Division Zero: Thrall Read online

  “Nope. I’m good. Faulty retaining strap decided to teach me I couldn’t fly. Went about fifty meters from the plate to the real ground. I guess the big man upstairs really wanted to make his point ‘cause the plate slipped its moorings, fell, and landed on me. Biggest piece of my ass left wouldn’t fill an espresso cup.” Kirsten cringed. “Anyway, I like my family better watching from this side, no one to remind me how much of an asshole I was or give me shit for cheating on her.” He shrugged. “Wife was a lot happier with number two, course they’ve both been gone awhile now. My kids’ kids have kids.”

  “You one of The Kind?”

  “Yep. Name’s Andrew. By the way, those two are getting ready to run.”

  Kirsten tensed at the two gangers’ subtle shift of weight onto their arms, in preparation to do a push-up. She thought about Dorian’s story of legging a boy ready to shoot Nila, and aimed at Skeev’s thigh. It felt excessive.

  “I’m watching you, Skeev. Prison or crematorium, your choice.”

  They relaxed.

  “Someday, someone will call your bluff.” Andrew winked.

  “Already have, but they weren’t kids.” She looked at him. “So, what does Theodore want this time? Didn’t he get enough of an eyeful the other week?”

  “Actually, he wanted to ask you for help. It wasn’t one of The Kind, but a spirit got attacked. Not a great many things attack ghosts.”

  “Dammit, there was another one.” She squinted. “Shit. How the hell am I going to find it?”

  “Over here, over here.” The overt cheer in the patrol bot’s digitized voice module drifted through the air.

  Kirsten unburied her face from her hand and waited. A four-foot-wide orb of cyan hologram emerged from a dim patch of woods. The litter-bot projected random images around itself to make it easier to follow. Two Division 1 officers, in blue duty armor, crunched and snapped through the foliage behind it, arms held to guard their faces from branches despite their helmets.

  “Tell Theodore I’ll look into it.” She gave Andrew a determined look and approached the two Div 1 cops.

  “What happened here?” The shorter one regarded her service weapon with an air of trepidation.

  “I was trying to enjoy a day off in the park, but got a feeling someone was spying on my son and his friend. While I was searching for them, these two jumped me thinking I was a kid. I have a feeling I’m not the first.”

  He smirked. “Guess they like them a little young?”

  Kirsten’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not as young as I look. The girl who belongs to that pink ‘Mini is only fifteen.”

  “Heh.” He grinned. “Never quite sure with Zeroes, I hear they start ‘em early.”

  “Only if they’ve got a rare talent that’s unusually strong for the age.” She sighed, caving under their inquiring stares. “Sixteen.”

  Officer Burrell gawked at her.

  “No, I didn’t read your mind. I figured you saw the look on my face and were about to ask. They sent me out into the field at sixteen. Anyway, these two were going to force narcotics on me and then engage in sexual assault. I identified myself as an officer and the suspect went for a weapon.”

  “The bitch’s eyes turned white and lit up! What the fuck would you do?” Skeev howled as the larger cop cuffed him and hauled him to his feet.

  Blowfish blinked at the sound of the wind, still woozy from the effects of the mind blast.

  “Skeev?” Kirsten took a few steps closer, standing with all her weight on her right leg, gun arm lax at her side. “Be a nice young man and tell these officers the truth about everything you did. Tell them about Amy.”

  Kirsten had positioned herself at an angle where only Skeev caught the sudden glimmer in her eye. Skeev went into a frantic rambling confession about what the Red Dragons did to a fifteen-year-old, and regaled his participation in at least nine other assaults in the park. She smiled.

  Andrew gave her a scolding head shake. “Now, now. What would your captain say about that?”

  She jogged toward the sound of Evan’s approaching voice. “I imagine he’d be happy I didn’t kill them.”

  ncora Medical occupied the upper forty floors of a gleaming white-paneled tower in the southeastern corner of Sector 18025. From the moment the call came in, Kirsten had been grumbling internally at the memory of the cold that far north. Typical for a Code-3 run like this, she had brought the patrol craft high above the city and accelerated to 375 mph.

