Aura Overload

8 – Black Wing

It turned out the locals weren’t exactly looking for a fight, at least not where Mathews and her crew were concerned. Maybe it was Perry’s size that dissuaded them, or that Red was wearing two custom, chromed-out blasters—he had permits from the local magistrate’s office—or that, despite trying to hide their presence, Frederick’s security goons lurking in the background threw a definite chill on the bar’s atmosphere. Flint wasn’t there; he’d left with Frederick’s mother, but there were three others that Hector clocked right away, and Frederick confirmed with a grumble about his overbearing family.

All in all, they just had a good time at the bar. Hector drank too much—he had to fit in, didn’t he?—and he rationalized enjoying himself as a means to an end; success in the rift would mean incredible short-term gains, both with regard to potentia and income. Improving his wealth and power meant improving his odds of figuring out who betrayed him and murdered the Contis. With that in mind, he felt some team building wasn’t frivolous or a waste of time. At least that was what he told himself when Bobby ordered another round of shots.

While they waited, most of the team gathered around an arm-wrestling table, watching Perry challenge members of the local IG units and other rift raiders. Paige leaned close to Hector, speaking into his ear so he could hear her over the clamor. “Do you think we’re going to die?”

He looked at her sharply, surprised by the question. He wondered if she was drunk; her breath smelled like mint and carried an eye watering amount of alcohol fumes, after all. “What? Not tonight, anyway; I’ll cut you off before you get that far.”

She laughed, licking her lips and reaching up to rub her nose—flushed from the booze. “No, I mean in the rift, dummy!”

Hector tilted his head, considering. The truth was that there was a damn good chance she and some of the others might die. He didn’t say that. “Why do you ask?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the table, where Perry was grunting and straining against a guy with an orange industrial-grade cybernetic arm. None of the others were paying her or Hector any attention. She turned back to him, and despite her glassy-eyed flush, her voice was serious when she said, “This’ll be the fifth run for some of us. There’s a twenty percent mortality rate for civilian rift raiders, so…” She trailed off, trusting Hector to connect the dots.

Despite himself, Hector wanted to reassure her. He liked Paige; she was friendly, smart, and she’d tried damn hard during their “team-building” torture earlier that day. The heavy buzz he had going probably helped to loosen his tongue, too. “I’d say the fact that you’ve already made it through four rifts makes you safer. Those statistics are skewed because lots of wannabes get wiped on their first run.”

She smiled. “I didn’t take you for an optimist.”

“Well…” Hector chuckled, shrugging. “Anyway, you’re a biologist.”

She nodded, looking down. Hector wasn’t sure of modern statistics, but he knew, back in his old life, that most rift deaths happened to security personnel. Support personnel usually only died in a full wipe. “Ugh, sorry I brought this up! I’m not usually a downer.”

“You’re good.” Hector nudged her with his elbow and pointed to a synth approaching with a tray laden with shot glasses. “Here we go,” he groaned, grinning crookedly.

###

Much later, Hector found himself walking home alone on a dark rural street, following a map Evie had made for him. He’d watched all the others get into cabs or personal vehicles, waving and shaking his head at offered rides. To him, an hour on foot in the night air seemed preferable to a quick ride home with the spins. Of course, he’d taken some bugs to fight the hangover, but they were low-grade, designed to be easy on the organs, so relief wouldn’t be immediate.

A message flashed on his AUI and he expanded it with a thought; it was from Mathews: Team, big mistake starting at the bar. We’ll hit the swap market another day. Your commander is a woman of her word.

Hector chuckled, shaking his head. He didn’t really care about the shopping trip; Mathews was already furnishing basic armor and weapons. Besides, he was an aura user; he already had his Aura Blade and Speed Boost. As long as they played it smart and worked as a team, he didn’t think he’d need much more than that.

//You seem to be thinking clearly. Are the nanites working?//

Hector shrugged as though Evie were walking beside him. “The nanites, the walk, the fresh air—my youthful liver.”

