Retiree 2.0 Page 18

  Alana yelled, “Car! Stop!” and she and Rhys were thrown forward against their safety belts. “Ben! Go inside the church and see what’s happening! Quick!”

  Rhys opened his door and piled out, “Yes, ma’am...”

  Alana yelled, “Car! Manual control, now!”

  The dashboard folded down and a small, emergency steering column extended. Recessed foot pedals popped up from the floorboard. The car quickly wheeled around as Alana mashed the accelerator and whipped the steering wheel to the left. The car she intended to pursue had already taken a substantial lead on her even as her car flew off the curb and onto the main roadway. Slapping the button that activated the police car’s flashing lights, she said, “Vira, interrogate that vehicle’s transponder.”

  The car replied, “There is no response.”

  “Disable that vehicle!”

  “There is no response.”

  Alana barked, “Control! Code Zebra! Code Zebra!”

  A computerized female voice spoke directly into her ear, “Emergency channel opened. How may I assist you, Inspector Graves?”

  “I’m reporting a 10-31 on southeast Ventura Boulevard involving a 10-32. Suspect vehicle is a silver-gray sedan with bypassed security hardware. Two passengers. At least one is heavily armed. I am in vehicular pursuit. Traffic control needs to clear the roads within a kilometer of my position. I also need ground units sent to the St. Mary Magdalen Church at 2532 Ventura stat, including EMTs.”

  Civilian cars and trucks began to pull to the sides of the road, opening up a path both for the pursuer and pursued as both cars raced down the divided highway. Palm trees, traffic control poles, and any number of other obstacles ranging from fire hydrants to curious bystanders lined both sides of the road, making any quick turns hazardous, even for Alana’s cybernetic reflexes. However, the vehicle she was pursuing continued straight ahead, driving full-speed.

  The computer said, “Requests acknowledged. Traffic control is engaged and units have been dispatched to the requested location. Is there anything else—?”

  “Yes! I think the suspects are headed toward the Simi Quarantine Zone. Are there any units in position to intercept before they reach the automated checkpoint?”

  The dispatch computer said, “Negative. I can direct a tactical drone to the checkpoint, but it will probably not arrive before you.”

  Alana took what aid was available, “Send the drone. Use the gate to Simi as a waypoint. Then have it home in on my transponder. Rules of engagement are to observe the suspects if they are outside the zone, and free-fire if they are inside.”

  “Affirmative. I am dispatching the drone now.”

  No sooner had Alana issued her instructions than the car’s passenger leaned out his window, brandishing his weapon. Alana ducked instinctively and withdrew her foot from the accelerator as the windshield shattered, spraying the inside of the car with tiny fragments of safety glass. “Car! Resume autopilot!”

  “Destination?”

  “Pursue the mobile vehicle in front of us, one-hundred meters distance.”

  Another burst of flechettes peppered her car as the gunman aimed lower, but the armored firewall prevented any rounds from entering the passenger compartment. Alana drew her sidearm. She linked her vision to the gun camera and poked it over the top of the dashboard. She could see that her quarry had added a couple hundred meters to its head-start, and was now almost half a kilometer away, and maintaining its lead. Her car was beginning to pull to the right, and the computer was making constant, jerky corrections to keep it going straight. The lights hidden in the front of the aerodynamic grill ceased to flash.

  “Vira, call Ben Rhys!”

  A couple of seconds later, Rhys answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Alana asked, “What happened there?”

  “Attempted murder. Victim is Gabriel Stone, the priest in charge of the church here. He’s badly injured, but still alive. Isn’t that who we were coming to visit?”

  “Yes. It was. What else?”

  “One of the parishioners is a nurse, and she’s administering first aid. According to the witnesses, a single perpetrator walked into the church during an after-school birthday party for one of the parishioner’s children and shot the priest. He was approaching him to finish the job when his partner blew his car horn. Then he made a u-turn and ran out to his car. The getaway driver must have recognized our cruiser as police-issue.”

