JB CXCVII: Need for Speed
"Where are we heading to?" Major Clarent asks. Henriette really only has one choice, though. She ruled out running home to her team immediately. Donald is squishy, and Rose is just one woman. One woman who happens to be a biological killing machine, but Gregor will have plenty of biological killing machines onside. There's a reason that you don't let hostiles trail back to your home base. And she's scared of the cybermeme thing. She's genuinely scared. It's not something she understands. It strikes at people through normal technology and it can turn anyone on the street - anyone at all - into an enemy. Going near a NWO communications hub? No. No no no. That doesn't seem like it'll end well if any of the infected attack them while they're there. She's not going to risk spreading that thing globally.
She wants to go to ground. It makes
sense. It means they can get away from both the hostiles and the ones hunting them and that's
good. Except it's not. Going to ground means they can't act. Going to ground means Leon Gregor's plans succeed because she won't be there to stop them. So that means she can't do the sensible thing, because the sensible thing is a trap set for Major Clarent who's an efficient, sensible killing machine who understands exactly what she should do in such a situation like this. It's just a way to remove the two of them from the table.
Which means it's time to do something obvious, blatant, and bullish. WWItXD? Break out the Gordian knife and shiv an uppity Progenitor doctor.
"Major?" she asks.
"Yes?"
"Your Ragnarok Command contacts. You say you wouldn't dive an infected individual on your own. Would you do it with them backing you up and running defense?"
"It would be a more viable option," the older woman says, non-committal.
It's the best she'll get. Henriette grins like a shark and selects the base where she notes there are Void Engineer marines. "Well, if we can grab one of the infectees, I think the cybermeme might know exactly how it found you. And it might even know if it was deliberately released." She grits her teeth. "If you're feeling up to it," she adds.
"Such goading won't work."
"I had to try," Henriette says, shifting gears. Please, she thinks to herself. She doesn't pray to anything in particular, because the Computer proved unworthy of her. But she still pleads. Please let Director Belltower's stuff with the Void Engineers come through. Because it'd really suck if they shot her when she was hoping they'd stop any of Gregor's assets shooting her. "If we're going to get to Yokohama Naval Base, though, we'll need to stop their pursuit."
"Already on it." Major Clarent says. She unpacks her rifle, leans it out the side window, and aims. Henriette flinches when she fires-the report is eerily silent, rather than the typical window-shattering roar of heavy weaponry. She glances in the rear-view mirror, and sees the TSMP armored van and the North Korean commandeered Hummer take fatal wounds in a split-second. Even with her ADEI highlighting its ballistic path and giving her the chance to replay the shot, she can't believe what happens. The engine block of the vehicle is designed to resist standard small arms fire, not custom-tooled antimateriel rounds fired with brutal precision. The round punches straight through, goes through the frame of the vehicle in a spray of burning depleted uranium, and tears out one of the run-flat wheels for good measure. The round, now only the perfect silver toroid of the smart-metal core, skips off the asphalt, leaving a slight divot, and slams itself unerringly into the Hummer's engine block as well. Even as it does, the North Koreans are moving, reactions faster than any normal human's, faster than even many cyborgs.
The driver of the armored van loses control instantly, smashing into the divider wall of the highway at high speeds. Even if nobody's dead-and Henriette hopes so-they'll have enough broken bones and damaged equipment that any chance of them being useful is nonexistent. The North Koreans don't fare much better-but their personal excellence is enough-it drove their stolen vehicle past its limits, and now it drives them beyond human limits. Their stolen Hummer careens into the side-but they don't seem to notice. Most of them of them leap out the windows of the vehicle in sprays of safety glass and hit the ground running, even as the HV round carves through the civilian vehicle, barely even slowing. One of the passengers is too slow and too unlucky, and he tumbles as he rolls out, hit. A round which would have torn a man in half leaves only a neat hole, and he staggers for a moment, trying to draw a weapon, until Major Clarent follows up with a two-round burst. His head snaps back as if punched and he falls instantly. The other North Koreans draw weapons-either stolen TSMP gear or AK-clones, and fire back, rounds careening off Henriette's borrowed supercar.
One of them goes for another vehicle, shooting the driver with a precise suppressed pistol shot, then dropkicks the windshield in, landing in the driver's seat, twisting around to open the car door, and dumping the corpse of its former owner out. Three more of the North Koreans pile in. The last two look around and seek to hijack their own vehicle-but Major Clarent fires at them and they go for cover behind the crashed TSMP van for the moment.