  Outside, howling winds and snow swirled around the black hovercar. By the time it reached the ground, it would be rain. Inside, the soft thrum of electronic components underpinned the silence. Kirsten left the autopilot in control for the straightaway and cradled hot coffee to her chest. Enjoying the scent of such divinity felt awkward knowing people’s lives depended on her. She was safe in a warm car while others were threatened by forces they could not explain. However, she was already on the way and could not do anything more than wait for the ride to be over. Despite hurtling toward a dangerous situation, she clung to confidence in addition to the warm mocha.

  “At least the damn entity waited for the coffee to be done this time.”

  Dorian winked. “I thought you’d be happier it didn’t wait until dark and leave Evan stuck late at the school dormitory again. You okay? You seem rather pensive.”

  “I’m just thinking about those idiots from the park last weekend.”

  “Is that why you’ve been so clingy with Evan for the past few days? Did you tell Eze you coerced a confession?” Dorian raised a whimsical eyebrow.

  “He didn’t ask.” Slurp. “I would have if he brought it up. I’m still trying to sort out if I feel bad about doing it.”

  “Well, a few hundred years ago, they would have called it a violation of due process. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good thing. Used to be, a person couldn’t go to jail without Miranda.”

  Kirsten finished another sip and looked over. “Miranda who? Is she a haunt?”

  He spoke through gaps in his laughter. “Miranda warnings, the whole criminal rights thing police used to have to read to suspects.”

  “Oh, back when the criminals had more rights than their victims?” She shook her head.

  “Careful, K.” He stopped smiling. “It’s easy to say that off the cuff, but sometimes the law has the wrong person in their sights. The whole thing was meant to protect the innocent from government oppression.” Dorian faced front, his gaze settled on a cargo trailer-sized shipping bot. The lumbering machine was bedecked with flashing lights that colored the nearby rain red and green. “Now we bask in it and no one notices.”

  The car compensated for the slow-moving transport, gliding down and left. Kirsten held on to her coffee as the wind knocked them around. The boxy flying robot streaked past the right side, slow to the point of seeming to hang in place.

  “I guess. It just… I dunno, I remember reading about it in school and fuming. Mother got better treatment in jail than I got at home. Her judgment came at the hands of other inmates, not the government. They would have fed her and kept her safe until they let her out. I’d have been safer in jail than living with my own damn mother. How twisted is that?”

  “What happens when a Div 1 cop does a half-assed summary execution on the wrong guy?”

  “Now you’re talking about an entirely different thing.” She took over active flight control as the nav point drew close, guiding the patrol craft out of the clouds in a paced descent. “Summaries have a lot of checkboxes to go through. Even when it’s warranted, half the time it doesn’t happen.”

  “Good thing, that.” As they dove out of the storm, Dorian smiled at the orange gleam of the mid-afternoon sun on the city a half-mile below. “Officers who do too many of them usually wind up on the wrong end of one sooner or later. They don’t like to let that kind of information get out to the public. Bang. Oops, he was an innocent man. Now you’re guilty of murder.” He was silent for several minutes as they sank among the towering monoliths of north
ern West City. “I don’t think I could have been able to do it without knowing they were guilty.”

  “You mean without reading their minds?” She looked at him for two seconds. “Isn’t that about the same as telling someone to confess truth? It’s not like I added more to it or made him lie.”

  “Div 1 officers don’t have the luxury to know when someone is lying. They perform summaries based on evidence they can see. Only in those cases, the lawyers don’t get involved in time to make a difference.”

  “I knew he did it. Even with his blurted utterance to the arresting officers, a good enough lawyer can worm out of it.” She bled off speed, reaching the level of the fifth story at a hair over eighty miles per hour. “Weren’t lawyers once supposed to just make sure the law is applied fairly, as opposed to looking for any little technicality to let their client get away with crime?”

  Dorian grinned. “You have to be reincarnated. You are way too jaded for your age.”

