the objective inside the mountain now that the shield is down. Those are your orders, roll on them.”
Jake shook his head and scanned the hundreds of available command channels, finally finding what he was looking for. “six five by nine oh three!” The alarmed voice crackled, there was intense gunfire in the background. “I say again, they've broken through into the basement of the old securities and trades building. Must have escaped the mountain using the subway before it blew and they're-” the channel went dead and Jake turned towards the coordinates as they appeared on the tactical map broadcast through the command chip. The visual representation on his visor showed a glowing red spot, like an ember in a sea of brick, mortar and steel ashes it showed him exactly where his friends may have survived.
“I'm coming,” he said as he anchored a line to the floor and ran through the open air where there was once a thick reinforced wall. The hair thin line ran off the small spool anchored under the shoulder of his trench coat. It was the same one he had used to tether himself to Stephanie not two months before, and for a mid-air moment he found himself wondering what Oz would think of her, if they'd get along. The street rushed up as he turned and saw his opportunity.
“Who was that! Your designation on this channel marks you as a Regent Galactic Lieutenant, you have no authorization, stop listening in before I report you to your Sergeant,” berated one irate voice on the channel.
He hit the brakes on the spool and stopped suddenly, still in mid air. A second later he was swinging back towards the building. The dawn light bathed the street and ruined building side in a ruddy red as it faded, increasingly blocked by the ash and fine material that filled the air. A false night was falling as his momentum carried him towards the ground at such an angle that he could let his feet touch the ground and roll without full on colliding with the concrete.
The release trigger retracted the spike from it's position several storeys above and the small tool was drawn back as the line spooled up. “Sorry, wrong channel,” Jake replied to the scolding voice on the other end as he switched his command and control unit to only receive information. The electromagnetic charge from the fusion bomb must have reset it to two way communication, but that simple error hadn't betrayed his intentions or identity. Jake didn't give himself a chance to catch his breath but started running as quickly as he could along side the tall, crumbling buildings lining the streets.
“Damn right wrong channel,” a harsh female voice commented before going on. “All right, we have to make sure these people don't make it to the starport. It looks like they're fighting to maintain their position in the subway station in the lobby of the commodities building. Our priority here is to cut them off and force them into surrendering. Squads Charlie Twelve through Delta Four; form a containment perimeter. I'll take my people underground and see what we can do to block off the tunnel.”
Jake listened to numerous commanders acknowledge her orders as he looked out for any Regent Galactic soldiers who may be on the look out for him or in his way. The tactical map showed that he was over two hundred kilometres away from the Commodities building and with signal jamming in place there was no way he could tell them that he was coming. He searched for viable ground transportation, something that wasn't at all uncommon from what he'd seen, just expensive.
Just as he took a quick left turn down an alleyway then into an open doorway to avoid several heavy soldier transports that gently glided down the street carrying hundreds of soldiers within their three decked green and grey hulls he spotted something. As he let the transport pass he caught his breath and rewound his view on a small sub-display in his visor and spotted it again.
It was a magcycle, hanging half way out of a building to building transit tube only four floors up. The transparesteel tube it was hanging out of was broken wide open, but the bike looked like it was in perfect shape. He double checked his thermal and sound suppression systems then ran up the darkened metal and tile staircase. His mental, near instinctive connection with his equipment ran through its condition like an inventory list. The rifle he had stolen had plenty of ammunition, including two dozen variable release micro-grenade rounds. His wrist unit had enough reserve energy to fire and the armoured layers of his vacsuit had finally repaired itself.
Jake moved inside the building and up the eight flights of stairs as fast as he could. He rushed down the hallway to the apartment closest to the magbike and through the open door and around the corner. The floor ended just a few centimetres in front of the door and he had to scrabble at the jamb to balance himself and not needlessly fall through the large gap and two storeys down.
He jumped to the left, an easier leap than trying to cross the whole gap lengthwise, then walked through the ruined apartment to the window he expected he'd find the magbike dangling near. The interior of the abode looked like it had suffered through a moderately high quake. Broken dishes, upturned chairs and other awkwardly placed furniture littered the place. If the place was in any kind of order before the explosion, that order had been utterly undone, much like the rest of the city.
The thin transparesteel bay window came into view then, it had been warped by the pressure exerted on it by the wall. Beyond the bent window was the magbike, the cover for its round rear emitter nodes had been ripped off to reveal hundreds of tiny spikes pointing in all directions to propel and stabilize the vehicle. That was the only sign of damage.
The seat, big generator underneath, controls, forward emitter system and the small windscreen were intact. Looks like whoever rode this thing never took it out of a transit tube. I don't think this thing's ever seen dirt. Jake thought to himself as he looked to the street below to ensure that he wouldn't be seen cutting the transparesteel window away. Once he was certain the military transports were gone he started cutting through the thin metal using the emergency torch built into his command and control unit, one of the things he'd added as a customization years before along with the built in stunner and small energy weapon. The problem that came with using those additions, however, was that he would be visible to thermal imaging equipment for long minutes after the systems were deactivated. They emitted too much heat in too small a space for them to be obfuscated by any kind of vacsuit shielding.
Once a rough square had been almost completely cut he pushed on the panel, bending it down so he could reach out to the thick bodied white and gold magcycle. It wasn't a precarious reach, in fact it was anchored just inside the broken and bent transparesteel so firmly that he wasn't sure he'd be able to get it free. The problem with magbikes was the amount of power they required to hover and get underway, they were heavy machines, but incredibly fast, able to hover several meters above the ground and go absolutely anywhere but once the power plant cooled down and shut off they were nothing but a half ton of stationary machinery.
Jake pulled himself into the transparent yellow tube beside the vehicle and pushed on it to check how stable it was. The broad, two and a half meter machine didn't budge. He took a look around himself in the increasingly dim light to make sure no one would hear him and jumped up and down a little, testing the integrity of the tube. It gave only slightly, but enough to make him nervous, so he hurried things along.
Swinging one leg over the magbike he put one of his hands on a control handle and felt a tingle. It was only skin deep but he felt he could make a connection with the vehicle. He'd heard of people with subdermal control and interface modules implanted inside their skin, but had never imagined what it could be like. Only a few of them were brave enough to set that interface so close to the brain that they could actually connect with the systems in an intelligent manner and he was quickly becoming aware that at the very least he could send nervous system impulses to technology he was in near direct contact with and there was a subsystem connected to his optical nerves. When I finally get to Zingara station and have a chat with whoever Geppetto left there with answers for me I'm going to have a lot of questions. Jake thought to himself as he closed his eyes and put his other hand on the second handle.
The display between the handles came to life and the bike scanned him. Seating adjustments were made, a warning indicating that the safety shroud; a large armoured shell that was meant to cover the bike and rider was missing and the colour of the bike changed to match his crimson and black vacsuit and long coat. Another warning appeared indicating that the tube system the bike was assigned to was broken, there was no way to proceed past a break in the closed transit system and the most obvious break in the system was marked right under the rear emitters. That's all right, I think I'll try the open road. He thought to himself.
“Open driving enabled. Would you like to begin cold micro-fission?” the bike asked.
He flipped a switch on the right handle and with a shudder the machine came to life, blue sparks and arcing energy poured out of the unshielded emitters at the rear of the magbike, reaching out to nearby objects and pushing the heavy machine off the metal surface of the tube. Jake sat up straight as the aggressive energy field technology strained to reach down to the ground at the rear of the vehicle and started to back out of the broken transit tube. The low frequency buzz of the energy making contact with and amplifying the minute magnetic fields