//Well, I have some news: I’ve decoded the cipher’s broadcast.//

Hector stopped walking, and his heart began to thud more rapidly in his chest. “Don’t tease me, Evie.”

//Right. Out with it, then: the last time the drive-core cipher was with the ship—AURX-44-991 Kurotsubasa—it was located in the Jovian Trojan Field, L5 Cluster—Object JX-7331 – Sarpedon Fragment.//

Hector tilted his head to the night sky, staring at the brilliant starfield, ignoring the way the millions of twinkling lights spun in his booze-addled vision. He held his finger up and pointed toward those stars, whispering, “Which way?”

//Left…now up…just a little to the right. That’s roughly the direction of Jupiter right now.//

“So the ship, Kurotsubasa, might still be sitting there? It’s hidden on some damn asteroid—a rock swimming in a sea of other rocks?”

//That’s right. As for that designation, there’s nothing in any of the databases I could access on Mars. No record of registration numbers like that, at least. I found a dozen other vessels dubbed Kurotsubasa—from private shuttles to an old Imperial frigate. None are likely to be the vessel our drive-core cipher belongs to.//

“What’s it mean?”

//Kurotsubasa? It’s Old Earth Japanese for “Black Wing.”//

Hector stared at the stars for a few more moments, but after a while, he became aware of movement behind him. It was distant, but his ears had picked up the soft scrape of a sole on pavement, and the slight rustle of fabric—like the swish of a windbreaker as someone moved their arm. At first, he filed the sounds away as “nothing to worry about”—other night-time walkers. But when further noises failed to materialize, he realized that whoever it was hadn’t meant to be heard; they were trying to be stealthy.

“Something you want?” he asked the night, closing his eyes and tilting his head so the tranquil breeze coming off the Martian desert stirred his hair.

“Talk to yourself a lot, don’tcha?” asked a youthful voice from behind him and to the right—the shoe scuffer.

“Bet he was on a call,” said another, deeper voice from a few paces behind.

Hector sighed. Am I that easy looking? How many times are people going to mug me on this planet?

//Shall I alert the authorities? Mathews?//

Hector ignored Evie; she knew what he thought of the idea.

“I’m not the one you want tonight.” He spoke softly, still looking up at the stars, still trying to picture the Black Wing, lurking in some hidden hangar cut out of a random asteroid in one of the vast belts that followed Jupiter around its solar orbit. A shoe scuffed to his right, and he sighed again. “Seriously.”

“Should’ve thought about that before you got a price on your head,” said the gruff voice.

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Hector frowned. Evie, do I have a bounty?

//Nothing on the public net. Nothing listed in the IDJO bulletins.//

So, then. Who did he have to thank for this little disturbance? Frederick’s mother? That didn’t make much sense. Someone else in his family? Someone threatened by his presence? Someone else on the team?

Another shoe scuffed the pavement, and Hector glanced to his right. The kid was there, just a few meters over his shoulder. He was lanky, wearing a synth-leather bomber, and sporting a surprising amount of chrome—red-dot eyes, armored dermal plating on his throat, and black, combat-rated cybernetic hands. His left hand gripped a long knife with a blade that glowed with a baleful red safety laser—monofilament.

The weapon told Hector a few things, one being that the kid didn’t have a firearms license. Did that mean they weren’t legitimate bounty hunters? Still, a mono-blade was a serious weapon. You didn’t pull one on someone you didn’t mean to kill. If the kid had a weapon like that, the guy behind Hector probably had something serious, too. Maybe it was the booze, but he was still having a hard time feeling any stress about the situation. “Last warning, guys.”

“Hah! He’s warning us, Mitch—gah!” His words died in an awkward exclamation as Hector exploded with crimson light.

A Speed Boost was a hell of a thing—a very different experience from a Strength Boost. During the latter, an aura user experienced the general euphoric rush of aura, but there was also the physical swelling, the sense of power that came along with it. A Speed Boost affected a person’s mind as much as their body, though. Along with the exhilaration of aura, there was an almost hallucinogenic feeling that you were stepping outside of reality—that the world was moving along without you at a snail’s pace.

