Nightfall Read online

  Tanya overlaps the source of Eleanor’s comm to the schematics of the World Security Center we are flying toward. The signal comes from the lower part of the building, on the fifty-third floor.

  “What do you want to do, Cole?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I want; we go to the third floor like we planned where we know from our pre-jump mission data that is where the bomb should be. Ahmed is clearly trying to get me to come to a higher floor in an attempt to divert me from my main objective.”

  “Agreed. He is using her to divert your attention. I’m sorry your friend is being used against you. It must be painful and frustrating to be in that position.”

  Tell me about it…

  My heart is telling me to save my friend while my brain tells me I can’t let her pain be a reason to change tactics and risk failing the primary objective. Frustration doesn’t even start to cover how I feel right now.

  “If we get a shot, we kill the sucker. You hear me, Tanya? In fact, I want you to confirm a priority one order right now.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If I’m unable or unwilling to kill that asshole, for whatever reason, but you can override me and do it, I want you to take over and make sure he dies.”

  She doesn’t answer right away.

  “Promise me, Tanya!” I insist.

  “What if that conflicts with another one of your wishes, like saving Eleanor? What if he uses her as a shield or a means to escape?”

  “That’s why I’m giving you this order now because I can’t predict what he might do, and I don’t want any unforeseen emotional burst to interfere with finally getting rid of Ahmed Al’Hasi. That son of a bitch is torturing my friend and partner, and he’s turned her comm on so I can listen to her suffer. He wants me to be emotionally compromised. We can’t let him use her this way. God knows what else he is willing to do to stop me from putting a round between his fecking eyes.”

  “Alright then, but—tell me the truth, Cole: aren’t you already compromised as we speak?”

  “I sure hope not, or this might very well turn out to be our last rodeo together.”

  “That’s a scary thought. Your vitals tell another tale.”

  “Then I’ll depend on you to try to compensate with the right cocktail of drugs. Turn the whole emotional side of my brain off if you feel you have to.”

  “Are you sure, Cole? Perhaps your anger, if channeled correctly, could be of use. You said so yourself earlier on.”

  “I’m not telling you to do it now; just use your best judgment if you feel it’s needed. But if—No!” I correct myself. “Not if. When the time comes, make sure he gets what he deserves, no matter how I feel in that moment, even if I tell you otherwise.”

  “Very well, Cole. Priority one order acknowledged. Please lock in the order with your password.”

  “Agent Cole Seeker, Tango Alpha Seven Three Gamma Delta Tango Seven. No overrides.”

  “Order locked in; overriding of order disabled.”

  I have little doubt that with this order I probably forfeited Eleanor’s life for good.

  Two

  Mission completion time: T minus 83 minutes

  It doesn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan. Four klicks before arriving at ground zero, three lightly armored fighters and a pair of jet bikes greet us.

  They open fire the second they come within firing range. I artificially boost my adrenaline levels so I can pilot not only the ship with my mind but also a few of the drones that are already in range.

  Three missiles are on their way to my ship. I deploy countermeasures before breaking hard right. All bogeys follow me and try to reacquire a missile lock, but I don’t let them.

  I go evasive and use the drones to pound on their shields, focusing on one target at a time. The drones’ heavy rate of fire brings the shields of the current target to a satisfying low level. I swivel the ship around, lock onto its center, and add my own plasma guns to the mix. The shields are down in less than a second.

  Multiple blaster fire impacts with my frontal shields as I keep pounding on the target, but already my guns are taking chunks of its hull away. I lock a missile and fire. It screams through the air and hits its mark dead center. The ship explodes in a huge fiery cloud.

  Another two enemy missiles are on their way. I decide to hold off on my countermeasures this time, and instead, I change vector, activate my afterburners, and make a run for it.

  I direct the drones toward my next target, and they take a position on that tango’s six, pounding its rear shields while I vector back toward it, with two missiles in tow.

