Eve Fiction

I wormed my way along the ducting, pushing my backpack ahead
of me. I tried to not even think the word claustrophobia, lest it make
it reality. I tried not to pay too much attention to the obvious signs of
corrosion that crusted areas of the metal surface I was scraping along and
tried not to imagine the state of the braces that would be holding the
structure to the ceiling. I tried; failed. Plan A was turning into a nightmare.

Focus. The map overlay showed me that I didn’t have
far to go. That was something. Plan A called for the fasteners in the grille
above office 21118 to be loosened and ready before the target arrived. Please
don’t let the fasteners have corroded shut! What happened next was a variable.
Plan A.1: target is alone; single poison flechette to the neck without moving
from cover, then E&E. Plan A.2: target has company; remove grille, drop the
gas grenade, take out the target with poisoned flechette when everyone is
unconscious and then E&E. Simple plan.

The map showed that I was about to cross over the partition
wall that separated my target room from its neighbour. Thermal imaging showed
that the room was empty. I moved into position, pushing my backpack across the
grille. The fasteners came undone easily. With a shove, the grille would swing
open, and I could swing my upper body through the hole if necessary.

Suit charge was getting pretty low: I’d had to use the
active noise suppression field a fair bit to get past a couple of meetings and
a presentation on my long journey through the air conditioning. I prioritised
the charge readout display. I’d have ten seconds of full stealth capability,
and it was possible that I’d need every second of it.

I readied the flechette launcher, positioned the gas grenade
in easy reach and put a flash grenade next to it. Just in case. I took out the
10mm, chambered a round, and reholstered it. Just in case. Still, Plan A was
looking good so far. My misgivings about crawling through a shitload of
ventilation duct had evaporated and I had positive feelings about the whole
thing.

Vik Eikar wasn’t a particularly bad man as far as I knew. He
was certainly no worse than most of us, I guess. He ran some kind of import
business out of Caille and had another office somewhere on Matar. The Caille
Police Department had noted that he had a sideline in porno ‘reels, and on one
occasion they had arrested him due to a certain laxness in securing model
releases and a suspicion of some of the actresses being somewhat under age. No
charges had been brought, however. I didn’t know much else about him. Except
that someone didn’t like him enough to pay money for him to be killed.

On an average day, Eikar headed to the office and was sat at
his desk by 09:00. His compromised office management suite told me that his
first appointment today was a meeting with a supplier at 09:30. The time
readout showed me 09:05 local. Eikar was late. I fretted. I’d only observed him
for a few days, but what I’d seen had convinced me that he was a guy that took
punctuality seriously as a rule.

The office door chirped and slid open. My silent sigh of
relief cut short when I saw that instead of Eikar, one of the building security
team had entered the room. He moved cautiously, one hand on his weapon, and
peered around the room. His ill-fitting body armour pushed his arms out a
little, making him look like some kind of ape.

‘No one here, Mr Eikar,’ said the guard.

‘Hmm, must have been a false alarm then,’ said Eikar, moving
into view. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and fiddled with
something I couldn’t see.

‘Can’t expect too much from those cheap consumer systems,
you know.’ The guard had relaxed, but he was still looking around the room, and
he hadn’t buttoned down the flap on his holster. ‘Besides, building security
should stop any intruders. You’re on the 21^st floor and you don’t
even have any windows, I don’t see how…’

He was interrupted by a loud screeching noise.

‘What the fu…’

There was a second sound of tortured metal. I felt movement.
Oh… shit. I smacked open the grille and pushed myself headfirst through
the opening, kicking hard with my feet. I balled up as best I could on the way
down, and managed to land on my back rather than pile drive my head through the
floor. The entire section of ducting that had been my hiding place followed me,
along with most of the suspended ceiling. I rolled clear before the big hunk of
metal could pin me.

Eikar and the guard stared at me open-mouthed.

‘Oh, hi!’ I said brightly, standing and brushing myself
down. The positive feelings for Plan A had vanished. Think of something!
‘I’m from, er, Pest Control.’

