It had to have been decades since the roads had last seen anything with tires, the rubber kind used to keep traction with the pavement. Her bike didn’t even have wheels as it surfed the air just under a meter over the road.
The arid region barely changed as she flew through it. While the sections on either side of the barely still present road slipped by at an incredible rate, it was the low hills and the dry expanse between her and those hills that seemed to never change. A glance at the map and speed told her otherwise.
The sun touched the top of the horizon behind her when she caught site of it. It was nothing more than a blight on the opposite horizon, a dark dot that gave nothing away. Minutes passed and her shadow stretched longer and longer ahead of her. The dark dot ahead of her grew larger, morphing into an odd collection of shapes that didn’t make sense until the sun was halfway set.
Skyscrapers still stood strong, a stark contrast to the desert that surrounded it. Even as the terrain she drove past was littered with hints of past settlements, nothing remained as unchanged as those skyscrapers seemed to be. She counted ten of the spire ones - the ones that reached double the height of the rest of the city; the rest of the buildings were too condensed for her to count.
“Don’t get cocky in there, Koi,” filled her helmet, breaking the radio silence they had been sitting in for the last hour. “In and out. Nothing more.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she drawled back, settling more over the bike’s body. “But I make no promises if I find out I’m being sent in unprepared, Mark.”
There was a snort and for a brief moment she could see him sitting beside her, a foot up on anything with an edge to it as he worked with an interface she wouldn’t see, his bespectacled face holding an amused little half grin. “Trust me, you’re well equipped for what’s in there.” There’s no video, nothing but the sound of his voice, and yet she still saw the hand gesture that would accompany his words - the hand would come up and rotate over so that the back of the hand was to the floor as the hand sank below the level of the wrist in a bounce. “Thus why you’re going in.”
“The null better be worth it.”
“Oh, trust me. It’s worth it.”
Silence settled between them again.
The road started taking on more structure - railings, separations, clear boundaries between sides and protected edges - as the sun set completely behind her. There was no light beyond the stars overhead and what came off of a city that, as far as they knew, was completely void of human life. It didn’t matter. The helmet visor had been adapting to the light levels since before the sun had even set, meaning for her, her view barely changed as the sun went down and she could still see everything around her as if it was daytime.
Granted, she did cut that view when the last of the sun slipped beneath the horizon for a short few minutes, adjusting it to be less daytime viewing when she reactivated it. It was eerie seeing a supposedly abandoned city so brightly lit.
The road now more a bridge than a street slowly banked to the right coming right up along the city’s edge. It was so close, she was sure she could jump the gap between roadway and building in her bike and not lose any altitude from momentum alone, crashing through the floor the roadway was level with.
“You’ve got company,” filled her helmet at the same time she got the ping from the bike’s area sensors. Red blips appeared on the map. The blips ahead of her started to move to cut her off. “There’s an off ramp a couple hundred meters ahead of you, right side. Take it and head left.”
The route marked the map and augmented reality with a faint glowing yellow line several times wider than her bike that colored the pavement and was also visible through the roadway ahead.
The off ramp appeared quickly with her still high speed and she swerved off the roadway down the incline. The bike braked smoothly as she practically laid it on its side and brought the bottom ahead of her. Her forward moment was transferred seamlessly as she came level with the cross street and shot down it without losing more than a third of her speed.
It was in her favor as something exploded in the intersection she had just cleared.
“The heck even was that?”
“Not sure.” The red blips were added to the augmented reality and she watched a few move around her out of the corner of her eye. She looked up as one moved directly overhead. “But it can say cheese.”
It was a glance, a raise of the head before bringing her focus back down, but it had been enough for a clear picture. She had only seen a red light, probably no larger than a palm sized disk, but the picture showed what she had missed with the closer-to-natural visibility she had set.
“Damn. Koi, be careful. You woke up one heck of a security system.”
“Gee, what was your first clue?” she rhetorically snapped as an alert tone filled the helmet briefly. She swerved left, avoiding the beam that created a massive crater in the pavement she would have occupied.
“Route’s been updated to the shortest path to the center of the city.” The illumination of the road vanished and a point somewhere in the city lit up. Her map held the route but nothing more happened to the world around her. “I’m leaving your view clear for now. These things are tactically minded and I’d rather you get there in one piece.”
“Do we know if these things can fly?”