  Alana could see the suspect’s car crash through the flimsy barricade that was stretched across the roadway in front of her. She told Ben, “I dispatched help. Stay with the survivors until it arrives. Do whatever you feel is necessary. Over and—”

  The car interrupted, “You are approaching a restricted area. Because of high levels of radiation, the Department of Health—”

  “Police override! Continue pursuit through the gate.”

  A second later, Alana’s car also zoomed through the gap. She remained hunkered-down behind the dashboard, using her pistol for her eyes, when a large shadow appeared overhead. The circular shadows cast by the fan ducts gave it away as the tactical drone she had requested. A commanding, masculine voice spoke directly into her ear, “Drone Seventeen on standby per your orders, Inspector Graves.”

  Alana wasted no time. She locked her targeting reticule onto the car and yelled, “Disable that vehicle!”

  “Affirmative,” the drone said as its shadow accelerated, and the actual drone came into view as it flew overhead, closing the distance between Alana’s car and the perpetrators’ car. A long, EMP cannon swung down from the right wingtip of the drone and aimed itself at the car. For a brief moment, Alana’s vision went haywire, but it corrected itself just as quickly. The car began slowing down, and then rapidly screeched to a halt as the driver slammed his brakes.

  Alana sat up, regaining her normal eyesight. She said, “Engage any passengers who debark from that vehicle, non-lethal force.”

  A moment later, the passenger and driver side doors on the car swung open and two male figures dashed out, heading in opposite directions toward the cover of the nearby ruins of shops. A different type of cannon swung down from the drone’s left wingtip and a spray of shells kicked up a cloud of dust amid a storm of electrical arcs as the stun shells peppered the area. The suspect did not emerge from the cloud. The other one, the passenger with the submachine gun, made it to cover diving inside the broken window of an abandoned storefront.

  The drone said, “One suspect is disabled. I am unable to pursue the second.”

  Alana’s car skidded to a stop on the sand-covered road just behind the suspect’s car. She flung her door open and rolled out onto the pavement, crouching behind her door with her sidearm drawn. She replied, “The suspect entered a stand-alone building. Hover overhead and interdict it. Shoot anyone who leaves.”

  The drone spun in the direction of the sheltering building, its twin ducted fans tilting to fine-tune its flight, and then it slowly began circling overhead.

  Alana dashed from her cover into the settling dust that marked the spot where the driver had been gunned down. She found him face-down on the roadway, groaning. She quickly pulled a set of zip-ties from her jacket pocket and hog-tied the man. The stun shells had clearly not taken him down. It appeared to her more likely that he had simply had the wind knocked out of him by the barrage of 15mm shells. A quick inspection of his black and khaki street clothes revealed an e-shield liner worn underneath, just like the man Rhys had shot at the warehouse on Sunday afternoon. Alana frisked the man and removed a submachine gun from a shoulder holster. She then dragged the man back to her police car. She opened the back door, and before she hefted him into the back seat, she grabbed his e-shield undershirt at the waistline and pulled it back far enough to expose his back. She then shot him with a stun bullet, which sent him into a less than peaceful slumber.

  Alana ran to the rear of her car and popped the latch on the trunk, opening up the car’s supply compartment. She dropped the submachine gun into
an evidence box. Then she stuffed her pockets with lethal flechette magazines, unloaded the stun magazine from her pistol, and inserted real bullets into it as well. She slammed the trunk shut, saying, “Control, I need a squad of Joebots at my location, stat. How long until you can get one here?”

  “The estimated time for one patrol car with two robots would be fifteen minutes.”

  “Send them, but I can’t wait. Autopilot my car to the nearest police precinct and inform the officer on duty that there is a violent felon in the back seat who needs to be booked. Exact charges pending.”

