Kill switch the sommerfe.., p.31
Kill, Switch: The Sommerfeld Experiment #4, page 31
“Are you certain you’ll be okay?” Adam asked, the concern in his voice brought a lump into Joshua’s throat. Sure, Kevin and Shelby expressed concern, but for Adam to place complete trust in him was something else, and it ratcheted up his determination.
“I can’t promise anything, but you’ll have the holo-recording if something happens to me.”
They shook again, Tova hugged him, and Wyatt’s family filed out of the room. When they had gone, Kevin sidled up. He looked rattled, but he composed his shit together pretty fast. Maybe he was getting used to this.
“I’ve been working on a new suit with some options I think you’re going to like.”
“There’s another suit?”
“Z, Z, Z,” Kevin said. “There is always going to be another suit. Right this way to my lair.”
44 – You Had One Job
Graves waited for the call that would confirm Wyatt DeLuca and his cousins were dead. He paced nervously back and forth in an elegantly appointed room in Ilario’s apartment. Ilario sat in the other room with a girl on his lap and empty flash pneumojectors on a marble-topped coffee table. He could hear the girl giggling.
He hoped Ilario kept this one alive. Disposing of his girlfriends’ bodies was getting tiresome.
His watchcom rang and he answered it, expecting he’d need to transfer the rest of the money for the job.
“I’ll have the credits—”
“They are dead,” said a voice through a distorter.
“Good, good. I’ll transfer the credits—”
“No, the team is dead.”
“They… what?” Graves asked dumbly.
Graves glanced in the room where Ilario sat fondling the girl whose dress was pushed halfway down her waist, and then walked farther away. He didn’t want to deal with Ilario hearing this until he could explain it.
“What the fuck happened?” he stressed in a hushed tone. “I sent you to a dinner party to take out six soft targets. I gave you the specs for the security system, plans of the house layout—”
“The house layout and the specs for the security system were correct, although the security tech nearly had our guy. The house infiltration went as planned, but someone there took them all out. We have a brief conversation with one of the men before he died. It was one person.”
“One person?”
“And they claimed that person was invisible.”
“That’s fucking ridiculous!”
Words bounced around nonsensically in Graves’s head as he attempted to understand what his contact was talking about. Wyatt couldn’t have called anyone in to help that fast. His bodyguards were good, but not better than Graves’ men. And no one could be invisible. His men were professional assassins. They didn’t miss. Ever.
“What would you like me to do?”
Graves muffled a sigh. His reputation, buoyed by the Silent Runners, kept most people in line. “Have you been able to find Matteo DeLuca?”
“We are closing in on a location.”
“Do you have eyes on the DeLuca siblings and Wyatt?”
“Wyatt DeLuca is still inside the house. It’ll be difficult to pry him out. We have focused our efforts on the siblings. Do you want us to take them?”
“Wait and watch until they relax and think they’re safe. Then take the low-hanging fruit. When we have one, it will be easy to convince the others to give up.”
“We still need to contend with this new player. We assume they’re still in Wyatt DeLuca’s residence. The new player’s proficiency adds a layer of difficulty. It will take my men some time to research who it is we are up against. Research and observation are what makes us an effective team.” Silence for a moment. Graves could hear the person on the other end breathing softly. “My fee has doubled.”
Graves knew he would need to go back to Slobodan to get the extra money, but he knew the man would pay. The mechs were worth millions more than double payments for the DeLuca brats. “I can transfer half of the price now.”
“I will be in contact.”
The comm ended.
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Graves screamed. He stormed into the room where Ilario sat, hauled the woman off the younger man’s lap, and shoved her toward the door. She stumbled in ridiculously high-heeled shoes and fell to the floor. “Get out! Out the fuck out of here!”
She squeaked and scrambled to her feet, pulling up her dress and running away awkwardly. Graves realized he unintentionally might have saved her life.
