Silicon Valley 2033
Chapter 4: Back in Business
Sylia stood beneath the streetlight alone in the midst of dark night. The roads and sidewalks were cleaned often and each building on the street had bushes and orchards on their lawns. The sky was partly cloudy, the intense urban light shining up as strongly as the moon shone down. She heard someone shuffling toward her and turned to look.
"I'm sorry, Sylia," Fargo said. As he came closer, she could see that he looked worse than usual.
"You kept on requesting services of the Knight Sabers so that you could uncover their identities and eventually steal their technology." Sylia was not going to play around with him.
"I was going to jump ship soon. Anyways, I couldn't find out who their leader was."
"I trusted that you did not have ulterior motives for these meetings."
"What, finding out more about Genom and damaging them isn't enough for you? I was honest. That was the end purpose."
"A common misconception, Fargo. You know me better than that."
"Hey, easy there. I'm just a bum. I thought you'd like to get revenge for the death of your father."
"Perhaps if you told me how you had been planning to do that, I might not have done business with you."
Fargo took a step back and leaned on a corporate orange tree. "Um, don't you think you're being a little hard on me, Ms. Stingray?"
"I can't believe that you were just serving the French all along. Goodbye." As soon as she said goodbye, a truck pulled in and stopped at the curb in front of her. She walked to the passenger door and opened it.
Fargo picked himself up from the tree and reached for her. "Hey, does that mean the deal's off?"
Sylia was now sitting inside the seat. She slammed the door and the truck sped away.
Mackie turned to Sylia for a moment to say, "Sister, I think we're in trouble."
"What is it, Mackie?"
"Nene's homing beacon stopped a few hours ago. Before that, she was taken to a residential area."
Sylia closed her eyes and tilted her head back. "We need to gather Priss and Linna. It's obvious that someone knows who we are."
Priss weaved in and out of the night traffic on her brand new motorcycle. It was actually similar to one she had tried out once before, but she had to let that cycle crash and burn on the highway. There were some very odd people in America; while she sometimes had the highways all to herself late at night, there was a steady amount of light traffic even at these hours. She watched the exit signs and looked intently for Mowry Avenue, where Sylia had told her to meet.
She turned off into the exit and burned the tires as she made a hard left at the intersection. She passed by a number of shopping centers and shops before she finally came to a quieter part of the city. She saw the hotel ahead to her right and finally began to slow down.
Nobody she recognized was there. She drove to the front entrance and driveway, but nobody was there either. She pulled around to the back exits, but she saw nobody there either. She let the cycle lean to the side as she put her foot down and stopped for a moment. Something was wrong.
"Are you lost?"
Priss almost jumped out of her seat as she looked up to see a tall gentleman in a black suit with sunglasses. More surprising was that she had been asked in Japanese, and she had gotten used to listening to so much English during her vacation.
"I'm waiting for a friend," was her simple reply.
"Perhaps I can help you find your friend," said the gentleman with a smile. He chuckled coldy, then continued, "You know, it's not safe for women around here at this time."
"Thanks for the offer mister, but I can take care of myself."
He started walking towards her and said, "We shall see."
He did not have a chance to see the motorcycle accelerate so quickly. The front tire lifted off the ground and planted itself firmly on his face, tearing off false flesh to reveal his Boomer head.
Priss vaulted right over the Boomer and skidded around to the front of the hotel, where two more Boomers were waiting. One of them jumped at her but suddenly shook hard in midair and fell straight down again. Priss turned her head to see Linna's hardsuit withdraw a clenched fist from the Boomer's back.
"Run!" she heard Linna shout beneath her helmet, so she kept on zooming down the street as a Boomer gave chase. It started out running after her, but switched to rocket boosters and began to gain on her quickly.
Linna turned around to see the Boomer that Priss had run over. It was very angry and running straight for her.
She instinctively twirled around and let her ribbons slam right into the Boomer's body. But it had dropped to its butt and was sliding as if trying to make a run in baseball. Her ribbons passed straight over it.
The Boomer sat up again and lunged forward at her. She punched right for its face, but it swatted her arm away. She then tried to spin around into a kick, but it blocked that attempt with its other hand. The Boomer's technique was, for a Boomer, incredibly good. It then opened up its chest to reveal the deadly laser array. Linna did not have enough time to point her hand at it to fire first. The array started to glow.
Until a monomolecular blade came through. Sylia pulled her blade up to cleave through its head too.
They could see five more Boomers leaping into the hotel's parking lot from the street. "There's too many of them!" Linna realized.
One of the Boomers was suddenly flattened backwards into the ground by an intense beam of heat. Mackie's voice declared, "No there isn't!" The tremendous weight of Mackie's heavy battlemover stomped into the ground, breaking up the concrete, as he brought his beam cannon into position again.
Zax was half-asleep in the back seat of his own SWAT van. Those two ADP officers were good for something: they were driving for this patrol, letting him relax a bit.
He was not sleeping entirely, because Leon was still talking about some of his glory days of last year. "And then I was driving down an empty freeway, investigating a report of an accident, when I saw a woman on a motorcycle and a Boomer pass right by my car!"
