Shards and Ashes

I loaded up and went back out, opened up a gunport, and fired like there was no tomorrow, because there wouldn’t be if this went badly. Dogsbodies in Corporate livery fell and fell and fell on the entry level, and the chic marble floor was a mass of blood, chipped stone, and bullet casings.

Then Miss Pozynski got it, in the form of another smart missile fired from below. It probably would have come for me except that some bright boy had just lit up her metal shield with heat tracers. The missile dived straight for it, sensed the obstacle, dodged, found free space, and detonated behind the shield.

Miss Pozynski’s personal force field had one use, and this was the second missile. Game over. I got pelted with shrapnel, including something sharp and deep in my side, and didn’t look over at whatever might be left of her; it wouldn’t be pretty anymore. The fire carried on. Whatever other dogsbodies Clark had around—and I was fairly sure he had a lot—gradually lost to the incoming tide of attackers. The CEO owned a whole army of them, apparently. I checked my handheld. We were down by 50 percent already, and I knew it wasn’t close to over.

I heard feet coming up the stairs in a thunder, and without Miss Pozynski there to cut them down, they’d have me in a deadly angle in seconds. As I retreated, I caught a quick glimpse of the man leading the charge. It was Helman, bloody and grinning, and he snapped off shots at me wildly as I opened Virtue’s door and slammed it shut.

Virtue, pale and steady behind the desk, clicked keys. “I’m disabling the lock,” she said. “It won’t stop them long.”

“Helman’s turned on us,” I said. “They must have offered general pardons and transfer and promotion. Could be other defections. You need to change the codes now.”

That made her pause, but only for a second before her fingers flew across the keypad. I saw a remarkable variety of emotions flow across her face and out again—anger, fear, sadness, icy determination. “I see that Pozynski is down. What else have we got?”

“Seventeen dogsbodies around the perimeter still register as active and fighting. But they’re not going to be enough.”

She paused and looked at me, nothing at all showing in her facial expression—but something, some shadow of something, in her eyes. “We’re not going to make it,” she said. “I never expected them to offer transfer and promotion. That’ll kill us, especially if they offer signing bonuses to flip.”

“Reinforcements? Alliances?” Because that was the Corporate way to do it; Clark would have strategic alliances, partnerships with other key executives who’d have to offer support. Favors for favors.

“They’re unavailable,” she said with a bitter edge. “In private meetings.” They’d been bought off. Tarrant Clark’s bid for power had been seen as going nowhere, and accordingly, his allies had bolted en masse. His carefully crafted plans were going to hell, fast.

That left the two of us, effectively. I stared at Virtue. “What do you want to do?” Being a dogsbody, I had no choice. If I tried to surrender, they’d kill me for disloyalty. Virtue, however, was a Corporate employee, a genuine careerist; she could give up Clark and join Helman on the winning side, and nobody would hold it against her, not even on her annual review. She’d probably get a promotion out of it.

“I stay with my boss,” she said. “He needs to win, Zay. He has to win, or it’s all for nothing. Everything you and I have done, been—it’s all for nothing. You made me promise to make it right. That’s why I’m here. If we don’t, we might as well have gotten on the train and ridden it straight to hell.”

I checked my guns. “Where’s Clark’s executive escape?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t one.”

“Bullshit,” I said bluntly. “This is a Corporate executive’s Res; there’s an escape. You tell me where it is now, Virtue.”

“Why? So you can run?”

I read bitter disappointment in her eyes, quickly hidden.

“I promise you, I won’t be going far. I need you to guard Clark and run some schematics and maps for me.”

When I told her what I was going to do, the disappointment disappeared, replaced by a bright, fierce hope. She opened the intercom circuit and got Clark on the line. I could picture him in his still, quiet office, watching the battle rage outside his picture windows.

It was his decision, in the end. I couldn’t act on my own, not in this.

“Yes?” he said. Perfectly calm, it sounded like. He had truly excellent soundproofing in there; I couldn’t even hear the rattle of gunfire or steady thumping of missiles on his end, although it was plain in Virtue’s office.

“Sir, we need you to play for time,” Virtue said. “With Leo Pannizer. Call for an official Board meeting. Make a deal.”

“He’ll never agree. He’ll just stonewall me until it’s over.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. But it’s a distraction, and we need a distraction right now. We need him to think you’re in a defensive position.”

“Aren’t I?” I could almost see Clark’s eyebrows rise, along with the inflection. “What are you planning?”

“Sir, it’s better if you don’t know the details. But let’s just say that if it works out, you can take credit for the brilliant tactics. We’ll need a blanket all-actions-necessary authorization from your handheld.”

As an executive, he was more than familiar with that concept. “All right,” he said. “It’s posted and on record. I’ll try to get Pannizer to talk.” If Clark made the call himself, he was more likely to be treated with respect than if Virtue made it on his behalf. Pannizer might even signal a cease-fire until he heard Clark out on a deal. It would demonstrate his fair-mindedness, for the record. I doubted he’d go so far as to call even a virtual Board meeting, but he might. Depended on how much he cared about what the other executives thought about his management style.

Virtue and I pulled maps and schematics, and she downloaded them to my handheld, along with access codes I would need along the way. She shouldn’t have had most of them. I wondered, briefly, what Virtue’s endgame had been in her own long-term plan; something to do with access, obviously. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been exactly what I was thinking now.

“Where’d you get the tunneling codes?” I asked her. She shrugged the way she used to, down on K, with just a bare shiver of muscles, and gave me a flash of a smile.

“If it came to it, I was going to go rogue,” she said. “Go after Pannizer myself.”

“What stopped you?”

“Clark was working on it, so I kept it in the planning stages. But I put in a fail-safe a couple of days ago,” she said. “Deadman switch. I wrote together a program that monitors my life signs and launches a nasty little predator e-bomb the moment they fail. If it works the way it should, it’ll wipe all base codes and connected backups across the cloud. Bring down the whole defense grid for at least forty-five minutes before they can load from off site.”

“You mean, the whole Company’s defense grid?” I was . . . appalled. And full of admiration. Without defenses, the Company itself was vulnerable to any kind of armed hostile takeover . . . just the thing our competitors were waiting for.

Virtue grinned at me, and she was exactly the girl I’d know back on the level. “We don’t have to take out Pannizer directly, if they get me,” she said. “Our competitors come in and do a complete management shakeup. He’s downsized automatically.”

“I like the way you think,” I said. “But since it’s a last resort, let’s make sure you don’t have to use it, all right?”

“I’d rather win and stay alive,” she said. “But if I don’t, I’d rather they don’t, either.”

We agreed on that much. “Where’s the escape?”

“Right over there, in the corner. There’s a pad under the carpet. It’s . . . look, you won’t like it. It’s a fax escape.”

My skin crawled, and I felt sickened, but I nodded. A fax escape meant that I’d be dead on this end, leaving behind a corpse, as the energy and engrams of my brain patterns and DNA were ripped away, transmitted, and another body on the other end was created from vat materials. It’d be a generic body, no longer my own. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too much loss of resolution on the mental imprints. Faxing was definitely the last resort of the desperate.

I stood where she told me to stand, and nodded once to her to confirm I was ready.

I wasn’t.