‘Pest Control?’

‘Yeah, we had reports of, er, Fedo activity in the
ventilation system. Bad smell, you know?’ There was an awkward pause where we all
just kind of gaped at each other.

‘Ah… Let me just check this out with the front desk, Mr
Eikar.’ The guard was on the ball, I’ll give him that. It didn’t really do him
any favours though.

Plan B then.

I pulled out the 10mm and aimed at Eikar’s head; double-tap,
blam-blam; two neat entry holes in the forehead a couple of centimetres apart,
and most of the rear of his skull vaporised in brilliant green flash.

I dropped to one knee and swivelled for the guard. He had
his gun out already, but surprise was still on my side. Two more rounds of
phased plasma made him a statistic and a really messy job for the cleaners.

I retrieved my pack from the wreckage, and pulled out the
camera drone. I directed it to capture the image of Eikar’s corpse, then routed
a still image via the Syndicate’s Anonymiser Cloud. A couple of seconds later,
confirmation arrived of funds having been transferred to my account from
escrow. I made sure that I had all my stuff, slung the backpack on to my back
and headed towards the door, pulling my hood up to conceal my face.

The corridor outside was empty. I knew, though, that people
would have heard the four gunshots. Security would be stirred up. Police would
be incoming, and a security team with weapons drawn would probably be piling into
an elevator right now. Plan A had been much better: that had just involved
quietly walking out of the building before anyone knew what had happened. As it
was, I had maybe ten seconds before the cavalry arrived.

I trotted in the opposite direction to the elevators. There
was a window at the end of the hall. I fired a few rounds into the ArmaGlass to
soften it up, then kicked it right out of the frame. That could have really
ruined someone’s day on the street below. I shot a hole in the suspended ceiling,
then pulled out the two explosive grenades I had with me.

Fuck it.

I chucked the whole stash of flash grenades, the gas
grenades, everything into the hole in the ceiling and pulled the pins on
the two explosive ‘nades. Then, I ran like fuck, and swung myself out through
the window.

The guards and the explosion arrived at the same time. The
gloves and kneepads of the suit activated, and I stuck to the side of the
building like a fly. A fly missing a few legs, sure, but still defying gravity
in a very cool way nonetheless.

I peeked back through the window. I couldn’t see shit
through all the smoke and dust. Which was good. My hope was it would take the
guards a minute or two before they were able to advance up the corridor and
discover that I’d left through the window. Any really keen, motivated and
promotion-hungry guards that tried to move straight through the wreckage would
get knocked out by the lingering gas.

Right now, many people would be pretty impressed by my quick
thinking here. Others - let’s call them smartarses - will be pointing out that
I’m now stuck on the outside of a skyscraper in downtown Caille with a police
SWAT team en route. It pains me to say it, but those smartarses have a valid
point.

They haven’t reckoned with the sheer coolness of the suit
when combined with top of the line cybernetics though. Most people don’t reckon
with it. Suits like this one aren’t common by any stretch of the imagination,
so why would they? I spent a lot of money acquiring it. All my money, in fact.
Retirement will have to wait.

Lots of people will have seen wall-climbing kit. It mostly
consists of some boots and some gloves or handheld grips that bond with a
surface at a molecular level. The grip is amazingly strong. The problem is that
these things tend to be quite unwieldy in that it’s hard to turn the bonding
mechanism on and off efficiently for four limbs in a coordinated fashion. With
the suit controlled via my neural links though, it’s trivially easy to crawl up
or down a wall like an insect. With practice, it becomes second nature.

Right now, I would have traded the suit for rope and a
harness to abseil down the side of this building rather than have to crawl down
it while relying on no one thinking to look up.

Still, I made good time and no one was looking up. The
street was fairly empty, it being that dead zone after everyone has just
started work, and incredibly, no one had seen the large slab of hot glass fall
out of the sky and land in the middle of the street.

