Chapter 37 – God Cries
As she approached the District, Ash programmed the vehicle to make a detour on her way into the Bolt’s parking garage. The car stopped on the lowest level of the Athletic Complex. She designated a small clearing and set the vehicle down on the forested level.
Mono slept, curled up in the back seat.
Ash climbed out and the fresh air filled the car. Mono stirred. He spotted Ashley outside the open door and leapt from the vehicle. She pulled out his bag of food and opened it up, pouring out a small stack for the huge cat. She rolled the bag closed again and set it next to the pile.
Ash knew that if anything happened to her, Geoffrey would hear about the giant cat and find Mono soon enough. She just hoped she got to see them together again.
Ash hugged the giant cat and climbed back into the car.
Mono didn't appear disappointed with his new home. With a flick of his tail, he moved off to explore it.
Far above the district, a vehicle kicked out from the cableway.
It maintained its heading and elevation, but drifted, like a boat pushed out over calm water. A figure stepped out of the vehicle. Wearing a bulky gravity suit, he drifted away from the vehicle as if he were in outer space.
The floating agent held a long rocket launcher. Composed of three tubes bundled together, the launcher had a triangular shape. A moment later the man adjusted something at his belt and vanished from sight.
Three other figures exited the vehicle carrying similar rocket launchers and they too quickly disappeared.
The agents floated, invisible, above the district. They switched their optics over to infrared and located each other. Hand signals initiated the mission and two operatives dropped to the left. The two remaining agents moved to their assigned coordinates and prepared the rockets.
They raised the launchers and aimed, not directly at the district, but to its sides, and fired individually. Small rockets shot from the tubes, unraveling magnetic cables in their wake.
The agents turned ninety degrees to the left or right and fired a second cable the length of the district. They fired again, this time up or down, three cables extending from each agent's corner.
They dropped the launchers and moved to the cables themselves. As the empty launch tubes fell toward earth, the agents physically crossed the tips of the charged cables. The magnetic lines clung to each other with a love that could only be described as scientific. Once the magnetic lust of the corner knots was activated, the charge pulled each cable tight. They stretched themselves square, tightened by the forces at each corner.
The loose ends drifted toward each other and formed tight magnetic knots. The district was locked down. No magnetic or anti-gravity vehicle could move through the planes created by the cables. Not without the proper coded frequency.
Usually municipal authorities were the ones to execute this particular law enforcement procedure: known as a lock-box, during hostage situations. For invisible agents to be firing a stateside lock-box, in the dead of night, was rare, and with the exception of extreme cases of national security, deemed highly illegal.
The combat engineers returned to their anchored vehicle and were joined by a fifth soldier. Captain Grey, already familiar with the district, pinpointed specific locations and mapped out secure routes.
Each of the soldiers carried a full pack of demolitions gear, pulling them from the back of the truck. They would spend the next four hours wiring every bridge, strut and connector in the district. They would make no sound and leave no trace. The explosives would be so cleverly concealed; only detailed instructions or expensive scanners would reveal their placement.
The ionized energy drives, attached to their backs, saturated the immediate area with deflective light particles, preventing objects from reflecting light onto them. Everything within a four-foot diameter was invisible. No one could see them with the naked eye.
First Sergeant King, codenamed Tarnung, and Corporal Sorpresa, would set charges along the connections between the athletic complex and the bolt, while Captain Grey would take care of the terminal buildings, the schools and the administration building. Staff Sergeant Splitter was assigned to cover Ashley, while Captain Snow would handle God's Hotel and the old orphanage.
Once charges were set, the agents would regroup below the old orphanage for the second phase of the mission.
It was eleven fifty-nine when the wagon parked in the Bolt’s garage, on District Thirteen. Grey hadn’t told her why that was important but she was on time, regardless.
Ashley popped the passenger-side hatch, holding the handle so it wouldn't make a thud as it opened. She pulled her backpack, hoverboard and the sword from the car, before locking it shut.
Crouched beside the cooling vehicle, Ashley adjusted the pack between her shoulders and peered at the guards from over the car's hood. The soldiers hadn't registered her arrival. Undoubtedly their computer had, but a terminal can't force its custodians to follow up on every event it logs.
Ash had parked behind the greatest number of unoccupied vehicles, in the most remote section of the lot. Now, she studied the surrounding architecture with Geoff's binoculars, looking for a way to approach the guards unseen.
The guard shack was a circular bunker, set against a large pillar. Most of the crew sat outside, at a picnic table, playing cards. Between turns, they traded insults and swigs from a flask. Their assault rifles leaned against the table. Ashley noticed that the soldiers had removed their helmets but not their bulletproof vests.
Ash spotted a fifth guard inside the command post, sitting at the terminal, reading a magazine. She suspected he was the one who'd overlooked the arrival of her parent's car.
The terminal, registering the new day, clicked over from the events of the previous day, to a brand new, empty log page. Ashley’s arrival had been displayed for less than a minute, reducing the length of time the assigned soldier had to notice and react to the entry.
She packed up the binoculars, climbed onto her hoverboard and slipped away, staying hidden by the parked cars.
Across the garage, the guards continued their fun, exhibited by drunken laugher, bragging and taunting.
The Fox family station wagon ticked as it cooled.
A few minutes later, fire alarm went off.