  The fighter tries to go evasive and avoid the drone fire, which gives me the opportunity to approach it from the side and veer past it at the last moment. Right after that, I turn my engines off. The missiles acquire my target’s engine instead, and they send it and its pilot straight to hell.

  “Allahu Wakbar, motherfecker!” I exclaim.

  I re-engage my engines and start firing at another missile launched from an enemy jet bike on an approaching vector.

  I blow the missile off with plasma fire and decide to play a game of chicken with the incoming bike, now raining blaster fire on me. It does drop my frontal shields somehow, but I’m redirecting power from other systems to compensate.

  Let’s see how big if at all, these assholes’ balls are.

  I lock onto the bike and score a handful of plasma shots of my own lowering its shields significantly.

  It doesn’t seem to veer away, which surprises me. Meanwhile, the other bike and the remaining fighter are positioning themselves on my six, raining blaster fire toward my engine pipes. I use my drones as decoys, and they return fire, providing me with the necessary cover and time I need to get rid of the oncoming bike.

  Even if the approaching bike doesn’t veer away at the last moment, both my shields and armor are so much stronger that I will cut through it like paper. I risk damaging systems in case of a direct impact at these velocities, but I’m willing to take that chance. The real question is: Is he?

  I redirect some of the life support and inertial dampeners’ power to the maneuvering thrusters and shields. Time seems to slow down when we’re only a few meters away from one another.

  Eventually, I can see the pilot’s eyes, and that’s when I see him flinch. He veers upward at the last moment, but I respond in kind by rotating my craft ninety degrees. The tip of my wing slices through the lower half of the jet bike with a grinding metal screech. A second later the bike explodes in the purple night sky.

  “A for effort; F for execution,” I say out loud.

  Two more bogeys to deal with, and time is short, so I decide I’ve had enough fun. I need to get moving and get to the nuke now. Both targets on my tail are firing everything they’ve got at my starfighter. I think my last move spooked them. I release countermeasures to deal with the incoming missiles as I go evasive. They’re pretty decent pilots, and they keep up with me. That’s until I hit the brakes hard, inverting my thrusters and using in-atmosphere airbrake flaps all at once.

  Having forgotten to reassign power to my dampening field generators from earlier, I take a serious amount of Gs during the maneuver, but nothing that my augments, which are closely monitored and optimized by Tanya, can’t compensate for in real time.

  They shoot past me, and before they can react to have switched from predator to prey position, I rain down plasma fire on the bike first, finishing it off with a single missile. It partially explodes and goes into a wild, uncontrollable spin, colliding with the fighter next to it.

  The fighter veers hard to port and tries to make a run for it. I’m in a hurry so for a split second I evaluate the possibility of letting it go. But I decide against it. None of these feckers will survive today, not if I can help it.

  It’s rather a waste, but since more drones are on the way, I simply use the nearest one, Drone Three, to shoot at the already compromised fighter while I set it on a collision course. The fighter never
sees it coming, and both target ship and drone explode into a thousand pieces upon impact.

  “Having fun?” Tanya coos.

  “I wouldn’t go that far; just another day’s work at Rewind.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to, Cole? You and I both know you live for this shit.”

  “Alright then, I’ll plead guilty on that one.”

  I am less than a minute away from ground zero. I scan the World Security Center but get nothing. Soon, the turrets on the roof of the building detect my ship and begin to have a field day shooting at me. I evade the onslaught and lock on all the turrets as I’m approaching from the side of the building. Once I hear the lock tones, I fire six missiles simultaneously. Four of them find their target while two of them are destroyed by turret fire. I send Drone Four and the newly arrived Drone Five to dispatch the last two turrets while I make my landing approach.

  I’m hovering my ship in front of the building’s entrance, trying to get a visual on whatever welcoming party Ahmed has cooked up for me. But the smart-plexi-solar shading is activated to maximum, and I can’t get the visual data I require. Neither can I get any scan data. Ahmed has erected the mother of all jamming fields around the building.