I froze when I saw the police SWAT vehicles sweep in, but
their focus was at ground level. That wouldn’t last, I knew. Once they had
secured the ground floor, they would post marksmen outside too to cover the
angles.

The inevitable happened. Just a few short meters of wall to
cover and a civilian suddenly spotted me. She was too far away to hear, but the
pointing finger and gaping mouth told its own story. I hurried to what I hoped
was a survivable jumping distance, and jumped. The impact nearly took my knees
out, but it felt like my legs still worked. A glance showed me armoured police
piling out of the lobby. Plan B was really starting to suck.

Now for the reason this damn suit cost so much money. I
checked the power levels: still good for eight seconds. A cop raised his rifle,
and I countered by executing a forward roll that finished with me disappearing.
Full active stealth mode engaged.

Eight one thousand.

Every instinct screamed: ‘Run for cover!’ Every instinct was
wrong. The active camouflaging doesn’t cope with running. If you want to remain
unseen, you have to move smoothly and quite slowly: no more than a normal
walking pace at most. I started walking.

Seven one thousand.

I heard shouts. One cop fired wildly at the position I was
in a second ago. This was tense. It took the utmost control to walk steadily
across the street.

Six one thousand.

There were some parked flyers and behind them an alleyway.
It was kind of obvious, but choices weren’t wide and varied at that stage.

Five one thousand.

Several cops were running up the street towards me. Armour
and heavy assault weapons mean that they weren’t running very fast, but the
maths wasn’t looking like it favoured me.

Four one thousand.

This wasn’t going to work. I was between the parked vehicles
now, but I realised I’d never make the alleyway at the speed I was forced to
move at. I dropped into a low crouch and disengaged the stealth mode. It was a
gamble, but so was waiting for the suit’s power to drain completely: that would
leave me entirely exposed.

I ran as best I could while doubled over and reached the
alley. The lack of shouting, gunfire, and gaping wounds in my back told me that
I’d made it without being seen. I needed to make some distance regardless of
risk, so I sprinted the fastest 100 metres I have run since I was in the athletics
team at school, then hurled myself into the wall of a low-rise and started
climbing. Somewhere behind me there was a shout. A chunk of wall exploded as I
hauled myself onto the roof.

Once on the roof, I disregarded all notions of stealth and
concealment and started running again. I needed cover as much ground as I could
before I was tagged by air support. Adrenaline kicked in as I scrambled across
the rooftops. What followed was purely instinctive: run, dodge, judge, jump. It
wasn’t long before I ran out of options: surrounded by much taller buildings. I
could have tried to leap and grapple on to a wall, but that seemed inordinately
risky to me. Time to go down.

I found myself on some kind of service road at ground level.
I crouched behind a large waste compactor and caught my breath. It was time to
hide in plain sight. I shrugged off my pack, removed the shoulder holster and
issued a mental command to the suit. The gloves unbound at the wrist, and a
split opened at the waist, separating the whole into a hooded top and trousers.
I pulled off the top, turned it inside out to reveal a dull green colour. I
wasn’t sure if green was supposed to go with black, or was it blue that was
wrong? Gallente are supposed to know this shit, right?

I put the top back on, leaving the hood down. I tucked the
gun into the waistband of the trousers, and slung the pack casually over one
shoulder before stepping out from behind the compactor.

My heart skipped a beat. Motherfucker! There was a cop flyer
right there. I’m not the guy you’re looking for. Deep breath and walk
towards the main road. I’m not the guy you’re looking for. I walked as
casually as possible past the parked flyer. Its windows were down and the cops
inside were drinking kafak. Living, breathing stereotypes. One of them looked
straight at me, then through me. I wasn’t the guy they were looking for.

‘You just get that APB?’

‘Yeah.’

Well, shit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I mean, suspect heading west, no ID, dressed in black. What
the fuck we supposed to do with that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh and: suspect is of average height and average build.
That really narrows it down for us.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Guess we better keep an eye out for Mr Average then.’

‘Yeah.’

That’s me. Mr Average. I kept on walking, the sound of
distant sirens fading with every step.