“Looks like there might be some flight involved but I’m sure there’s bound to be limits. Their made with AO era tech. They can’t be that advanced.”
She increased the bike’s repulsors, shooting skyward in order to avoid one aimed to collide with her broadside.
She spat a profanity as she rolled the bike, the repulsors slamming one of the security drones or bots or whatever they had been labeled in their era of creation with enough force that would break every bone in the human body with the brief second of contact. The machinery was shoved back a few hundred meters but even she could see the chassis was dented. The damn thing barely noticed as it flew at her again as she righted the bike before she could fall any further. She pressed against the body of the bike, shoving the throttle down. “Advanced enough to be a pain in my ass,” she bit back, cutting the repulsor strength.
The bike dropped like a rock for the second she needed to drop below the machinery coming towards her. She shoved the repulsor strength back up to shove the bike skyward again, leaning hard to one side. The bike kicked up out from under her and around, rolling around as if she was the pivot point. The increased power from the repulsors slammed into the machinery with enough force to crumple it nearly in half, shoving it into a building so hard she would have been surprised if it hadn’t flown out the other side.
She brought the repulsor power down so that the thrusters were actually being used as she shot skyward again. She quickly left the red blips behind but more were gathering below her. There was no surprise when the majority of the blips were around her target. “I need to know if I’m going into a building to grab something or hack something, Mark.”
“Grab. Note says to be careful with it. It’s precious cargo and highly valuable.”
“Mark, I swear to Altru if I’m going in for a person-”
“If you find out the target’s a person, I’ll be pissed.” There was already anger in that statement. “I made it explicitly clear we don’t do live extractions and tripled our damn cost when all he did was smirk at me assuring me it wasn’t a live extraction.”
She cut the throttle and the repulsors at the same time, pivoting the bike on its nose before it could drop. She shoved the throttle to full and shot back towards the city as four of the machinery flew past. “So what exactly am I extracting? You didn’t give me much to work with.”
“And unfortunately that’s all I’ve gotten. Nothing more than a simple ‘you’ll know when you see it’ bullshit these types love to pull.” He huffed audibly enough for her to hear it. “At this point I’m kicking myself for not requesting full payment up front.”
She slowly returned power to the repulsors as she brought the nose of the bike up. The pavement came up to less than a meter from the bottom of the bike before her trajectory finished transferring from vertical to horizontal. There were several explosions behind her she didn’t care to glance back at.
She took the corner at full speed, the bottom of the bike coming level with the side of the building to keep from wrecking. She kept the bike on the side of the building as the security system honed in on her location. When the first beam shot off, she dropped back to the street. The fact that the damn city was forcing her to resort to nastier tricks was annoying. “Killing power. I’ll chat with you soon.”
“You’ve got five minutes before I start worrying.”
She flipped the small, inconspicuous cover for a button on the body of the bike as she threw the bike into what equated as neutral. A low hum started to wind up quickly as power was diverted to her little trick. She quickly set the parameters in the span of a few seconds feeling the bike vibrate as the gathered power started reaching dangerous levels.
She pressed the exposed button.
A pulse visible for the nanosecond it took for it to reach her helmet and implant went out in all directions. A shudder went through her at the force of it, a tingling sensation that was always left behind when she put it to full force. The city plunged into darkness immediately in a wave too rapid for the normal eye to track. The security system was no exception and the machinery crashed to the ground and creaked against supports that locked into place.
She drifted to a stop against the door of the building the target was in. The bike was still running, the few minuscule lights bright in the absolute darkness of the lower city shadows. She set the kickstand down and turned it off.
A silence as thick as the darkness pressed in on her. She took the helmet off. With practiced ease, she got the helmet booting back up as her implant came back online. The shadows quickly receded as the implant adjusted her vision to the darkness.
The door handle wasn’t locked when she tried it but it was clear the locking mechanism had been electronic when she opened it. The space she stepped into was full of massive tubes, all but one of which were empty. Already knowing what she was about to find, she walked up to the only one that was occupied and glared down at the child fast asleep inside.
She pulled the helmet on as it finished rebooting. Her anger grew when it only confirmed the cryo chamber was still running. It wasn’t being powered by AO era tech.
“Welcome back.”
“When you kill our client, make sure he suffers first.”
He spat a profanity she hadn’t heard him use in a very long time.
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