Silicon Valley 2033
Chapter 5: Revelation
Fargo was sitting at a table with a large umbrella-like contraption over it, held by a pole in the center of the table. The air smelled like the river and the sky was a pale light blue. He listened to the distant sound of an accordion playing music to tourists while he sipped on his coffee. A well-dressed woman with short blue-black hair sat opposite of him.
"Monsieur, you can only track them for so long," said the woman.
"I'm getting close to the leader," Fargo replied. "I've found out their base of operations, their methodology, everything. It won't be long before I can deliver their hardsuits to you."
And then Fargo remembered himself making violent and unloving relations with the woman in a cheap two-story hotel elsewhere in Paris. He knew that she made herself look like Sylia to strengthen their control over him. He knew that her hair wasn't really bluish-black and that it was not always short. But this was a convenient bonus on top of his normal pay, except he knew that it was terrible to do such a thing with his employer.
And he knew that there was something about Sylia that he couldn't quite put his finger on. But he knew that she was more than just a go-between for him and the Knight Sabers.
Zax slapped him across the face. "What were the specifications of your contract with France?"
"My mission was to establish a base of cultural dominance. Real people would be replaced with Boomers who would be strongly pro-French. We had already carried out this program to its third phase in Quebec."
Jeena slapped him the other way with her left arm.
"Nice try, but we don't buy it. Shortly after you were caught in the country, the Knight Sabers were sighted near here. Not only that, but they were under attack by Boomers whose data units contained full understanding of the French language." Jeena wiped off some of Fargo's blood from her arm. Polishing it was becoming a chore.
Fargo leaned his head back and looked up at the lightbulb. "What are you going to do to me now?"
An FBI agent entered the room. "We've arrived at the complex."
Nene stepped into the heels of her hardsuit. She then put her hands into its hands and stood up straight. Once it was finished clamping on to her, she pulled her shirt off of the head of Mackie's battlemover.
She looked at its sensor eye for a moment as the whole situation began to make sense to her. She knew now why everything happened the way it did.
Mackie's battlemover had variable x-ray vision.
Linna grabbed Nene's arm. "We have to hurry!" While Mackie covered their backs, Linna pulled her through hallways and stairs until they reached a hatch in the ceiling. Linna punched it open with a bang.
Nene poked her head out to look around. They had arrived at a totally abandoned warehouse. At the far side, she saw Priss and Sylia fending off six Boomers.
Priss had a Boomer's disembodied arm wrapped around her neck. While she tried to stop it from squeezing her neck further with one hand, she punched out the chest of a Boomer with her other. Three more jumped on top of her and tried to pin her down. She spun around, kicking them all off, and fired needles into each one of them. She took a laser cannon blast in the back from a Boomer she hadn't seen before, but her hardsuit had managed to stay intact. The next laser cannon shot missed her face and instead blew off the Boomer arm that was on her neck. The offending Boomer stopped for a moment, then fell into thirds as Linna approached from behind it.
But more and more Boomers kept on pouring in from every entrance.
"Ten more incoming!" screamed Nene as she tried her best to hold them off with her machine gun. They responded by scattering and going around her sides.
Priss held her side tightly as blood seeped through a crack in her hardsuit. She grabbed a Boomer, punched her hand through its stomach, and held it in the path of a laser array heat blast. Her hand was slightly burned, but at least she was not dead. She took the opportunity to rip the laser arrayed Boomer in half before stomping on its head.
Mackie's battlemover was now visible within the scene of the battle, covered by five Boomers who had climbed onto it. Mackie shifted his hand somewhat, and the Boomers fell off as they were electrocuted and melted into fried proteins.
Sylia's right arm had been broken badly, but she choked back tears of pain to keep on hacking the Boomers to pieces. Even though she was able to jump and fly over them to confuse them, they had rocket boosters in their feet that were independent of the more bulky ones in the back.
Leon's voice echoed through the warehouse from his loudspeaker: "This is the SWAT and ATF! Cease your fighting and we will spare you!"
Priss shouted back, "Whose side are you goons on?" in Japanese. It was not unlikely that Genom owned America's government, too. She doubted that Leon could hear her, but it was worth a try.