Hector darted forward and to his right—a normal quick movement to him. To the kid and the guy behind him, he was flying. Their reactions started out comical; the kid lurched back, windmilling one hand while he thrust his mono-blade at the empty air where he probably guessed Hector might be moving. He was way off.

The guy behind Hector cursed—a string of slow-motion expletives that would have made Hector laugh if they didn’t suddenly pick up in speed, “FFF…uuu…ck…in’ hell, son of a bitch! Fire your pulse, Tommy!” Something buzzed to life, and Hector got serious. It seemed the other guy had a speed boost of some kind; probably a wire-job. If Hector’s pathways could handle more aura, he’d be faster, but as it was, he couldn’t bank on that.

He’d already committed to the younger guy—Tommy, he supposed. Tommy’s ears might have registered some of the words the other guy shouted, but it would all be a rapid string of noise that his brain, moving at a normal processing speed, wouldn’t be able to comprehend. It didn’t matter, anyway; by the time he’d finished his first blink and his reflexive stab hit empty air, Hector was behind him, and his aura blade was sliding through his spine, right at the base of his neck.

During his fight with Frederick, Hector had used six aura for his boost, and Evie had promptly warned him he’d almost suffered aura overload. This time, considering he was also summoning his blade, he only put three aura into the boost. That meant that after he’d handled the unboosted bandit, the other was there, in his face, vibroblade humming as he slashed at Hector.

The guy was quick—probably slightly faster than Hector’s current boost—but Hector had a lot of experience fighting boosted; there was more to the art than just moving fast. You had to account for momentum; you had to understand that everything, from the tiny muscles around your eyes to the way the fluids in your body moved, would be out of whack. It took practice to even master breathing while under the effects of a speed boost. For Hector’s opponent, boosted by cybernetics, the effects would be even more pronounced.

Aura was almost elegant in comparison; when aura boosted a person, no matter the attribute, it was holistic. Every part of Hector was operating at a synchronous speed. The bandit, though, was at the mercy of the various components of his wire-job. If his muscles were boosted with synth nerves, but he had cybernetic parts—arms or legs, for instance—they might not be in lock-step. The doc who did his cognition boost might not be the same as the one who’d done his twitch muscles, and maybe the AI that was trying to put everything into sync wouldn’t handle it perfectly.

There were a million variables with a cybernetic speed boost, and the net result was that the longer a person ran a wire-job, the harder it was to function, and the greater the chance of a burnout. Considering all that, Hector knew he only had a handful of seconds to fight with his boost, but he doubted the bandit would last any longer. Besides, he meant to put him down before time was a factor.

He ducked back as the vibroblade slashed out again. It was a short weapon, maybe ten centimeters long. He answered the slash with one of his own, aiming for the guy’s wrist, knowing he’d pull back faster than the blade could get there. The thing was, the bandit wasn’t used to fighting aura blades. He angled his vibroblade to take the blow, a reflexive move that cost him everything.

Hector’s crimson, mirror-like blade hit the other man’s knife with a flash of crimson light, a puff of annihilated carbon, and then the bandit was holding a sparking stump.

“Fuck!” He stabbed his hand at his belt, reaching for something, but he was already shaking—his nerves were beginning to fry—and he missed his target. His thumb caught on the little black puck-shaped object, bending, and he cussed again, but only briefly; Hector’s blade found his chest, sinking to his knuckles into the poor bastard’s heart.

Hector let the blade go and spun, scanning the street. He didn’t see anything—no lurking bandits, at least. He wasn’t sure why he was thinking of them as bandits. Hadn’t they said they’d come for his head? Someone had paid them. What did that make them?

Killers.

Bright lights flared to life, and a vehicle pulled out of the shadows of a nearby alley. Hector scowled, squatting to pat his second victim’s belt, grasping ahold of the black puck. He didn’t know what it was, but he hoped it was a grenade or something. The vehicle came to a stop, headlights illuminating the scene of Hector’s battle.