The highway erupts into chaos. Cars crash into each other as they try to get out of the gunfight.
"Are you planning to get us closer so we can do the snatch?" Major Clarent asks, firing at the stolen sportscar, which somehow manages to turn and maneuver so that the majority of the burst misses and the rest only shatter a rear-view mirror or leave tears in the bodywork. The driver is very good, Henriette thinks. Not as good as her, but still very good. Probably at least as good as a en-woh super agent. But then again, this is some sort of North Korean hit team. It makes sense they'd send their best. "I would recommend against it. Those rounds are not conventional-they have performance similar to Technocratic HV ammunition. It would be... difficult to make precision shots at this time."
Henriette shakes her head. "Not unless we can get one infectee alone. I think it'll try to have its friends tell it where we're going, and then start looking for eligibles there. So next time they won't be chasing us." She looks at the carnage. "How long can we expect a Technocratic response to take?"
"Unsure. If I was planning their operation, I would have set up at least one distraction and have allies to confuse communications at this point." Clarent says. Both sides are using silent weapons-It's surreal, watching a gunfight play out but with not a single report of gunfire, just the results-the sounds of metal impacting concrete or asphalt, the sounds of vehicles losing control as they see what's happening and the animal hindbrain takes over from reason, the sound of engines revving.
Henriette's ADEI projects a proximity alert suddenly, and she slams her foot on the accelerator even harder and swerves just as the sportscar seems to materialize out of nowhere and barely misses her. "Fuck!" she swears. Those sons of bitches infiltrated her vision somehow, displacing their image with RD trickery. Without the mental infiltration, the ghost car they were hiding as is obviously fake-only about as good as a basic holodisguise. It'd hold up against a spy satellite or someone not paying attention, but not against Iterators.
"They're good." Major Clarent says. She fires again into the vehicle-but despite putting several rounds into the sports car, none of them seem to hit anything vital, as if by sheer bad luck. "They didn't expect the illusion to last for more than a split-second. Probably multiple high-threat level RDs, very few 'consors.'" Clarent guesses. "Good teamwork-they'd have to have it if they were capable of getting a mindhack to last even this long against defensive countermeasures."
Henriette sees another sports-car screaming in at absurd, engine-melting speeds to attack her and realizes that they're even better than that. She sends a command to the electro-reactive armor in the vehicle as reflex, and guesses right. The passenger leaps towards them in an impossible, twisting jump. There is a loud zap and the smell of ozone, and he falls off, limbs juddering, out of control. The fire against them redoubles-probably for them to save their comrade-and she can see the second car slow to pick the North Korean commando up. She has her ADEI roll the window down, and draws the pistol she took from Major Clarent's safehouse anyways. She remembers what Harlan taught her about one-handed shooting, combines it with some hastily-modified weapons targeting programs-all that piloting her own body has paid off at least a little bit, she thinks grimly, and fires a couple of shots at the driver. She can't count on Major Clarent for everything, after all. It's the first time she's shot at someone in anger without the distance of a war machine to help with it. She doesn't know what she should feel.
Most of her shots go harmlessly into the vehicle, tearing upholstery or blowing pointless holes in the sleek body of the vehicle. One of them hits the driver in the arm, and he looks at her. His expression is dead and blank. Less human than even a HITMark. The blood welling from the wound stops near-instantly, and he doesn't seem to even notice the injury. He just redoubles his attempts to recover his comrade. 15 minutes, Henriette thinks. Just 15 more minutes, and they'll be there. 15 more minutes surviving this ambush. And hopefully picking up an infectee so they can deal with the meme-virus. Easier said than done, especially with five angry North Korean commandos and whatever the meme-thing knows.
Highway to the Danger Zone:
Right, so because I've had issues with updating not nearly often enough recently, I decided to write up a relatively short update here. Right now, Henriette and Major Clarent are going to a US naval base in Japan, which happens to be basically chock full of classified units nobody can talk about (i.e. Iteration X). So what exactly are your plans to actually get there given that you're likely to have to deal with ambushers and the North Koreans?
[ ] Take out their vehicles again and take the direct route. Useful, unless some of them can teleport.
[ ] Force them to drop their jamming, then emergency extract (Corr 3). Fast, but vulgar-and it might require a bit of a fight.
[ ] Get communications back with the Technocracy so you can call in some friends. You might be able to win a fight like that.
[ ] Find out how they're tracking you and spoof it, then take an alternate route out.
[ ] Write-In.
