surrounded by three dogsbodies, to the central connection center, where three of Clark’s dogsbodies—not me—put all of them down. Next, messages began coming in to Virtue, Miss Pozynski, and Helman downstairs, warning them that imminent corrective action was scheduled to be taken by Management for breach of contract.
“That’s it, we’re locked up,” Virtue said, and shut down her console. She keyed in a rapid sequence of numbers, and a cabinet opened on the wall of her office. She tapped in another sequence. “Yanna, Aaron, get up here and get armed. We’re going to have direct incursion.”
The two Junior Admins were there in moments. Miss Pozynski wasn’t flirtatious anymore, and Helman wasn’t genial. They both had arms training, and it showed in the way that they took and checked their guns.
“You’re in charge of the dogsbodies,” Virtue told them. “All except Mr. Gray here. He’s mine. Last line of defense.”
I would be manning the balcony overlooking the entry hall until that last line was required. “Put somebody in the garden,” I said. They all looked at me. “I know the glass is ballistic. Just put somebody in the garden.”
Because that would be how I would come in. There’d be some flaw there, some hole I could exploit. If it was me, coming for the man I wanted to destroy, then the garden would be my entry point. They all imagined it was secure. It couldn’t be that good.
“I need to see the plans,” I said. “Every room. Every approach. Every defensive measure. Right now.”
Three sets of identical stares, and then Virtue said, “All right,” and dismissed her two juniors to their duties. She opened up a cabinet and took out a sheet of smart paper the size of the top of her desk. The paper contained blueprints of the complex and the grounds. I knew how to use these, at least; I’d been trained in reading and analyzing such diagrams. I double-tapped areas where I needed magnification, and the paper obligingly zoomed in for me. “Take this down,” I said to Virtue. “You’ve got a window of opportunity through the service entrance on the third floor.”
“I’ll close it,” she said, and reached for her handheld.
“No, don’t. We funnel them through that access, and we control their entry. But we have to make sure that they don’t suspect anything. Make sure it’s guarded, just not too heavily.”
She nodded and tapped the screen, issuing orders. I was probably sending dogbodies like me to their deaths out there, guarding that door. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d risen to a management rank within a caste that wasn’t even included on the Corporate organization charts. I knew how to make war, and the first tenet is that even if you have disposable people, you don’t waste them.
“V,” I said, the way I used to when we were kids. “You’re the only one with unrestricted access to Tarrant?”
“And you, now.”
I wasn’t sure that was a bright idea, given the conflicting mixture of emotions inside of me, but this wasn’t the time to debate it. “Then I need you out of the fight. You stay in here. This is Secure Level Two. He’s Secure Level One.”
In other words, Virtue and I would be the last line of defense.
She nodded, perfectly at peace with that.
An hour passed, and nothing. Virtue monitored news and events, as well as private message traffic, on her handheld as she sat perched on the edge of a couch, where I imagine she slept most of the time. There was a blanket folded neatly at the end and a pillow pushed underneath.
“Level K is in revolt,” she said. “Somebody started a rumor that the food was being cut off. The stores closed their doors against rioters. Now it’s general chaos.”
“It’s a feint,” I said. “They’ll stir up as many trouble spots as possible to pull focus away from this place.” But I felt sick, because I remembered Level H. So did she. Riots and strikes got put down hard, and permanently. We still had friends down there.
She went back to reading. About five minutes later, she said, in a very soft voice, “A train from Level B has been destroyed. Seven hundred dead. They’re talking external competitive attack, but it’s a feint. Has to be.”
Both of us instantly were transported back to that platform, that slick lovely train, the kids in their Cup game paint and colors. Neither of us spoke. She flicked through messages, faster, faster, and then stopped.
Her mouth opened, but before she could speak, I felt it through the soles of my feet. A kind of harmonic vibration.
Then the building shook violently, rocking side to side, metal bending and screaming all around. Art toppled from the walls. Furniture tipped and slid as the building swayed. I grabbed Virtue and held on as the world shuddered around us.
When it was over, I heard the high-pitched drone of alarms going off. I zoomed the smart paper out to the master view.
Red alerts pulsed in two places: the front entry hall, and on the third floor, at the service entrance.
“I need you to stay in here,” I said. “Monitor the garden. If they come that way, get to Clark.”
She nodded, face gone tight. I rolled up the paper and stuffed it into my pocket in a wad as I moved for the outer door. I glanced back.
“Watch yourself, Zay,” she said.
Same thing she’d said at the Cup Train.
Opening the door of Virtue’s office was like opening the door onto a war zone—from soundproofed to shocking in a single burst. I ducked out and to the side, and the door zoomed shut again behind me, the lock flaring red as it cycled down. I was behind the solid ballistic armor of the balcony. I grabbed my handheld and checked camera views.
View one, the door to Virtue’s office, where I was crouched.
View two, Miss Pozynski’s desk, which had grown a shield around it, and a cannon, which she was firing at will down the stairs. Miss Pozynski looked just as pretty killing people as she did handing them welcome packages.
View three, midway down the stairs. It was a carpet of bodies. Dogsbodies, of course. Shock troops sent to overwhelm Miss Pozynski, who had been in fact underwhelmed and was still mowing them down with icy precision.
I needed a bigger gun, I decided, and took out my pistol, clicked the Autofit feature, and selected something with better firepower.
Assault rifle. That would do nicely.
There were limits to what an Autofit could accomplish, and so the pistol’s basic structure only morphed a little. However, it did give me the ability to fire multiple bursts at blurring speed, although I was likely to run out of ammunition fairly quickly. . . .
“Miss Pozynski,” I said into the handheld. “Ammunition?”
“Oh, call me Yanna; we’re all friends here. Carl is bringing it to you,” she said. “He’s on ammunition rounds.”
Carl was a kind of stock boy, with a self-driving armored cart. He was a small kid, younger than me, and he pulled up his machine in a hiss of air brakes to toss out a mound of ammunition before speeding off toward Miss Pozynski.
He never made it. A small missile whipped up the stairs in a red rush, avoided Miss Pozynski’s armor, and impacted directly with Carl’s cart, which exploded in a hail of shrapnel.
Miss Pozynski had a single-use blast shield, I saw, from the red flare that vaporized the shrapnel on contact as it sliced toward her. I had one as well, built into my handheld, and nothing but ash made it through to hit me.
Not much left of Carl, though. Or the ammunition.
I made a run for the armory door. There was an emergency access panel near the bottom, under the theory that if you’re in desperate need of ammunition, you probably don’t want to stick your head above the bulletproof barrier to gain access. Good theory. I palmed the pad, and the door zoomed open, then quickly shut as I rolled over the threshold.
It was like a candy store full of bullets. I felt positively
I consulted the plans. They were targeting the windows in Clark’s office, which was what I’d have done.