  A line of Division 1 cars formed a perimeter in the center of a pentagonal courtyard between five corporate towers. The ground between them and the building lay scattered with bits of plant material and broken terra cotta. Small arms fire emanating from the lobby had destroyed at least six flowerpots large enough to bathe in, as evidenced by shot-out glass along the front.

  Kirsten set down behind the row of blue and whites, turning her attention to the screen at the middle of the console. Ancora Medical leased office space from a management company that owned the entire five-building complex. A query for disgruntled employees and reports of violence in the building came back suspiciously blank.

  “Either this is the one corporation in the world not run by greedy bastards, or someone’s been tinkering in the network.”

  “Yeah,” said Dorian. “I wonder which it is.”

  She grasped the door handle, but froze as bullets bounced off the ground in front of the car. A handful hit the hood and windscreen, but the armor plating reduced it to a dull clatter. Kirsten poked the comm.

  “Ops, what the hell is going on in there?”

  One of the Division 1 officers put his back to his car so he could face her, and waved. “Afternoon, Agent.” His voice came out of her dashboard, words spread out beneath his hologram identifying him as Sergeant Ormund.

  “You the senior onsite?”

  “Until you got here, yeah.” He chuckled. “Ancora deals with military medical technology, so the building has armed security pods. At first we thought a hacker got into the local network. We cut all outside GlobeNet access, but it didn’t help. Then we figured it was probably an artificial intelligence gone crazy.”

  “Since you called me in, I’ll assume that didn’t pan out either?”

  Ormund tapped at his forearm unit, which projected small holo-panels containing images of a silver, male humanoid face. “Centurion Investments does not have an AI in their corporate park, however Ancora does. We managed to make contact with him, and he’s as clueless as anyone else about what’s going on.”

  “Maybe he’s lying?” She kept her fingers on the door handle, staring at a twitching ball turret in the ceiling just beyond a ring of broken window. “AIs can lie, you know.”

  “It let us walk right in and check. When the disconnect didn’t change anything, we brought the link back. Div 2 went right into the network; they say the AI’s telling the truth. The hardware is moving on its own, not driven by any code they can find. We even killed power to sections of the building and the guns continued to fire.” He tapped his foot. “ That’s when we called you.”

  “What can you tell me about the hostages? Have there been any demands? This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’ve never seen an angry ghost take hostages before. They usually just kill… or try.”

  “No, ma’am. No demands made to the outside world at this time.” Sergeant Ormund ducked as the sporadic spray gave up on Kirsten’s car and played with the Div 1 patrol craft.

  Dorian leaned forward to get a better look into the lobby. “Whatever it is evidently doesn’t understand armor plating. The weapon is designed for antipersonnel use, no threat to the cars.”

  “Can you knock the turret offline?”

  He squinted. “Not if it is connected to the building’s power system. I can’t shut the entire city off. If a spirit has embodied them, I could try and get control, but then it would come down to how strong the other entity is.”

  “Ormund, what about those civilians?”

  “Uhh… At last count, there were two groups. We got about twenty employees on the 92nd floor, looks like mostly senior managers and up. The other group is on the 61st floor, in the day care. Everyone else managed to get out during the chaos.”

  “Fuck.” Kirsten’s head fell back against the seat. “Why?”

  “How should I know,” said Ormund, before he realized it was a rhetorical ‘why.’ “Umm, it’s not as bad as it sounds, Agent. The designers weren’t stupid, there’s no guns anywhere able to fire into the daycare. Problem is… the hallway leading to the daycare has six of ‘em. The kids are in no danger, but no one short of a full Class 4 borg is getting in there alive.”

  The turret harassing the police cars out front kept spinning, but ceased firing.

  “Out of ammo? Small favors,” she mumbled. “Well this is a right mess. Alright, I’m going in.”