"Where is it?" the sergeant yelled to the private, inside the bunker.
"Grid 18!" he replied, checking his monitors. "It looks like a car fire! There's a bunch of smoke pouring out of a boat down there, Sergeant.”
"18! 18! Move out!" the sergeant yelled at the young soldiers. They pulled on their helmets, picked up their rifles and set off in Ashley's general direction.
The troops jogged toward the smoke billowing from an obscured vehicle, far across the garage. As they got closer, they looked around, confused. The smoke had mostly cleared, the car looked fine.
One of the soldiers pointed to the nearby pillar, the fire alarm had been pulled and the extinguisher was missing from its mount. A lance corporal moved over to the smoking vehicle and pulled the extinguisher out from under the car.
"You fucking believe this?" one of the soldiers laughed.
"Gentlemen," the sergeant said, "we got zeros need a beating.”
"Come out here, you little cowards!" a belligerent corporal yelled.
"What the fuck, man. I was winning!" another complained, referring to the card game.
Ash sailed along, crouched on the hoverboard, the tip of the black-painted scabbard half an inch above hard cement. She approached the guard shack in a circular fashion, staying behind vehicles when possible.
Ashley crossed last bit of open ground at an angle to the open door and circular window bank. She stopped below the window and set the board on its side. The fifteen-year-old girl drew the blade from its sheath and set scabbard next to the board.
Sword in hand, she crept forward and silently peeked around the corner of the door. The guard sat, hunched over the control panel, still reading his ma
gazine.
Ash entered the room, smooth and dangerously silent. She reached the back of the soldier's chair and stood.
He laughed at something he'd read, without a clue she was there.
Ashley thought about what Captain Grey had said, about keeping the citizens alive.
She could knock him out and just plug in the drive. His gun was too far away for him to reach it.
She noticed that he was reading a rape-porn magazine and laughing about it. The girls in the photos looked tortured and abused, they were not smiling or laughing.
With a single strike, Ash severed the young citizen's head from his body. The neck exploded with a geyser of blood, covering the monitors. The head landed on the counter, a few feet from the body, spinning and rolling to a halt. The body was spinning too, still in the office chair.
Ashley rolled it away from the terminal and plugged in the drive Grey had given her. The terminal's activity monitor froze.
A glance at the monitors showed the guards, still distracted across the structure and generally goofing off.
A warning came up on the main terminal, informing the user of a mandatory optimization update. The crash cycle was disguised to look like maintenance. She watched the time required indicator climb from twelve to thirty-six, finally hovering at forty hours.
"Genius," she whispered and stepped back from the machines.
Ashley retrieved the scabbard, cleaned the blade, sheathed it, and grabbed her board.
Ashley pulled the young man's badge from his headless body and tossed it into her pack. She slung his assault rifle over her shoulder and grabbed the canister-shaped grenades from the table. Her pack swelled with the plunder.
She heard voices and crouched low. Another glance at the monitors showed that the guards had returned. She was trapped; they were right outside the door.
Ashley ducked against the half-windowed wall, crouching against the painted bricks, below the glass and to the side of the shallow depression beside the reinforced doorframe. She set her sword on the floor and drew the detective's handgun.
One of the soldiers entered the bunker. "Lentz. Lentz?" he called out.
The soldier saw the blood covered terminal and the headless body. Lentz stared at him sideways, from his place down the counter.
Two other soldiers entered. They saw the head, oozing blood and plasma onto the stained counter.
When the young girl fired the weapon, the several loud explosions were punctuated by the wet slaps of the bullets splashing into the young guards' heads and bodies. The soldiers were thrown against the console by the handgun's heavy rounds. They ripped through their uniforms, blowing out blood and muscle as the bullets chewed into their bodies.
Ash knew at least one citizen-guard remained in the garage, but from her place against the wall, she couldn't see him on the monitors.
Ashley's pack of ammo and grenades sat on the terminal counter near Lentz's severed noggin. She pulled it from the counter and closed it up. The soldier still hadn't appeared on the monitors. The coast was clear. She slowly stood, seeing no one outside the window.
A plastic bag lay on the nearby table. Ashley scooped up Lentz's head and floated out of the post on her hoverboard, quickly vanishing among the parked vehicles.
No one fired.
The sergeant was nowhere to be seen; as Staff Sergeant Splitter held a hand over his mouth and a gun to the side of his face, both men well inside the invisibility radius of Splitter's phase-frequency camouflage.
Once Ashley was out of the garage, Splitter knocked the sergeant out and handcuffed him to a picnic table. He double-checked the guard shack. He saw the decapitated body and the bullet riddled corpses, and noted that Lentz‘s head had gone missing.
He tapped his transmit button, "Captain Snow, we've got a problem.”
"I noticed the network is down," she replied. "What's wrong?”
"She killed four of them.”
"Was she defending herself?”
"No, she ambushed them.”
Captain Snow didn't reply.
"She didn't give them a chance to surrender or anything.”
"She's not exactly a trained professional," Snow pointed out.
"Captain, these are citizens we're talking about," he replied.
"Staff Sergeant, are you having a problem following your orders?”
Splitter hesitated.
"This mission is a matter of National Security," Captain Snow said. "Acknowledge.”
"Copy," he replied. “No, problems.”
"Maintain radio silence. Snow out," she replied.