Post
by Black » Mon Jun 22, 2009 3:17 pm
“That's it. At the beginning. Always the best place to start, that!†the druid quipped with a tight lipped grin.
“Take yourself back to the very start. Think of something.â€
If this was the only way Black was going to rid himself of the druid then he didn't see how he had any choice.
He thought hard about his past about the place that formed him.
The surrounding whiteness was suddenly filled with with a stark room.
Men wearing long dark coats over black stylised armoured uniforms bearing the Corporate logo of Transys Neuronet were stood to attention in a long line.
Along the rank of men walked another uniformed man, speaking in a clear strong voice.
Black, stood at the end of the row recognised the man, Task. He had been Black's superior when Black had been Cardinal. There was a reflection in the window set into the only door to the room. Such attention to detail in the matrix sculpting impressed Black.
Caliburn stared at the reflection, seeing in the return image not the alien form of predator, but his own visage when he was Cardinal.
Task was briefing the Neuronet agents on the mission they were charged with.
Black remembered it being one of his first.
What did this, Black wondered, have to do with him finding himself?
Then as Task continued his briefing the elf found it harder to think of this as a memory, and the question that had been on the edge of his mind – how was a memory of his appearing in the matrix almost like a host? - was suddenly no longer there.
He moved out with the rest of his team, their mission to seek out and apprehend a shadow-fixer whom had been supplying certain rival companies with information sensitive to TN's business.
The corporation wanted to know where he got said information.
Having journeyed across the Manchester sprawl following lead after lead they tracked the fixer down to his personal abode.
Now the team proceeded cautiously, aware that their activities could well have forewarned the fixer of their approach.
Cardinal was surprised when advanced agents reported back to the assault team that the Tango was still at home.
The operation commander, a dwarf called John Herrod, had positioned Cardinal in a fire stairwell a floor below the fixer's apartment. He planned to shepherd the fixer and his entourage towards the stairwell by deliberately leaving weak points in his assault. So the fixer would believe himself to be beating the Transys raiders but instead would be walking into the waiting arms of Cardinal and his fleet of combat drones.
The order came through over the comms to begin the assault and Cardinal knew now that it was a waiting game.
Listening patiently on the floor below he could hear the reports coming in and could tell from the building plans he had overlaid in his vision where the target was. From the sounds of it he had quite a bit of help and the Cardinal could hear the muted rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gun fire. He cursed that noise even though it was inevitable. The Transys agents were all carrying silenced weapons, but from the fixer's point of view the louder the better. The gun fire in an apartment block would give rise to acts of panic from the other occupants and then the Transys agents would have to deal with civilians getting in the way.
The stairwell was wide and the landings quite spacious, designed so that those trying to escape a fire from this floor could merge easily with those of the floors above. So often in the past, especially in older buildings, the fire escaped had become a bottleneck and been the ruin of many a life.
It made the stairwell an ideal place for Cardinal and his dozen drones to sit in wait. Six drones were stationed on the half-landing above and the other on the half-landing below alongside Cardinal himself.
The door suddenly burst open and two men quite professionally folded around the door frame into the stairwell, their sub-machineguns leading the way, sweeping the area before them for targets.
Finding none they moved in and four more armed men came in ahead of the Tango, a woman and two children. Behind them came another two men.
A yell sounded up the stairwell, echoing off the ferrocrete walls. Cardinal knew it was none of his team, probably a civilian, but whoever it was did him a favour, giving the fixer's bodyguards pause for thought. They waited on the landing, listening to the sounds and as they did so the rear guards came forward to cast their opinion, meaning that all eight were now in front of the Tango.
Cardinal activated his squealer, a little device that he had place in the rear corner of the landing. All eight of the guards reacted, some blindingly fast. So did Cardinal.
He stepped into the open at the bottom of the stairs, immediately assigning targets for his flotilla and bringing the twelve drones on line. The thrum and roar of their motors pulled the guards attention back towards the stairs, but it was too late, even for the two men whose reaction speed was phenomenal as Cardinal had assigned more than one drone to them.
It sounded like the very gates of hell were cracking open as the drones opened fire on the guards, their fully automatic weapons spewing fire and death.
After ten seconds of bedlam the fixer's bodyguards were all down, dead or incapacitated. Cardinal calmly walked up the steps, a Browning Ultra-Power pistol in each hand.
The fixer, an elf himself, cast Cardinal a pleading look but when he saw the compassion-less expression on the Transys Nueronet agent's face he knew there would be no quarter. He darted behind his wife using her as a shield, his own pistol waving at the other elf.
Open mouthed in horror she glared at both the Transys elf and her own husband.
“That,†Cardinal warned in his Scottish accent as the drones moved menacingly closer to the fixer, “will do you no good.â€
“Wha? You gunna kill innocents just to get at me? That wouldn't look good in the press.â€
Un-fazed Cardinal responded. “If your wife is kens of how you earn a crust then she's an accessory and therefore no innocent. And if she didnae? Well ignorance is no defence.â€
With that he sent a message from his brain, down his right arm to the pistol held firmly in his grasp. The message told the weapon via the smartgun link to fire.
The single shot echoed noisily in the now quiet stairwell. The sobbing children screamed as their mother's dead weight slipped from their fathers arm.
“You fucker!†the fixer yelled still having the cowardly where-with-all to slip behind his crying kids.
Cardinal's aim adjusted to the two children ready to fire again but he paused and stared into their tear filled eyes.
This is, was, a memory he suddenly realised, but he remembered pulling the trigger. He did not recall ever having doubts.
“This was all very interesting,†announced the druid's voice from behind him.
Black turned to glare at the matrix entity.
“I too wondered what all this had to do with defining who you are, but now I see. This was you as you were engineered to be, but at the time the suppressed real you doubted your very actions as you doubt the now.â€
The fixer and everything else seemed to have stopped, frozen as though this were some game on pause.
Black turned to look into the fear filled eyes of the children. “I certainly don't want to be this person any more,†he said angrily.
“That is good.†the druid replied. “Often to define who you are, who you are not you must first find.â€
“Very Yoda!†Black quipped and the druid flashed his sarcastic grin.
Movement on the stairs attracted the elf's attention. The strange looking Aztec warrior from before had just stepped lightly onto the landing. He turned seeing Black and growled. “Who the hell are you?â€
The matrix faded to white leaving the predator and the druid standing there.