“What the fuck!” Ilario shouted and sprang to his feet, glancing after the girl and attempting to tuck away an erection. He tilted his head back to look up at the taller man. Anger made the handsome man’s face an ugly, twisted mask. “What the fuck is your problem? Couldn’t you see something was happening here?”
“The team I sent to kill your brother, sister, and cousin are dead. They went to the house, and someone there killed all of them. All of them! You had one fucking job, Ilario, one.” Graves held up a finger. “You were to tell me who would be at the dinner party. That was it. That’s all you had to do, and you couldn’t even do that!”
“What the fuck are you talking about!? There’s no one there but Wyatt and my cousins. Nicolo is good, but he couldn’t take down a Silent Runner team. Leon Bianchi maybe could take down one, but he’s a fucking old geezer. And that butch bitch Wyatt hired… who the hell knows, but I doubt she killed them. And if that old geezer could take down your fucking fancy-ass assassin team, then maybe they’re overrated.”
Enraged, Graves didn’t think about his next action until after it happened. He backhanded Ilario.
The young man flailed backward, then fell on his ass, hand to bleeding mouth. “You motherfucker!” He struggled to rise.
Graves pulled a small .22 he kept at the back of his trouser waistband and pointed it at Ilario. “If you would keep your fucking dick in your pants and pay attention, you might have picked up on something when you went to his party.”
“I… I swear to you, I didn’t see shit. Nicolo threw me out.” Ilario held up his hands. “Can I fucking zip my goddamn pants?”
Graves’s finger tightened on the trigger. It would be so easy to get rid of this parasite. “My contacts have doubled their fee. Told me we didn’t give them complete information.”
“This is their fuckup. I told you everything I know. And man, you’ve fucked up my high and my goddamn night.” He gestured toward the door where the young woman had disappeared sobbing.
“And another thing,” Graves waved the gun at the younger man, satisfied to see the fear in his eyes. Ilario was a bully, but there were always bigger bullies. “Kill another girl, I’ll fucking kill you myself.”
“What do you care about a fucking whore?” Ilario muttered, pouted, and rose to his feet, zipping up his pants.
The guy was a fucking imbecile.
“Whore or not, some of them have family looking for them. All someone needs to do is put you as a missing girl’s last contact. We don’t need cops sniffing around. We have work to do; get your head clear.” Graves gathered up the remaining flash pneumojectors. “After we’re done with this, and we have the mechs, you can flash your fucking head into orbit for all I care. Until then, no more girls, no more drugs.”
Graves didn’t wait for Ilario to respond. He strode off and threw the pneumojectors into a trash mech and hit the auto-crush button, listening to the pop of the pneumojectors.
That motherfucker was going to screw this all up.
After they had the mechs, Ilario would become a middleman they didn’t need.
Maybe then Slobodan would give the word to eliminate him. At least Matteo was predictable.
45 – RTFM
(Read The Fucking Manual)
While Shelby spent the next day rebuilding the house’s security system, and Kevin worked on the suit and the Vipers, Nicolo focused on the DeLuca cousins, managing security details and moving them to safe locations where Graves wouldn’t think to look for them.
Relieved that these details could be trusted to Nicolo to supervise, Joshua focused what little time he had on the upcoming mission. A quick visit to Theandil’s Virtual castle proved a smart move. Wyatt was a font of information.
“Remember how the DeLuca mechs turned on Buchanan?” Wyatt said with a sly grin. “Those are backdoor codes. So let me tell you about these backdoor codes.”
That evening, Joshua crouched in the deep shadows of a building opposite the massive DeLuca warehouse a few blocks from Naples Harbor in Italy.
Two mind-linked Vipers coated with the invisible metamaterial sat in a dual shoulder holster Kevin had created for the stealth suit, giving the suit much-needed offensive options. The addition of a second sheet of woven graphene provided another layer of bulletproofing. The suit’s battery life, although extended by 20%, was still a work in progress.
A portion of the battery had been utilized slipping out of his skypalace to LoSan airport, assuming that Graves’s men might still be watching. A supersonic jet rented under an assumed name got him to Naples in five hours.