  Alana’s car engine whirred as it made a u-turn and headed back the way they came. Alana dashed to cover at the corner of the building into which the suspect ran. She heard a burst of cannon fire from behind the building, where the drone was hovering. “Drone, report!”

  “The suspect attempted to leave the building through a rear door. I failed to hit him, and he retreated back inside the building.”

  Alana slowly peered around the corner, through the former pane glass window, now a shattered frame, that the suspect had dived through earlier. Seeing no targets, she whipped around the corner, her pistol following her every eye movement, her target reticule indicating where her shots would land if she pulled the trigger. Using her visual interface, she activated her thermal imaging system and overlayed the thermograph atop her normal vision. She did not immediately see any body heat signatures, but there was a faint, fading trace on the corner of one wall that was likely a palm print left behind when the suspect grabbed the corner as he made his way deeper inside the building. The building was clearly a former women’s clothing shop, its textiles long looted, with only the freestanding clothing racks remaining. Peg hooks lined a wall where handbags once dangled. A sales counter was stripped bare of its former electronics, and a thick layer of dust rested on top, undisturbed for what was probably decades.

  As she turned her attention back to searching for the suspect, who was probably holed up inside the storeroom, the back office, or the restroom, a random though struck her, completely unexpectedly. Her mind had drifted back onto Gabriel Stone, the young priest and protégé of his father, Aaron, and onto what Aaron had been doing. He had been ostensibly helping fix fallen cyborgs that lived inside the ruins of Simi, for little in return, and had apparently given himself over to God after retiring from a life-long military career. It was almost as if Aaron had been atoning for something. Could Colonel Stone have been involved in setting off the Simi dirty bomb?

  Suddenly, Alana spotted a heat signature through the back wall of the sales floor. She trained her pistol on the hazy, humanoid image. Before she could decide whether to simply pull the trigger or try to take the suspect alive, the target suddenly moved, and a burst of gunfire ripped through the wall at her. She was struck in her chest and knocked backwards, onto the floor. The image showed the suspect quickly dashing to the door that separated the back rooms of the shop from the main floor. A human head bespectacled with sunglasses and a torso clad in a beige, button-up shirt whipped around the corner, aiming a machinegun at Alana, but before he could fire, Alana targeted his weapon with her automated fire control and shot it. The sudden, unexpected kinetic blow knocked it out of his hand and into the corner of the larger room. The man started after his gun, but Alana quickly switched targets and pierced his right knee with a flechette. He cried out in agony as he belly-flopped onto the floor, spouting out a stream of curses in a language Alana did not recognize. She slowly regained her feet, never once taking her target indicator off the suspect’s head. She ran her left hand across the place where she had been shot, and noticed that her new mackintosh had bullet holes in it, but that her body armor had stopped the rounds, if only barely. Shooting through the wall must have sapped some of their energy, as she examined one of the deformed flechettes as she yanked it out of her vest. She bellowed, “Sir, you are under arrest! Do you understand me?” The man nodded, acknowledging that he understood English.

  Another stray thought entered Alana’s head as she stomped on the man’s back, pinning him down as she fished through her pockets for another zip-tie. If she could use her targeting software to shoot a gun out of a suspect’s hand and then shoot him in the knee while he was moving, then there was no reason why Brett couldn’t be right about Phil Robertson being murdered by a batted baseball.

  Alana reached down and plucked the sunglasses from the man’s face. She noted that they had a media package attached, including a tiny camera port. They did not have any manufacturer’s marks. They could have been custom-made. She glanced through the lenses and could see fuzzy outlines of the pipes and conduits running through the shop walls. That was how he saw her well enough to shoot her through the wall. He was using a covert electromagnetic sensor. Even her enhanced cybernetic vision did not come equipped with that feature. Otherwise, the glasses were not corrective. They were merely sensory enhancing, and probably had other functions as well.

  The tactical drone, still circling above the building, called her, “Inspector Graves, my power reserves are approaching bingo level. I can only loiter for another ten minutes. Shall I summon a replacement unit?”

