Profiteer

Tetsami stumbled over to the front and the windshield, but she couldn’t see the business end of the crane. She tried to remember if it was one that carried a girder. As she tried to see it up through the skeleton of the new building, she decided it had been.

 

“Zanzibar, I’m going to try something.”

 

“What?”

 

“I’m making for the foreman’s trailer.”

 

“What?” Zanzibar looked over her shoulder at Tetsami, then toward the windshield and the trailer. “That’s fifty meters, in the open, with no idea where the third sniper is.”

 

“I’m covered from the first two, and I have a force field.”

 

“One and a half seconds max against a military laser carbine.”

 

“Cover me if someone starts firing.”

 

“Damn it, this thing has no range.”

 

“It’s a bright light that’ll screw up their aim.”

 

“Oh, shit,” Zanzibar ducked and made over to the windshield so she could cover Tetsami’s run.

 

“Do you have any better ideas?”

 

“No, and that’s the problem.”

 

Tetsami spared one glance at the green light on her field generator. It was lit. Her otherwise-invisible field was operating.

 

She nodded at Zanzibar, stepped out the broken windshield, and began running. A flash dazzled her and she felt a fiery dagger lance into her right shoulder. Her force field had soaked up some of a carbine blast, but a lot had gotten through. She could smell synthetic fibers smoldering.

 

Tetsami was under the sights of the third sniper.

 

She kept running.

 

She weaved out from under the laser for a moment, and suddenly her shadow was dancing ahead of her, pointing toward the trailer. The massive ruddy light had to be Zanzibar’s return fire. The plasma rifle was like a signal flare behind her.

 

Tetsami spared a breathless glance at her field generator, the indicator light faded from red to amber. Another beam lanced ahead of her and Tetsami ducked and rolled in the dirt.

 

Halfway there.

 

The third sniper was above her and to the right. That would put him somewhere up in the building’s metal skeleton. Figured.

 

Tetsami leaped to her feet and kept running toward the trailer, and cover.

 

Another shot of energy hit her. The beam struck her leg, and she felt burning heat in her calf and smelled her jumpsuit starting to smolder. She looked down. A line of strobing color was diffracting into rainbow circles that flashed along the perimeter of her field over her leg, as if the laser had hit an invisible elliptical shell surrounding her. The fact she saw anything at all meant that her field generator was about a second from overload.

 

The box at her belt that generated that ellipsoid field was flashing a red warning light and beeping at her furiously. Her leg was beginning to cook.

 

Five meters from the trailer, she removed the generator from her belt, tossing it as she jumped for the side of the trailer.

 

She hit cover against the side of the foreman’s trailer at the same time her field generator exploded. Tetsami crumpled to the ground, breathing heavily, waiting for that laser carbine to slice her unprotected body in half. After a few seconds it seemed that wasn’t going to happen.

 

She looked up and back. Zanzibar was poking the plasma rifle out the windshield and up toward the murky scaffolding. As Tetsami watched, she pumped off a cone of red-orange energy that hurt to look at and lit the entire construction site. Zanzibar must’ve cranked the beam all the way up. She glanced in Tetsami’s direction and gave her a thumbs-up.

 

Tetsami had been fortunate. The trailer was parked at an angle to the construction. Its shadow blocked the third sniper’s view of her.

 

She stood up, right leg a little wobbly, and slid along the trailer, back glued to its side. Near the rear she came to an entrance. She tried the handle.

 

Locked—

 

“Damn it.”

 

Such a simple thing, and it really fucked her plans. She didn’t have time to jimmy a lock.

 

Okay, but what’re the odds that there’s someone in there? Pretty good, right? Tetsami nodded to herself. Most folks would have at least one human supervisor on a project like this. That was the guy who had shut things down when the shit hit the fan.

 

Guy probably got a big bribe to let sniper number three take his position up there.

 

External sensors had to see her, so how to do this?

 

“All right, I’m addressing the a-hole inside this can.” Tetsami put a hand in her coat and put on her best crazy expression. “I’m carrying a few AM grenades—you know how twitchy they are—if I buy it out here, you probably won’t have to wait for my partner back there to frag the trailer.” Zanzibar punctuated that with another spectacular shot into the superstructure. Tetsami silently thanked her.