Meira could feel rather than hear the Suits' sedan approaching the warehouse; they were less than a minute away. There were three of them, which she knew from previous encounters was more than enough to capture, kill, or disperse any four of the criminals, amazingly athletic and brave though they might be. There must be quite a few more of the criminals inside. She reflected grimly that given the choice between capture, kill, and disperse, the Suits tended to choose the second option. At first, that shocked her, since she had always thought government agents would rather catch criminals than kill them. The criminals seemed to know the Suits' preference for lethal force, and very few ever chose to stand and fight them. Meira couldn't recall any terrorists standing their ground and living to tell the tale.
Thirty seconds after perceiving the brief conversation between the Suits and whoever gave them their orders (whom she had taken to referring to as the Dispatcher) Meira could see one of the two parka-clad guards take his hands from his pockets, reach inside one sleeve, and pull out a cell phone. She wouldn't have caught the motion at all had the parka not been somewhat reflective and the phone lit up in stark relief to the inky darkness beyond the sodium lamp's glare. Meira heard a harsh curse, muffled by distance and closed car windows, and watched the two hustle for the SUV and climb in the back seats. Light spilled out from the open doors, and the vehicle rocked back and forth on its suspension.
Gravel popped and cracked behind her as a car pulled into the warehouse parking lot. She didn't need to look over her shoulder to know the Suits had arrived, but she did anyway. The nondescript beige boat-like car wouldn't have looked out of place in a cop movie from twenty years ago. The car ground to a halt and two impossibly bright beams of light stabbed out at the SUV, illuminating it utterly and painting a stark black shadow on the warehouse wall behind.
Meira squinted against the glare of the vehicle's glossy reflection, but was still able to perceive movement on the roof near the cargo compartment. A heavy thump, and a rectangular segment of the roof clattered over the side of the vehicle. At the same time, three doors in the sedan opened as one, and the Suits began to climb out. One of the guards exposed the upper half of his body from the improvised sunroof with an arm's-length of olive drab cylinder on his shoulder; crowning the tube was an ugly, oblong object Meira recognized as a rocket grenade of some sort. The guard set something else on top of the roof, something Meira could only guess was an automatic rifle. Glass smashed outward from the rear-facing door of the vehicle, and a malicious-looking muzzle brake peeked through.
A flurry of communication, too fast for words, flew among the Suits and their Dispatcher. Afterwards, when things had calmed down and she chose to think about it, she knew what they had said: threat assessment: light machine gun, personal artillery, armored vehicle, unknown number hostiles inside structure; please advise. And the Dispatcher's response: activate autonomous action protocols for duration of encounter; delete hostile programs; be advised: no neutral templates available for respawn within ~~~. Whatever distance the Dispatcher had indicated could only be translated in Meira's mind as "very far away."
Time slowed as Meira scrambled over the center console of her car and crouched within the passenger side footwell – while the Suits and the criminals never seemed to see her when she concealed herself reasonably well, that was no guarantee that bullets and shrapnel wouldn't find her. Even so, her cover seemed far too scant. A disconsolate howling screeched from the olive drab tube, and she could see the grenade's path as it streaked towards the Suits' windshield. The three Suits dove from the vehicle, moving impossibly quickly. The grenade detonated with a bowel-shaking thud, spewing fire and deadly shrapnel in all directions, rendering the car into an ugly, fiery ruin and smashing Meira's rear window into a complex spiderweb. The Suits tumbled with a gymnast's grace away from the explosion, stood again with preternatural calm and unruffled, perfectly tailored suits. Their heads tracked like turrets and fixed on the SUV, now illuminated by the sedan's wreckage rather than its spotlights. Two Suits on the left side of the ruined sedan; one on the right. Each drew a heavy caliber pistol from his jacket and trained it on the vehicle.
Over the crackle of flames, Meira could hear the guard curse as he discarded the smoking tube and shoulder the rifle he had set atop the roof. She could see that it had a long, curving magazine with another taped beside it. The heavier machine gun within the cargo compartment stuttered to life, spraying deadly arcs of fire towards the two Suits to the left of the burning sedan. The guard with the automatic rifle opened up on the lone Suit from the right side, issuing a lighter, staccato report. Meira shrieked in alarm from the noise as the three Suits seemed to blur and dance in place, bullets pocking the pavement around them uselessly. She had seen this before, but had no time to ponder how the Suits could do what was patently impossible; instead, she opened the passenger side door behind her and squirmed her way underneath the car.
While she worked her way under the car, a rapid conference call among the three Suits buzzed through her mind: elevate above gunner's arc of fire and engage topmost rebel; I will flank and advance. A niggling sense of recognition itched at her mind, but she didn't have time to contemplate the vague déjà vu. The response came immediately from two distinct Suit-voices: concur. For a moment, she felt sorry for the two criminals. Meira squirmed far enough towards the driver's side under the car to see the Suits' tactic in action. One of the two Suits pinned down by the machine gun jumped, leaving his colleague to dance around the bullets. The Suit leaped nearly twice his own body height and, with legs curled beneath him like a bullfrog at rest, his free hand curled above his head like a fencer, his gun hand thrust with a purpose at the guard standing through the roof of the vehicle, fired three shots. Two bullets hit the roof with a sharp pang that echoed louder than the reports of the rifle and machine gun. Though she couldn't possibly have heard the sound of the third bullet, she imagined vividly the sickening wet smack as it hit the exposed guard. The rifle fire stopped abruptly as the luckless guard spun in place, the top of his head neatly clipped off, his ballcap fluttering to the ground.