  “No. Return to base,” Alana said as she pocketed the spectacles, stepped over to the corner, and picked up the submachine gun. She could hear the drone’s fan blades change pitch, and then fade into the distance as she unlocked the magazine and dropped it in another pocket. She then pulled the trigger to clear the chamber, punching a hole in the ceiling in the process. She examined the firearm, but did not recognize the design. It was compact, only slightly larger than her service pistol, and eminently concealable. She looked closely at it, saying, “Vira, scan this weapon. Does it have any anticrime features?”

  “Negative. The weapon does not meet Republic guidelines for legal weaponry.”

  “What is its model and make?”

  “The weapon is a 4mm Type 80 machinepistol. This model was designed by the Jian Xi Group.”

  Alana asked, “Can you trace it?”

  “Negative. The weapon has no transponder, and the serial number has been removed. I can see no other identifying markings.”

  Alana pulled up a dusty chair that was resting against the wall and sat down a couple meters away from the suspect. His knee wound was bleeding, but she did not seem to have severed the main artery. She said, “It’s going to be few minutes before a car gets here. When it does, you’ll get medical assistance. In the meantime, we’re going to have a little chat.”

  Without his sunglasses, Alana was able to get a clear view of the man’s face. His skin was dark bronze, and pocked with acne scars. He was gritting his teeth, most likely from the pain of having his knee shattered. It was clear to even someone with basic first aid training that he was likely to either lose the leg from the knee down or have an artificial knee replacement. “Where did you get a Chinese machinegun?”

  The man looked at Alana as if he understood every word she said, but his grimace did not give way to a confession. Alana said, “Vira, scan that man’s face and search the database for a match.”

  The man smirked, only for a second, before his face contorted again from the pain.

  Alana’s Vira said, “Searching... No matches found. Do you wish to expand the probability range and try again?”

  She said, “No. I don’t think he’s in the files.”

  Alana said, “When we get you back to the police station and strip search you, are we going to find a tattoo from the Madagascan security forces on your back?”

  Whoever the man was, and wherever he was from, he had clearly not spent much time playing poker. His expression changed again, his face going blank. He looked at the floor, not focusing on it, rather simply trying to look at nothing. Alana guessed that she and Rhys might have accidentally blundered into the two suspects who had escaped from Inspector MacGruder’s warehouse raid the previous day.

  “Why did you attack Gabriel Stone?”

  The man flinched, but uttered not a sound.


  “Were you involved with a cyborg chop-shop that was operating at the waterfront at the Port of Los Angeles?”

  The man looked at Alana again, which left no doubt in her mind that she had apprehended the same individuals who had fled the scene. She wanted to grab the man by the knee and press hard until he either confessed or screamed, but she was able to maintain her outward calm. If she had not wanted to have the video record of her questioning admissible in court, she might have turned it off. She changed tack, “I’m starting to get a better picture of who you are. This is just a guess, but since you’re not in our facial recognition database, and it’s clear that you haven’t spent the first credit on facial reconstruction surgery, I’m presuming that you’re an illegal visitor to the American Republic.”

  Alana gave the man a few moments to react, which he did not; he merely closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. She continued, “Since you are an illegal immigrant, and you have engaged in violent criminal activity during your visit, you’re in quite a bit of trouble. Once the incident reports go into the computer, it’s probably going to be less than an hour before Security Division’s networks find out about it. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the IATA or not. It’s called the International Anti-Terrorism Act.”

  The man’s eyes flicked open again at the mention of the American Republic’s infamous and draconian law. Alana continued, “The only way I know of for you to avoid being spirited away to God knows where for God knows how long and for God knows what would be for you to cooperate fully with our investigation. Even then, I won’t be able to guarantee anything. But if you did provide us with useful information, it might help sway your tribunal into granting you a lifetime of domestic imprisonment instead of whatever it is that Security Division does to foreign terrorists.”