A door opened and a familiar voice called out, “Don’t shoot, Boss.”

Hector scowled, standing. “Orin?”

“Yeah, just me and Demon.”

Hector grunted, squatting again. He didn’t want to linger, but he wasn’t about to leave any potentia behind. As he placed his hand on the dead assassin’s—he’d decided that’s what they were—chest, Orin kept talking:

“I wanted to jump into the fight, Boss, but Demon said no. Well, I thought that was bullshit, but you said I had to listen to him in situations like that.”

//3 potentia gathered. Potentia available: 4.//

“Lousy,” Hector spat to the side, then stood and walked over to the kid.

“Hey, sorry, but—”

“Not you. It’s fine. Demon was right.” Hector knelt beside the first assassin, placing his hand on his chest.

“Those guys followed you all the way from the bar. Well, maybe a block from the bar. They were on foot, and we didn’t see anyone else, but I mean, you know, we were ready just in case.”

Hot aura potentia rushed into Hector, sending tiny pink and yellow sparkles dancing across his vision as a comfortable, fuzzy, warm blanket settled over him. He shook the sensation off, blinking his eyes rapidly.

//13 potentia gathered. Potentia available: 17.//

“Not damn bad, kid,” Hector said, reaching out to touch the young would-be killer’s neck. There was a faint pulse. “Some tricks up your sleeve, huh? Should’ve invested in speed, or maybe you should’ve made your move while I was more distracted.”

Maybe he’ll live, maybe he won’t.

//Interesting.//

Don’t start, Evie.

He picked up the kid’s mono-blade and then checked his belt. Sure enough, there was another black puck there. The other guy had said something about a “pulse,” so Hector had a feeling the devices might produce some kind of area stun-field.

He carried the devices and the mono-blade over to the cab where Orin and Demon waited. “Got you a new knife, boys. You’ll have to wrestle to see who gets it.”

###

Iris tapped her crystal-glass display, zooming in on the drone’s feed. “You’re seeing this?”

Her father’s voice came through her ear, crystal clear despite his current location somewhere in orbit. “I am.”

“It’s like you said.” Iris rotated the feed, providing a clear view of Hector’s empty hand as sparkling pink mist flowed into his palm. The drone had an extremely expensive scanner array that detected aura concentrations. “He’s scraping—without a scraper.”

“Oh, he has a scraper; it’s just part of his aura system.”

“So—at least A-grade?”

Her father didn’t answer right away. She glanced in the call window and saw his expression. She thought he’d be pleased, but he looked pensive—worried.

“Father?”

“We have to be careful with this one. Any chance he’ll find out you sent those two to test him?”

Iris shook her head. “None. They were thugs, Father. I stayed in the car, but they almost robbed poor Hermes when he hired them.”

Her father’s frown didn’t fade. “Send Hermes back to Redwick—just in case. I’ll send you more staff.”

“I’ll have him on the first train—”

“Send him now. Hire him a car to Hudson. He can get the train from there. I want him out of that town.”

Iris knew her father was being paranoid, but she also knew that he was deadly serious and that any argument would be very ill-received while he was in that mood. “Of course.”

“Good. This is good information, Iris. I’m pleased. Keep a healthy distance. Ensure you’re actually recruiting; if he gets wind of you there, I want your story to hold up.”

Iris frowned; she wanted to please her father, but she also expected a bit more trust. “I have five interviews tomorrow.”

Her father nodded, and she could see he was beginning to relax; he’d processed the new information and now, in the back of his mind, he was working the new variables into his plans. “Good. We’ll speak soon, but I should be sleeping. ‘Morning’ is in three hours for me.”

“Goodnight, then.” Iris beamed, but he was already looking away, and the call window went dark.

She sighed and expanded the window with the drone’s feed again. Hector was getting into a cab with his two bodyguards—not that he’d needed them. Sighing, she touched the recall command on the drone; like her father said, there was no point taking any risks. Hector seemed to have a sixth sense for being watched, and she certainly didn’t want to wind up on the wrong side of that angry glare.