  Looks like I’m going to have to go the rest of the way on foot. I would blast the shit out of the entrance, but until I get a visual on the nuke, I can’t take that risk. I let my starfighter hover on autopilot just above the ground. I’m still mentally linked to it, though I have no idea if that link will hold once I’m inside the building. I will probably need to find the source of the jamming and get rid of it. I redirect power to my ship’s transmitter to boost the signal. Hopefully, that will allow me control while I’m only a few hundred yards away from it.

  The trap under the cockpit opens, and I don’t wait for the dampening field to smoothly carry me down, so the moment it’s open, I jump through it. Tanya takes control of the drones and sends the liquid metal appendages from the cargo hold to rejoin me. They interlock with my armor, merging at key points like shoulders, elbows, knees, ankles, belt, and the last one fuses on the back of my neck. That one will allow me to bring up a helmet if needed.

  I’ve only used the nano-appendages in simulated combat against drone soldiers. They are the latest and newest out of the R&D, and they’re an incredibly versatile and powerful augment, one that doesn’t even need to be installed inside my body. Each one is a liquid metal nano-plasm that reacts to my thoughts and creates whatever matter I imagine: weapons, armor, anything. Whatever I think up, the nano-plasm will create it in the physical world at incredible materialization speeds.

  We’ve had some quirks while testing it and sometimes the nano-plasm doesn’t keep molecular cohesion as expected. Actually, I’ve been wounded a couple of times. So using it is definitely a gamble, but seeing how badly things went today, and perhaps even in a previous timeline, I’m willing to take a little risk to reach mission success. The advantage in terms of tactical choice they give me can’t be understated enough.

  My HUD flicks, and Vassiliki’s face appears once more, her eyes alight with disapproval.

  I keep telling myself that it’s Ahmed screwing with me, but I feel cold ice travel down my spine, nonetheless.

  “You’re lost, my love. You need to open your eyes, to see the world for what it really is. A prison.”

  “Tanya, tell me you’re seeing and hearing her?”

  “Is it happening now, Cole? Nope, I don’t detect anything. Are you sure she is not stress-induced?”

  Yeah, I’ve had stress before, loads of it, in fact. This isn’t it.

  “Look beyond what your senses tell you, Cole,” says Vassiliki.

  I wish I knew what the feck she wants from me, be it real or me losing my mind. I know this world isn’t perfect. It’s pretty fecked up; on that we can agree. And there are no signs of it getting better over time; but then again, what am I supposed to do about it? I’m the guy you call when someone does something horrible, and I’m here to make sure it doesn’t happen again, thanks to the short time travel jumps. If this version of Vassiliki thinks I’m anything else, she’ll be sorely disappointed.

  That’s when I realize I’m arguing with myself, trying to justify my actions, my way of life, or simply having a field day talking with my subconscious fears. Do I really know which is the case? No. Does it affect me? Hell yes, it does. I have a mission to fulfill with too many lives hanging in the balance. Right now that’s all that has to matter. I’ll have plenty of time to reflect on all of this tomorrow.

  “Tanya, give whatever cocktail of drugs you think is necessary to reduce my stress and anxiety levels. Don’t turn me into a vegetable, please. I need my reflexes keen and my mind functioning at peak capacity, but I need to stop thinking about what’s morally good or bad right now. Fecking Ahmed. He’s finally found a successful way to screw with me. If anything was to going work to compromise me emotionally, visions of my dead wife certainly do the trick.”

  “I do not detect any wireless transmission directed toward us, but with the strong jamming field nearby, perhaps my own sensors are affected. As requested, I’m dosing you with drugs.”

  It doesn’t take long for me to feel my emotions fade to the back of my mind. They’re not fully gone, but they’re more like echoes now, mere shadows of what I was feeling most of the day until now. I need to focus on the mission and only the mission.

  I go by the main entrance in stealth mode, deploy nano-moldable C-4, and install it on the smart-plexi as easily as Plasticine. I then retreat to the right side of the entrance and apply plexi-eating acid on another slab of the smart-plexi. I make a door shape with the acid. If there is a welcoming committee in the main hall of the building, which I have little doubts about, I’ll need a little distraction.

