Chapter 132: Bad Idea

The wind came across the tenth floor of a building nobody had finished, carrying concrete dust and a cold that would have gone straight through my old jacket, and the snow it brought with it died on the rebar without ever settling.

Nia lay flat beside me at the edge with the SR-25 on its bipod and her eye on the scope, wrapped in the complete stillness she puts on for this kind of work, while Tikki loafed tucked into the front of her jacket with only his ears showing over the zipper.

I crouched next to her with the shield strapped to my left arm, the M110A2 cinched tight across my back, wearing an expression she refused to look at.

"You’re making the face," she said, without moving her eye off the scope.

"I’m not."

"Nikki... I can feel it from here."

Below us, the under-construction residential complex spread out in half-poured concrete and steel, three towers in three different stages of unfinished, with a crane standing between ours and the next one over, its long arm swung out across the gap, and beyond that the Ghostbird was parked on the flattest stretch the System could find, surrounded by four men.

Two stood guard with rifles at the low ready while two practically crawled over the airframe, one in the cockpit and one hunched at an open panel, while the two helicopters that had brought them were nowhere over the site at all, circling wide somewhere east where their noise pulled every infected within earshot away from the ground team while keeping the guns close enough to matter.

Fourteen men in total. Two pilots and a gunner per bird made six in the air, which left eight on the ground, four on the pad, and four more inside the tower across from us, the one that had a frame and floors and no walls, working it level by level in a stack, two shotguns and two DMRs, clearing stairwells and open floors.

[They’re sweeping for the supposed pilot... After all, a pilot’s worth more than the helicopter now, and they want to know what one was doing here.]

And they knew to look here because of yesterday, because those drones had flown a camera grid across half the city, and somewhere in that footage a grey NH90 had been sitting on a construction site with nobody around it, which is the fastest way there is to make fourteen men and two birds appear.

[So that part’s on me...]

-Ding!

{

Status...

Ghostbird: Secure.

Access attempts: 34.

Successful: 0.

Note: Operator two has begun striking the console.

}

"The birds are yours the second it starts," I said, low. "Force them down if you can. I want those airframes."

"And you’re taking the sweep team with a frisbee?"

"I’m taking the sweep team with a frisbee."

The stack of men came up the open stairwell onto the eighth floor and fanned out with their backs to the gap, and my eyes went to the crane’s arm hanging square across the space between their building and mine, twenty-odd meters out and a few meters up, and I felt the grin arrive on my face before I had decided anything.

Standing up, I gave myself a little stretch, and dashed, and the edge of the roof came at me in four strides while the whole world slowed down to let me look at it, and then my boot hit the lip, and I jumped.

Ten meters of open air went under me in one long float, wind screaming in the buds, the eighth floor of the far tower coming up short by a distance my body had already measured and found wanting, and my right hand was already holding the Grapple Gun.

And I put the hook into the crane’s arm without ever really aiming, because aiming is for people whose brains still run at the human speed.

-Chak-! -Krnk-!

The cable snapped taut and yanked, and the pull took me from falling to rising in one hard jerk through both shoulders, a boost off nothing, a second jump in the middle of the first one, and at the top of it, weightless, with the launcher already gone back into the grid, and with the shield coiled for a backhanded throw, I spun.

One full turn, the whole body winding up around the throw, and I let it go at the leading man’s head.

-Woosh-!

He was looking at the stairwell, and he never got to look anywhere else.

-Thak-!

-Ding!

His helmet took the full might of the spin and the throw, and the man dropped straight down without a step as though struck by lightning, while the system’s Ding went off in my head. I didn’t even need to look to know what it was about.

But the shield didn’t stop at his helmet.

-Thak-!-Thak-!-Thak-!

It came off him at an angle I had already done the math on before it left my hand, into the second man’s face, off that into the third’s, off that into the fourth’s, each hit softer than the last as the disc bled its speed across three skulls, and all three of them staggered with their hands coming up to heads that had just been rung, every one of them yelping.

[Angles off armor, mass on a spin, three faces in a row... I could see the whole line before I threw. That’s new.]

I came down on the concrete feet first and rolled once to eat the rest of the fall, and I was straightening my knees when the shield came back at me off the last man’s helmet, spinning, and I plucked it out of the air by the rim, threw it again at blurring speed, at the nearest of the three, who was still swaying with a hand pressed to his face.

-Thak-! -Ding!

His head went back like it had been hit with a hammer, the whole man leaving his feet and folding over backward, while the shield kept going off his helmet into the next two, ringing both of them a second time before it went spinning high into the air.

I was already moving before it came off that first helmet, four strides across the open floor, and I caught it out of its spin with my left hand in one clean grip, planted, and put a straight kick into the chest of the second-to-last man with every bit of the run behind it.

And he left the floor entirely, as though hit by a truck, flying across ten meters in the air before he hit a stack of rebar cages hard enough to rattle every bar in them, and-

-Ding!

That left the last one standing by the thick concrete column at the building’s core with blood sheeting down his face from the ricochets. He had come back to himself faster than the others, with his shotgun already up.

-BOOM-!

I got the shield up in front of my face and chest before the muzzle finished flashing, and the buckshot hit the shield before turning into sparks, the whole pattern of it at once, while a few pellets that spalled off the rim sang past my ear close enough to feel, and I didn’t flinch, and I didn’t stop, and I was already running at him behind the shield as though I didn’t even feel the buckshot.

-Bash-!

I bashed into him like a charging bull, shield first, and drove him the last half meter into the column with the shield between us, and the air went out of him in one long groan against the concrete.

The shotgun was pinned between us with its sling still around his neck and shoulder, and I needed it gone, so I got my right hand on the barrel, kept him bracketed between the column and the shield, and yanked, and the sling held for maybe half a second before snapping.

The man groaned louder as it bit through his collar on its way to breaking, and I tossed the gun away behind me across the floor before easing the shield off him just enough to give myself room, and shoving a short jab into the center of his chest plate.

I felt the ribs go under it from just that, the crack coming straight up my arm through the glove, and he slid down the column to the concrete, and his heels drummed on the floor for a few seconds as he went into cardiac arrest before finally going limp.

I stood there behind the shield and watched him go until-

-Ding!

That’s when rotors came back over the site, both birds turning in from the east, hard and low, and the whine of them climbed up through the concrete under my boots.

[The other four must’ve alerted them...]

"Nia, you’re up," I said into the buds. "Try not to damage the birds too much... I’ll take the guys on the ground."

"Roger..." Her voice came back flat and working. "Heads up... The other four are heading for your building... They heard the shots... Told you the shield was a bad idea. The rifle would’ve done all four from up here without a sound, and you’d still be sitting next to me."

"But it sure was fun..." I said, and I could hear my own grin in it.