Kevin monitored the suit’s integrity from the security vault at Joshua’s skypalace with Shelby working comms and security.
As Wyatt DeLuca, he could walk into the warehouse, but it would log in his name and time of arrival. Not to mention he’d probably be surrounded by Graves’s goons before he moved a dozen steps. Shelby was currently working to circumvent the warehouse security. As a former defense engineer, Kevin had a good handle on the security mechs Joshua would likely encounter in the warehouse, as well as knowing the schematics to the battle mechs. That, along with Wyatt’s inside knowledge, Joshua figured he’d have this mission in the bag in an hour.
A simple in and out.
The HUD display in the Maelstrom stealth suit read 22:40.
“Shelby, give me an update. I have an hour to get in there and stop these mechs from going out the door.”
“It wouldn’t be DeLuca if they didn’t have excellent security. I need another few minutes.”
In the distance, Joshua heard the hissing and rattling sounds of warehouse doors sliding open. Then, one of the largest freighters Joshua had ever seen dropped down out of the sky, landing lights blinking along its gunmetal-gray exterior. Six massive rotors swiveled downward, pushing down swirling gusts of air as it landed.
“A huge freighter for the mechs just landed. Never seen anything like it.” Joshua described it. “Sending drones. You should be getting images in a few.”
Joshua detached two fist-sized drones from the suit and deployed their stealth capabilities. They sped off toward the massive transport, giving him eyes on the tarmac area. The stealth drones meant more drain on the suit’s limited battery life, the only upside being they required less power than the suit’s stealth.
“I see it. That’s a Minotaur Class D heavy freighter,” Kevin responded. “It’s the only freighter with the capability of carrying those battlemechs. Man, they are so cool. I wish I was there… that is, maybe under different circumstances.”
Joshua had only seen them in images, and Kevin was right; they were impressive.
“Shelby, I think the timetable has been accelerated. I need a way in now.” So much for the easy in and out.
“Okay… bad news is, I can’t kill the security around the building’s perimeter. I can’t even get into it. Probably onsite only with biometric recognition. Good news is, there’s an employee door to the west side that will remain open for as long as I can keep it, but this security is fighting me.”
Earlier, she had uploaded the layout of the warehouse to the suit’s memory. Joshua brought up the holographic images, and rotated it around to where a door blinked red in his HUD.
“I see it.”
“Z, you should have the schematics for the battlemechs, too, with kill switches marked in green. Unless you can find the controller deck and the command wafer, it’ll be a two-step process. You’ll enter the backdoor code Wyatt 1.0 gave you manually on each one, followed by pressing the sensor to change the code. After the digital readout blinks twice, you enter a second code, whatever you want. The new code will make them inoperable to any mech technician even if they have a calibrated deck.”
“What if I can get the deck and the wafer?”
“That would be better. You’ll use the same code, but just entered once instead of twenty times. Look for a person with a holotablet, except a little thicker. That’s your controller deck. The command wafer will be flat, about the size of a business card. There’s a slot on the top of the deck for the wafer.”
Joshua switched on a micro-camera in the helmet’s HUD.
“We’re receiving,” Shelby said. “I see where you are. Head to your two o’clock.”
“Okay, going in.”
Switching the suit into stealth, Joshua darted across a mostly-vacant groundcar and skycar parking lot bordered by plastic hedges—always green no matter the season—and manufactured rocks. He followed a zigzagging path Shelby uploaded to help him avoid security detection. A door on the side of the building clicked open, and he slipped inside.
A line of back-to-back cubicle workspaces stretched across the inner area, while doors along the walls lead to offices. Computer consoles blinked and hummed. A small cleaner drone, about the size of Joshua’s hand, buzzed like a dragonfly as it flew from cubical to cubical, cleaning, and disinfecting electronics, Virtual half-helmets, and system goggles.
Joshua exited stealth to preserve the suit’s battery.