Daley and Zax suddenly jumped to their feet when they saw exactly that happen right by their windows. Zax reached forward and pulled the steering wheel hard out of Leon's hands, spinning the van around to give chase.
Leon was allowed to keep on driving straight again while Zax hit the alarm button on the dashboard. "This is unit 211, we have sighted a Boomer chasing someone on a motorcycle on Mowry Avenue in the direction of Cedar Boulevard, giving chase, over." There weren't many patrols late at night, but hopefully someone would be close enough to intercept.
"Unit 431 acknowledges, currently at Decoto Road, will try to intercept, over," replied Jeena's voice.
Zax pulled off a panel on Daley's side of the dashboard and hit a red button while grabbing onto Daley's seat with his other hand. The van suddenly lurched forward as Leon noticed the speedometer increasing beyond any reasonable rate of acceleration.
"Hey, what did you do?" Daley asked as he looked in a side-view mirror. The van had sprouted rocket boosters from the sides and back, and he could also see that they were passing by everyone else as if they were purposely driving backwards.
"Is this safe?" Daley asked.
"Standard procedure when chasing Boomers," calmly replied Zax.
"Is this really safe?" Daley shouted.
"Well, there have been fatalities in the past," calmly replied Zax.
Leon was too busy dodging everyone in front of him to wonder how the van's red button could be so much more powerful than his car's own.
Jeena leaned out of the window and pointed her rifle down the road. Her replacement unit, whom she had only gotten to know a few hours ago, had established a roadblock made of three ancient tanks lined up next to each other. They had also placed warning markers and barriers so that nobody would flatten themselves up against the tanks by accident.
Jeena let the scope of her rifle auto-track the Boomer. Satisfied that it was close enough for the scope's natural vector correction to work, she fired.
The Boomer's head flew right off, and soon its body was being torn apart by the force of the rifle too. She saw the woman on the motorcycle look back and see it, yet continue as fast as she could. Jeena wondered what that crazy woman thought she was doing.
Then she lowered her rifle and saw Boomers right in front of the roadblock. She fired on them too, but they hid behind the roadblock. She was forced to hide back inside the van as they opened fire on her with machine guns. The windows all over her van started cracking in many places, and pieces of her windshield were starting to fall in.
Priss saw the Boomers come out from the roadblock again and run towards her. She only had a split second to think but knew her plan would work.
The front tire of her bike lifted up just enough to plant itself into a Boomer's chest. Before the Boomer had completely fallen down, her rear wheel also rode up the front of its body, sending her flying through the air. Her front wheel then grabbed a hold of the top of one of the tanks and let her jump safely back down to the other side.
Jeena took the opportunity to finish off the two Boomers while they were still surprised.
Quincy was looking especially angry today. He reflected this mood in his voice as well. "Boomers are vanishing from the sight and influence of the OMS with each hour. This is unacceptable."
One board member reasoned, "None of the killer dolls have been compromised, and the satellites have not received any orders we did not send."
Quincy did not allow him to speak another sentence. "That may change soon. We still do not know the source of the anomaly. Furthermore, our efforts to reduce the cost of the OMS was almost sabotaged by hired mercenaries."
"We have dedicated ourselves to the task of finding the perpetrator," explained another board member.
"But you have not completed the task," Quincy reminded them. "In the meantime, I will continue to watch you all without ceasing."
Quincy's looming image disappeared from the viewscreen. The board members were able to sit down again.
"That man seems to live forever," commented a board member.
"You musn't speak of the chairman's lifespan!" protested the man next to him.
A laser cannon shot melted the curious board member for reinforcing effect.
Nene woke up in a room lit only by a single red lightbulb hanging from a dirty concrete ceiling. She fell down off a metal folding chair onto cold gray asphalt. When she sat up again, she saw that the room was completely empty except for the light, her chair, and a rusty reinforced door in the wall. She reached into her shirt and pulled out her homing beacon.
It was conserving power, since its battery hadn't been changed for a long time. She was going to change the battery this morning, but it was too late. The rest of her possessions, including everything in her pockets, were gone. She tried to force the beacon to actively broadcast again, but it would not.
She tried to pull the casing of the beacon off, but it would not break. Sylia had made them too well. Nene then bit into the casing and tried to tear it off. She had to stop and put her hands to her mouth to comfort the pain left in her teeth. She still had one hope, but she was loath to admit it.
After a few minutes of thinking hard, though, she gave in. She wedged one end of the beacon into the folding chair. She then stood up on the chair while saying to herself, "Don't give up now! You can do it!"
She jumped up as high as she could and landed on the chair again. She fell off the chair as soon as her feet connected, but at least the casing of the beacon was off. She quickly dusted herself off and picked it up. She held it up to the light and thought about whether or not this was really safe.
"Here we go," she announced to herself. She unscrewed the lightbulb, unscrewed the glass bulb out of the base, and carefully tied filaments from the bulb base onto tiny wires in the beacon. She then put the bulb base back into the socket with the beacon hanging delicately from it by what looked like a few metal hairs.
After taking a few sparks to the face, Nene was satisfied that the beacon was now fully powered and actively broadcasting. She still lamented over the damage her face probably suffered - she might have blemishes showing - but at least she would be rescued.
She was also very hungry.
End Chapter 4: Back in Business
