Judas Unchained

An explosion sent Alic spinning back up the sloping floor to crack his head against the bottom of the bar counter. The force field only partially absorbed the impact. He choked at the pain. The blazing wreckage of Treetops rotated around him. People were jumping from the remaining sections of floor into the dark space beyond; they were on fire, trailing flames through the night, orange sparks fizzing out behind them. Screams pierced the air, repeatedly overwhelmed by the shot of another rifle, or a plasma grenade detonating. One of the big trees that Treetops was built around was starting to keel over, a ponderous motion that was speeding up.

The Agent’s force field flickered and died. Flames scorched straight through his slick leather suit. He screamed as his skin crisped. The armor-suited figure above him raised one arm. Alic saw a harmonic blade gleam in the garish firelight.

“Yan!” Alic called. “Again.”

The harmonic blade swiped down. A fusillade of plasma bolts hammered the armored figure just as it beheaded the Agent. Alic cried out in horror as the Agent’s head bounced away across the buckled floor planks, blood splattering out of the severed neck, its short hair singed and smoking. He was never going to forget the startled expression locked on the Agent’s face as his head skittered toward the drop.

The armored attacker had been pushed sideways by the carbine shots, losing balance to tumble backward onto the slanting floor. Twisting coils of energy wrapping around the suit grounded out through the fractured oak beams. The miniature lightning blizzard suddenly shifted around to streak upward as the vast weight of the collapsing tree crunched down. Suit, floor, and the Agent’s corpse vanished under a swirling mass of flame that shattered the remainder of the bar. Alic felt the planks finally give way, sending him tumbling through the air, waving his arms and legs frantically. He hit the ground hard, with the force field inflating out around him like a scratchy pillow. It absorbed some of the collision, but he felt several ribs crack. He retched helplessly. The Agent’s head bounced on the damp soil beside him, skin charred and peeling off blackened bone. Even through all the pain and nausea he knew to grab for it. The disgusting thing was nestled in the crook of his arm when an armor suit appeared above him.

“Jim?”

“ ‘Fraid not, Chief,” Tarlo’s voice boomed through the bedlam. A plasma carbine was lowered. Its muzzle stopped five centimeters from Alic’s face.

“Fuck you, traitor,” he snarled.

A grenade went off right beside them, flinging both of them through the air amid a cloud of soil and tree fragments. Alic crashed into a tree trunk two meters above the ground and dropped like a stone. His force field was flickering around him on the verge of total breakdown, allowing overheated air to slide excruciatingly over injured flesh; green virtual vision text turned into random horizontal squiggles against the orange inferno. Through a haze of pain he saw the smoking black lump that was the Agent’s head, still rolling along the steaming ground away from him.

Tarlo was walking toward it. Alic tried to get up. His left side was completely numb. “Yan! Jim! Somebody help!”

Tarlo picked up the head. His suit’s jetpack spat out two spears of near-invisible blue flame, and he rose into the glaring conflagration that was consuming the jungle canopy. A cascade of huge blue and white sparks plummeted down in his wake.

“Vic, shoot him, just shoot him out of the sky, don’t let him take it, his memorycell’s in there. Vic, it’s Tarlo. Vic?” His voice fell to a whimper. He rolled onto his back, and pointed his ion pistol into the falling plume of sparks where Tarlo had vanished, ready to blast away. But there was only his empty hand, skin torn and bleeding, two fingers bent back where the knuckles had been broken. “I’ll find you,” he rasped at the swarming flames as the heat beat against him. “I will find you, fucker.”

***

Mellanie made it up to the Saffron Clinic’s third floor before she noticed something was wrong. The scrutineer programs she’d so carefully infiltrated into the arrays on the two floors below her were no longer responding. In fact, the whole of the net on those two floors was now dark.

She stopped and reviewed the tiny amount of data she could access. So far she’d only infiltrated three arrays on this floor, and her programs weren’t telling her anything. The clinic net certainly hadn’t issued any alarm, which was very strange. Management programs must have noticed the dropout. Not that she could query them.

So far she’d only passed a couple of staff on the evening shift, technicians in deep conversation. They hadn’t paid her any attention. The nurse’s uniform she’d put on was like wearing a stealth suit. There was nobody else in the corridor; she checked along it, uncertain what to do next. One of the rooms she wanted was right at the far end, barely thirty meters away.