“Beyond the office is the warehouse patrolled by defense mechs. You’ll have to avoid them, so I’m uploading the patrol patterns I just swiped from the warehouse system. One thing about mechs is, they’re predictable and don’t take smoke breaks.”
To Joshua’s right, the door clicked open.
“Go now. Re-alarming in five… four… three…”
Joshua hit stealth, dodge rolled through the open door, and came up on one knee, staying low and still for a few breaths to gather information on his surroundings. The door behind him slammed closed, and its heavy locking mechanism slid back into place with a heavy thunk.
He was in an immense open warehouse area. Wide, tall double doors to the north were rolled open, and the mechs lined up in two rows of five. A dozen guards in drab green, unmarked uniforms walked back and forth near them, Sobek assault rifles tucked in their arms, fingers laid to the side of the auto-fire sensors. Another man, short, somewhat chubby, and not carrying, caught Joshua’s attention. He paced up and down the row of mechs while typing something into a device. He sent one of the drones for a closer look.
“Do you see this, Kev?”
“That’s the mech technician. Odd that’s there’s only one. Can you focus on what’s in his hand?” Kevin asked.
Joshua instructed one of the stealthed drones to hover over the man’s shoulder. The fist-sized drone took an image that Joshua downloaded to Shelby and Kevin.
“That square thing he has under his arm is the controller deck. The command wafer is in his shirt pocket.”
To Joshua’s left, the outline of a security mech rippled in dull blue waves inside his helm. He checked the patrol pattern Shelby had sent him. It was off course; perhaps hearing the door close had caught its attention.
Joshua crouch-ran away from the mech. A row of what appeared to be smaller defense mechs, probably awaiting shipment, provided cover. He huddled between articulated legs, and waited.
The mech trundled up to the door. About four feet tall, the mech was lozenge-shaped. Sensors strobed around its rectangular black plastiglass head, and it moved on stumpy articulated legs. A sensor on an articulated stalk unfurled from a compartment in its chest that passed a red beam of light over the sensor mounted on the wall next to the door.
“Those are M40def models. They look harmless but they can be kitted out with any configuration of bad things, like laser nets and stun batons, even ARX-10s,” Kevin said. “Avoid them.”
“It’s accessing the entry logs. These things are smart. It stopped where I blanked your entry.” Shelby cat-hissed. “Go away, you stupid mech. Yeah, well this sucks. I think you need to move.”
The M40def started shrieking a warning.
“It’s sending an alert to the other mechs that it’s detected a possible intruder,” Kevin said.
Joshua darted from under the mechs’ line of sight, keeping them between him and the M40def, but in plain sight of the guards watching the battlemechs. And the line had started to move, the huge mechs marching forward up the ramp into the transport.
“I’m thinking you gotta get out of there, Z. The M40s detected something—"
An alarm shrilled, and thin red fan-shaped beams suddenly streaked down from the roof four stories above and rotated around the floor of the warehouse.
“Do you see this? Tell me the stealth suit will help.”
“Z, I bulletproofed the suit, not stun-proofed it.”
“Shit, maybe an upgrade for the future.” Joshua hissed. Both drones were currently outside with the battlemechs and the guards, which meant he couldn’t bring them back in to watch the M40s.
“We need to abort,” Shelby said.
“Z, there is no way you’re going to be able to disable those mechs before they’re loaded.”
Joshua watched the pattern of the lights sweeping across the warehouse floor, his thought patterns splitting, calculating, counting seconds, recognizing patterns. Patterns he was good with. Patterns he could do. There was a small slice of time between each fan of light where an area, about three feet square, wasn’t covered for a split moment.
One of the guards shouted in Bosnian that Joshua’s suit translated across the HUD.
“What the hell is going on?”
A second guard stepped close to the inside of the warehouse door, but did not enter. “Intruder.”
“Go look.”
“I can’t go in there. No one is getting across that.”
“They do that when a rat gets in,” a third guard said. “I deal with this bullshit daily. They need to recalibrate those fucking mechs not to trigger from small animals.”