  I use my holo-ghost and send it to stand where I’m about to blow a hole with the C-4. I mentally detonate the charge when the acid completes its silent job on my side of things.

  “Good luck, Cole,” says Tanya.

  “To the both of us. We can’t feck this up!”

  “No, we can’t.”

  The explosion is loud, the ground under my feet trembles and chunks of melting smart-plexi are thrown into the air toward the holo-ghost. Alarms start wailing and even before I’m ready to enter the building’s hall I see a barrage of blaster fire and rockets flying past the truck-sized hole my C-4 created. My ghost is on autopilot, feinting to take cover and returning fire, providing me with the distraction I need to enter undetected and flank the welcoming committee.

  I scan the inside to check if my stunt has compromised the jamming field. Not so much. I do get some data overlapping on my HUD, but it’s mostly garbled and not actionable data.

  “Tanya, your mission, when we’re inside, is to pinpoint the location of that jamming field. It’s our first target. Without it we’re blind.”

  “Agreed and acknowledged.”

  I take a deep breath; now the shit really hits the fan. I kick the window with the door-sized shape I made with acid, and I enter the fold. To say that it is chaos inside the hall would be an understatement. Clearly, Ahmed doesn’t want me past this location. There are at least twenty foot soldiers, a large combat mech, and two latest-generation Wraith Sentries.

  These will be the toughest ones; their armor and AI matrix make them the trickiest of enemies. Under normal circumstances, I would go for them first, but I need to thin the herd. I take both my rifle blasters and set the firing mode to concussive blasts. I will reveal my position this way, but I need to get rid of as many soldiers as I can in the shortest amount of time.

  “Tanya, please provide a barrage of cover fire on my mark from the drones and my fighter outside.”

  “Roger that, Cole. Ready when you are.”

  I need to be mindful of the mech, though right now he seems more interested in my ghost decoy. I’m not a target yet because I’m invisible at the moment but as soon as I start shooting, things won’t be that simple. I take a
second or two to acquire my first targets. I see a cluster of four soldiers advancing toward the entrance as they fire; they’ll be easy pickings, so I decide to go with them first. Then I’ll have to deal with the three soldiers that are nearest to me. I move so I’m in the right position to deal with their reactions to what happens next.

  I fire both my rifles set in concussive ammo rounds and open up on the cluster of soldiers. They are hit and don’t have time to react. It’s a bloodbath, the multiple successive explosives ammo rips their limbs apart, and it takes only a second for what’s left of their four bodies to pile up on the white marble floor. It’s now stained with spray and thick puddles of blood.

  The three soldiers nearest to me turn around. I switch my right rifle to widespread ammo similar to a shotgun blast as I run toward the nearest of them. He is looking at me, but he’s not fast enough. I put the barrel of my rifle right in front of his head and blow his brains out.

  The other two frantically shoot in my direction, but none of them precisely, as I roll on the ground to avoid their fire. When I end my roll, I line up my next shot and set the weapon into precision-blaster mode. I burn a hole between another soldier’s eyes. A look of shock is locked onto his face as he collapses to the floor.

  The third and last soldier in my immediate vicinity panics and throws a grenade. I barely have time to kick it back toward him. When it blows, I use both my arms to protect my face. The blast sends me crashing and skidding on the marble floor. The impact with my shields reveals my position, and I’m getting hammered by the third soldier.

  I jump out of the way and find cover behind a wooden desk. It gets pulverized and the wood splinters. He shouts something in Arabic.

  “The infidel is here!”

  That’s it for the element of surprise. I lurch out of cover and spray him with blaster fire. His armor takes most of it but one shot blows his ear off and another penetrates his neck. He drops his blaster rifle and holds his hand to the wound as he tries to escape and take cover. I have no intention of letting him go, so I grab a throwing blade from my thigh and throw it at his head. It enters his skull from the side, and he falls to the floor, his entire body jerking.