  She ran from the safety of her car to Ormund’s side, behind the wall of Div 1 vehicles. Without the intermediary of a digital pass-through windshield, a spectral glow became visible around the turret. As she got up to run, the sergeant put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Agent, I’m sure you know my guys aren’t too keen on that psio shit, but if you need us inside, say the word. We’ll be there.”

  Three women and seven men in blue armor nodded at her.

  Kirsten squeezed his hand. “Thanks.”

  The spirit light left the mounted weapon and it hung limp, spent. She bolted across the remainder of the courtyard, hitting the wall with her back just left of the main door. Through the still-intact sliding glass doors, an expanse of white tile and false plants waited. The space was empty save for a young woman in a top the same shade of black as her hair; silver buttons running from her shoulder to hip on the right side. The tall neck of the garment split open in front in a Chinese-inspired collar, and she smiled at thin air as if nothing strange was going on. The lack of surface thoughts confirmed Kirsten’s suspicion.

  Dorian wandered through the unopened door. “That’s either a doll or the world’s most unobservant person.”

  Kirsten edged out from behind cover, staring at the turret. It tried to spin toward her, but she latched onto the paranormal energy within and held it to the side as she slipped across the lobby and through the doors. They closed behind her with a soft hiss. Holographic birds flitted around the false plants, at least half of which were also made of light. The air smelled crisp and cool, with a hint of cleaning solution. A handful of squat ten-inch black domes scurried out of sight across immaculate white tiles, digital cleaning-roaches fleeing the light; or in this case, the vision of a guest.

  “Welcome to Centurion Investment Corporation Tower II.” The woman faced Kirsten. “Which company or individual are you here to see?”

  “Ancora Medical,” said Kirsten, heading for the elevator bank beyond a row of plush waiting-room couches.

  “Are you sure about that?” Dorian jogged ahead of her. “If a spirit is messing with electronics, do you trust the elevator?”

  “Aww.” Her run stumbled into a slouching stagger while staring at the ceiling. “Why is it always sixty plus stories?”

  Dorian phased through the door to the stairwell. “Saves you having to pay for membership at a fitness club.”

  “I’m sorry, miss. Ancora Medical is currently closed,” said the reception doll. “If you would like to schedule an appointment with either sales, human resources, or legal, please leave your information at the front desk.”

  “The department has one
I can use for free.” Kirsten hit the door with both hands, shoving it open hard enough to bounce it off the wall.

  Metal slamming echoed through an undecorated vertical shaft never meant for the eyes of investors, customers, or upper management. The brisk journey came to a sweaty end at the landing of the 61st floor, where a tiny display screen showed the logo of Ancora Medical, a dove hinted at by a few curved lines.

  “Planning to play chicken with six turrets at once?” asked Dorian.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she rasped. “I can barely breathe.”

  “Now there’s one thing I don’t miss.”

  Kirsten forced a weak smile and pulled herself standing once again. The trudge up the next thirty-seven floors left her legs wobbling. She fell into the door, hanging on to the push bar to keep from falling over.

  “I’m not sure what sucks more, this or jumping off a building.”

  “Falling ninety stories inside an elevator, I think, would be worse than either.”

  “You have such a way with words, Dorian.”

  A few paces inside the door, she found a vendomat offering drinks. Half a bottle of spring water was gone before the conscious parts of her brain were involved in any decision-making processes. She finished it off, rolling limp against the wonderful machine. Her shaking legs became amusing.

  “Kirsten, look out,” Dorian yelled, lunging.

  She ducked and spun, yelping at the sight of a softball-sized orb bot zooming at her with a pair of sparking prongs extended from its leading side. Kirsten managed to get her hands around it before it made contact. The cold metal object strained to get closer; its hover inducer pushed it toward her chest with enough force to pin her to the wall.

  For several seconds, she held it at bay while staring at the spikes creeping closer. Dorian grabbed it through her hands. The sudden shutdown left her struggle unopposed, and she flung it away. It careened off the wall and thudded to the ground with the acoustic grandeur of a dropped cannonball.

  “Where the hell did that thing come from?”

  Dorian pointed down the hallway. “Automated non-lethal internal security.”