But it was slow, and slow is smooth.
The laser dot landed right above the koob’s brow. The central cortex stem and lower thalamus beyond that, protected by bone and brain matter. Instant lights out in the koob’s anatomy. And if he was low, he’d send a bullet through the airsac, making it impossible for the koob to croak a warning once ruptured.
And smooth is fast.
The dead koob had barely a second to open his mouth as he came face to face with the assassin before a bullet scrambled his brain and came out the rear lower pan at the base of the skull.
Bowie moved forward before the body could fall and pushed the corpse back inside the access door with one hand steadying and the other maintaining the pistol’s posture forward and ready to engage an unannounced buddy.
The lifeless koob warrior slumped against the wall as Bowie’s vision switched over to IR with just a simple thought. It was dark in the stairwell access leading to the roof and he’d merely wanted, yes wanted had been the right word, and the filter overlay for his vision turned everything to IR red. There was enough residual heat in the walls to give a good picture of what the short set of stairs leading down to the top two levels of the museum looked like.
No buddies.
Seven rounds left, he reminded himself. The downside of using so small a pistol.
Moving quickly but quietly he made the bottom of the stairs. Though the smartsuit was running some kind of active sensor system, it wasn’t picking up anything. No movement. No heartbeats.
“Not getting anything on sensors,” whispered Bowie over the comm.
“Yeah,” said Reiser quietly. Bowie could tell he was drinking a cup of kaff from a disposable cup. The comm was so good he could hear the soft material of the cup crinkle as Reiser gripped it while he spoke. “Everything’s still R&D, Jack. Give it a moment and it may come in once it figures itself out. All this stuff is just voodoo to an old spook like me. Back in my day, we…”
Bowie slid through the barely open door and out into a marble-floored hallway adorned with ancient Kublaren stone art. It was dark in here, and some powerful deep scan Reiser’s people had been able to run in the last few hours had shown most of the koobs within the building. On the top floor there had been five. The rover who was now dead. And two patrols at opposite ends of the massive building, walking alternating routes that intersected every fifteen minutes.
And here was the trickiest part of the night. Both patrols had to be hit separately, but before their standard intersection times. While doing the map recon back in the operations warehouse, they’d identified two places where Bowie could effect this.
Without hesitation Bowie moved to what they called Position One and waited behind a massive stone sarcophagus of a prehistoric Kublaren mummy. He waited, keeping the Nine down and letting his arms relax.
Up for too long and the arms cramped and the aim got bad when it was time to come into play.
Less than two minutes later the first pair came down the small gallery, each taking an opposite side, and one slightly behind the other. Bowie assessed both targets and confirmed he had them in sight.
“Engaging…” he whispered and got a “Standing by…” back from Reiser. If things went sideways now, other elements had to get out of the area of operation quickly before anyone could start capping footage and pinning blame. So Reiser would wait for confirmation on each kill.
“Tangos down,” whispered Bowie a second later. “Moving to Two.”
Position Two was not thirty meters away and near the Grand Exhibit of the Moon Monolith. One of the most sacred relics of koob society and culture. It was rumored to predate Kublar’s earliest civilizations and further rumored to be extra-terrestrial. But the House of Reason antiquities commission had never allowed any off-world scientist to have a go at it and verify if any of this was actually true.
Both guards were just entering the chamber from a side exit that marked their patrol route when Bowie entered, swiftly walking and firing at the same time.
He’d swapped mags on the way to Position Two, so he had eight rounds. His hands had started to shake during the first two kills and he’d felt it best to have a full magazine when he hit the next two targets. Unsure if his aim would start to go with the subsiding adrenaline and nerves as the mission clock wore on.
Instead he’d suddenly felt calm, and the brief bit of exercise moving from Position One to Position Two had shed some of the excess nervous energy. It only took a bullet each to put the two surprised koobs down. And the rest of the magazine just for general purpose.
Now there were five dead and seven to go. All of them on the lower level.
34
Counting down.
Number Seven died when Bowie let himself down in the main exhibition hall, eschewing the stairs and using a small nano-cable to sink to the ground floor. He came in right behind Number Seven who was tasked with watching the Hall of Wonders. Kublaren technology from their golden age. Technology consisting of an ancient printing press and other abortive attempts at devices much of the galaxy had long had access to before the Savages’ first leapt away from Earth.
If you believed that myth.
Bowie had never cared one way or another.
Number Six died near the entrance to the administration facility parking lot, standing watch and looking outward. Bowie moved up quickly and used the blade coated with nano-toxin. The smartsuit made movement easy and near silent, and so the dead koob had felt nothing more than the merest scratch as Bowie swiped a small cut across the wide neck and watched the creature go down, paralyzed