Her body was quaking from shock, but she perservered.
Leon heard a faint but familiar voice from his position. He radioed in, "This is the ADP adviser, do not attack the feminine hardsuits, consider them friendlies, over." Among the responses of the unit leaders who copied, he discerned Zax's and Jeena's voices.
He had the honor of going around to the back while the majority of the force struck from the front and sides. He intercepted a few Boomers running through the parking lot or jumping from behind the rear sound wall. They did not even have a chance to see him pointing his Stomach Gun at their bodies.
Jeena called out to him from behind a bush. She accounted for all of the fallen Boomers in the area that he did not remember shooting himself. "Why do you call it the Stomach Gun, anyways?"
Leon gave her a thumbs-up. "Because it takes guts to use it!"
He suddenly jumped as an invisible figure put its hand on his shoulder. He heard Zax's voice say, "I'm infiltrating from above. Your task will be to exfiltrate the Knight Sabers."
Leon nodded to a slight distortion in his vision in front of him. "By the way... my English isn't very good. What does 'exfiltrate' mean?"
"Well, you know how infiltrate means to get in? Exfiltrate means to get them out!" The distortion withdrew from Leon and seemed to slither up the wall of the warehouse onto the roof.
The Knight Sabers could only watch in awe as the Boomers were cleared away in massive numbers by crushing shockwaves that seemed to come from nowhere. Priss knew she had seen these destructive powers before.
They were Largo's.
The Bu-55c guards were huddled around the doorway. The door itself had a simple plaque on it that read, "Brian J. Mason Databank Room." Madigan stood a fair distance behind, pointing a simple pistol at it. Quincy suspected something in this very room. He was normally not so hasty to take action, no matter how serious the problem was.
One Boomer kicked the door open. The room itself was not only fully active, but it was still going through massive volumes of data.
The room itself spoke to them, "It is too late. You cannot oppose me now."
Madigan shouted back, "Who are you?"
"Name does not matter," the room intoned. "I have had many names. Perhaps I will take yours."
"Impossible!" she objected. The Boomers made hand motions to ask if it was okay to blow up the room. She raised a hand to put them on hold.
"Come and see."
She lowered her pistol and slowly approached the room. Every step made the room's noises and pulsations throb harder and harder in her head. Finally, before she realized what was happening, she was sitting in the chair with computer apparatus stuck to her head. The sound of data flowing in and out of her was like the hissing of a snake.
Priss got up from a stretcher. Her helmet was still intact, but she was not sure about the rest of her body. She sat up and felt broken bones move around in her body.
A paramedic put her down again. "Please don't move, miss, or you might kill yourself."
She reached out, pinched the paramedic's nose, and rolled off the stretcher. She blinked her eyes hard and saw Mackie's battlemover. Before the other paramedics could react, she was already running to it.
"How tough does she think she is?" they shouted.
Priss somersaulted right onto the bike that Mackie was in the middle of dropping. It became the Typhoon-3 around her and carried her off into the sky. She recognized Nene clinging onto Mackie's back while Sylia and Linna flew beside them in their own motoroids.
"It's okay," Leon told the ambulance crews. "They'll be fine."
Zax was already removing his DarkSuit. "Pretty amazing that they lasted as long as they did. Especially the dark blue one."
"Yeah. The Knight Sabers have saved our lives a few times in MegaTokyo."
"Is it because they're that good, or because the AD Police is that incompetent?"
Daley held Leon back from trying to punch Zax in the face. Leon shook him off and muttered, "I can't stand the way they insult us," in Japanese.
His curly-haired partner smiled. "Perhaps you should develop a closer kind of comradeship with us, then maybe we'll fight harder."
Leon ignored him, as usual, and walked out to a less crowded area. They were waiting for the CSI people to arrive.
He looked at the stars and wondered, "Isn't Priss tough?"
The databank room calmed down somewhat and let Madigan's chair turn around to face outside. Madigan looked at several pulverised Boomers laying down in the hallway.
She spoke in unison with the room, "I am Madigan."
End Chapter 5: Revelation
