirsten grimaced at the sight of the most recent ghost; the upper half of his body flopped forward as if on a hinge. He gave her the most confused look. “You just tried to attack a Division Nine doll with claws, jackass. What did you expect would happen?”

Nina squinted. “That thermal anomaly behind you… is that―”

“Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am, you don’t have a line of them following you. Most don’t linger around much past an hour or so.”

A section of wall exploded just past Nina’s face. She bent away as more gunfire came down the hall. After a pointed stare at solid drywall, she mumbled.

“Wait here. I’m gonna scrub the hallway.”

Kirsten crouched against the frosted glass wall of an executive office as Nina edged to the corner. After the bullets stopped hitting the floor, Nina leapt into a blur of tan coat and black bodysuit. In the span of three seconds, she came to a halt at the far end of the hallway. Six men with rifles fell to the ground. The closest (and first to die) had not yet hit the floor by the time her fist launched the sixth corpse into a vendomat.

Nina waved at her to come over, but the screech of vibroclaws sent shivers down Kirsten’s spine. A man came through a doorway, his hands surrounded in heat blur. Kirsten shuddered, thinking of the Intera assassin who chased her through a parking garage. She clung to the wall, trembling.

Arms to the side, he sprang at Nina. The doll body moved as though she did not exist in the same flow of time, blinking out of existence for nanoseconds and appearing feet away from where she had been. Claws raked through empty air.

He lunged with a wild, frustrated roar, reaching for Nina’s face with a handful of white-hot blades. To Kirsten, the fight from that point forward existed as a series of still images flashed in sequence. Nina leaning left. Her hand on his wrist, his broken arm twisted at an impossible angle. Nina’s left forearm slamming down onto his back. The body, now missing its right arm, embedded hip-deep through the wall.

The doll’s movement smoothed out, returning to real time. She dropped the ripped-off limb with a squishy plop and made a ‘come here’ gesture with her unbloodied hand. Kirsten blinked.
Lucian had no damn idea.
She could not help but stare at Nina as if getting too close to her would be fatal.
They thought I was Division Nine? Nina would have destroyed those idiots.
She imagined the attack at Henry Motte’s house happening with Nina in her place, and laughed.

Nina lifted an eyebrow. “Are you okay, Agent Wren?”

“Yeah… just a funny thought.” Kirsten grimaced, losing her smile as she stepped over a severed leg. “Ma’am.”

After a glance around at the carnage, Nina moved at a brisk stride. “Zeroes find strange things funny. Did one of the ghosts say something?”

“No, they’re either confused or giving you the finger.” Kirsten jogged to keep up. “Intera tried to kill me awhile back.”

Nina fired through the wall twice. A man wheezed and hit the ground on the other side. “That’s still not very humorous.”

“I was just… they thought I was Division Nine because our uniform is black. One of their assassins taunted me for fighting like a little kid. I was laughing at what would have happened if those idiots attacked you.”

Red laser beams streaked through the smoke and plaster dust behind them as a tracked security robot the size of a one-seat car rolled around the corner. At the same time, three men in front of them fired through shattering glass. Nina spun, gathering Kirsten into her chest as she leapt backwards through a solid wall. The sudden motion jerked her breath away. Stunned from the near-instant transition from standing to lying on top of Nina, Kirsten made a noise like a honking goose as they landed, clutching at the arm across her body. Her brain did not have a chance to consider said arm could crush her before Nina pushed her aside. Smoke trails whizzed by the hole as bot and men fired; too slow to realize their target had moved.

“Think you can take out that rover?”

Kirsten gawked. After going through the wall, she barely knew her own name.

“Hey.” Nina patted her on the cheek. “You still there?”

E-90 out, on. “Yeah. Sorry, disoriented from the… How did we get in here?”

“S tart firing at the bot in two seconds. I’ll deal with the three on the right.”

After crawling behind a desk, Kirsten draped herself over the top and fired through frosted glass walls. Shimmering streaks of azure light sent flaring plumes of smoke and molten glass airborne. Nina dove through the drywall again, making a new hole. Kirsten ignored the sound of men screaming, continuing to fire pulse after pulse into the wall at the massive tracked security bot. A piece of assault rifle bounced past the hole in the wall, hand still attached to it. A wet, splintering crunch cut off a man’s scream. Something clicked off the front of the desk Kirsten hid behind; a bloody tooth rolled to a halt on the carpet.

Holy shit.

She ducked a hail of plaster dust and flying glass shards as the rotating security rover machine-gunned its way through the wall. Small patches of fire and sparks flared out of laser holes, though no serious damage was apparent. Scurrying to the left, she spun around the side of the desk. Without a wall blocking her view, she had a clear shot at the thing. As fast as the E-90’s core could cycle, she put six beams into it. Four in the central body and two through a boxy part in the back she hoped contained the ammunition for its guns.

It sputtered, twisting side to side in erratic jerking motions, and the rear end exploded in a ball of green flames. Nina, bloody up to both elbows, came out of nowhere and landed on top of it with a heavy, crashing
whump
. A pair of Nano claws emerged from between the knuckles of her right hand, which she drove into the forward end of the main body. One twist rendered the bot silent and dark. It collapsed amid splayed legs.

“Control box on these Sentinel-4’s is right here.” Nina pulled her claws out with an ear-bleeding squeal of synthetic diamond on plastisteel. The blades slid without a sound back into her forearm as she leapt to the ground. “Decent job of keeping it occupied though.”

Kirsten got up, pushing herself to her feet with two handfuls of desk. “Are those things legal?”

“The weapon systems are civilian grade, but it was hacked to disregard police transponder signals. That makes it illegal.”

A man’s roar drew both women’s gaze as an enormous metal-armed aug rushed into the hall, hefting a six-foot-long Nano sword. Nina blurred into a spiral smear of color as she hauled the husk of the Sentinel-4 security bot into the air and threw it. With a great crash, the robot crushed the man into the wall, trapping him under its weight. He lived a few seconds longer, gaping at her with blood flowing from his mouth and nose.

Kirsten stared at the gleaming sword, the dead man, the sword again, and Nina.

Voices on the comm. from the rest of the team called in. Eighteen unarmed civilians taken into custody, eleven armed individuals terminated―no sign of Konstantin downstairs. Further down the hallway, screaming arose. A handful of orb bots and another large tracked unit chased two security men through an intersecting corridor.

Nina laughed. “We won’t have to worry about the automated security anymore, looks like DeWinter’s got it under control. You see anything…”

“Demons?” Kirsten looked around. “No, just a handful of new ghosts… and one suspiciously absent old one.” She gawked at Nina while listening to comm. chatter about zone clearing. “The Archives. I have to go to the archives!”

reyish smog peppered with staccato bursts of blue light rolled past the patrol craft’s windscreen, causing the yellow wire-frame model of the city to shimmer. Kirsten pushed the vehicle too fast for current visibility; the flight computer could not render small objects (like advert bots) in wireframe fast enough to avoid the occasional minor collision. Fortunately, the bots too small to register in time were also no threat to the armor plating.