The Suit landed neatly and rolled to the side, the better to distract the machine-gunner still stuttering away inside the vehicle. The lone Suit who was dodging the rifle fire strode purposefully around the side of the vehicle; from her vantage, Meira could hear the soft rubber of his shoes padding across the pavement, could see the cuffs of his brown, less than perfectly stylish trousers. The way he walked reminded her of someone, but she was sure she didn't know anyone in this peculiar government agency. The Suit stopped for a moment, still facing away from her and towards the vehicle; he was only two meters away, and she felt sure he could hear her heart pounding. She looked up at his broad-shouldered back and well-groomed brown hair and tried to breathe more quietly. With great deliberation, the Suit holstered his pistol back inside his jacket, seemed to pull at his lapels, and craned his neck to the right. Through the ringing in her ears and the yammering of the machine gun, Meira thought she could hear a series of dull cracks as the vertebrae in his neck popped.
With his neck craned thus, the Suit seemed to look over his shoulder, in Meira's general direction. The sharp outline of his aquiline nose and slight receding hairline seemed bizarrely familiar to her, but she knew that was absurd. She could sense a curious feeling of inquisitiveness coming from the Suit, and a communication fragment from him: anomalous readings . . ., interrupted by one of his colleagues: complete the flanking maneuver. Through her panic, she knew somehow that scrambling from her position right then would be worse than useless. The Suit turned his attention back to the vehicle, and moved with a burst of such blinding speed that bits of gravel and dust pattered at Meira's face. He covered the intervening five meters or so in less than two seconds and tore the back door off its hinges as easily as one might open an envelope. With his other hand, he pulled the rear seat from its mountings and tossed it aside. The machine gun halted, and through the ringing in her ears Meira could hear a panicked scream. The Suit disappeared into the back seat, and the vehicle began a frightful rocking back and forth. In the disturbance, the dead guard slumped over the roof of the vehicle was unceremoniously pitched out, and landed in a boneless huddle. The rear cargo doors burst open as though they were in an old-time saloon, and the other parka-clad criminal fairly flew from inside the vehicle. He skidded and tumbled to a halt some few meters away from the truck and lay quite still.
The two Suits outside halted their serpentine dances as soon as the machine gun stopped; they smoothed the lapels of their jackets and approached the vehicle. Meira could easily see their faces from here, but they were meaningless to her. All of the Suits were uniformly anonymous, usually with bland, nondescript features that made them all the more menacing and standardized rectangular sunglasses and coil-wire earpieces. The third stepped from the cargo compartment and faced his colleagues.
One of the other two spoke aloud, tonelessly, "Is there a problem?"
The other continued, "You hesitated."
The third Suit, the one who nearly noticed Meira, replied, "The anomaly. But I can no longer detect it."
The sound of the third Suit's voice brought a dizzying sense of vertigo to Meira. She'd heard that voice before, and it struck at her for its familiarity in a way that the alien nature of their other communications did not. Where did she know that voice? She began to breathe faster.
The other two Suits paused a moment, examining their surroundings without expression. "Let's go."
Meira held her breath as the two stepped around the third and walked stolidly towards the warehouse. The third Suit pivoted smoothly on his heel and followed close behind. As the trio circled the wrecked SUV and walked past Meira's hiding place, the third looked pointedly in her direction without seeming to see her, and for the first time she could clearly see that Suit's face. She stifled a gasp as a shock of recognition bolted through her. Disjointed memories coursed through her mind, memories of a bright summer day; of a sudden, vicious riot that shook that affluent part of the city; of a shock of otherness spreading out from her core to her extremities, forcing her consciousness back into a small space within her, alive but confined; of pursuit, and violence, and death; of a car smashing into her, breaking her body; and of the otherness leaving her, leaving her violated consciousness to reinhabit her broken, pain-wracked body.
A distinct image formed itself in her mind, a memory of a nightmare she'd been having for almost a year now. A memory of straddling a young, hard-faced woman lying in the street, of pressing a forearm (brown poly-synth-wool sleeves i don't wear brown i look terrible in this fabric who wears this color?) into her throat, leaning into her, sneering at her, relishing the look of fear and resignation on her face. Wanting to peer into her eyes, but only seeing the reflection in her sunglasses – only seeing twin reflections of a face sneering back at her in the lenses. That face . . . so hard and angry and full of hate, a face not her own, a face with a set, square jaw, bared teeth, hawk-like nose, receding hairline . . . I know him! she thought with a sudden delirious clarity. I know that man.
He . . . he was me!