The Hellas Find Read online

  The Hellas Find

  A Fox Meridian Novel

  By Niall Teasdale

  Copyright 2018 Niall Teasdale

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Part One: Martians

  Part Two: Astraeus

  Part Three: The Spy Who Came In

  Part Four: The Mines of Mars

  Part Five: A Solitary Man

  Part Six: The Tentacle Monsters Are Coming!

  Part One: Martians

  New York Metro, 13th February 2062.

  Black clouds hung over the Brooklyn Sprawl like a blanket. A sodden, cold blanket. It was a little too warm for snow, but the rain was coming down thick and heavy. Long ago, it had seeped through Fox Meridian’s clothes and found its way to her skin. She did not really care, having turned off her tactile sensors, but the drips from her near-white fringe were annoying as they fell into her eyes.

  She was sitting on the top floor of an apartment building which had become disused. Maintenance had stopped, the roof had collapsed, and now even the sprawlers refused to occupy it. She was there because in the rather better maintained structure across what had once been Nostrand Avenue, people were up to no good. She had been watching the place for the last twenty-four hours, aside from a four-hour break she had taken during the day. She was uniquely suited to this kind of stakeout, because she was a machine. Literally. There was not an organic component in her body. Her mind was a software emulation of what had once been a human brain, now running on a quantum computer system in a robotic body. She looked the same as she always had, but she was not. Sometimes, the advantages of her new status considerably outweighed the disadvantages. Like being able to turn off her sense of touch so she could not feel the rivulets of water running down her spine.

  ‘Remind me to talk to Jackson about the waterproofing on these suits,’ Fox said silently.

  ‘Perhaps it would be more effective if you were wearing the helmet,’ Kit, Fox’s AI assistant, replied. Kit was running on another of the quantum cores in Fox’s chest. Or this instance of Kit was; other instances were elsewhere, doing other things.

  ‘Maybe. I suppose it’s not meant to be sealed. Have you seen Marie’s photos from Chicago yet?’

  It was a sudden shift in the conversation, but Kit handled it smoothly. ‘Yes. My physical instance has seen them. They look good. I may even purchase some of the designs myself, though I don’t quite have Marie’s figure.’

  ‘Her boobs you mean.’ Fox smiled. Even though the conversation was happening purely between two programs, some outward reaction was not going to be noticed and felt necessary.

  ‘While it is true that Marie’s breasts appear bigger than mine, that is primarily due to her being physically bigger than me. My avatar’s breasts are, relatively, larger. Marie has actually indicated a degree of envy for their pert and invitingly full quality.’

  Fox’s smile broadened. ‘Has she now? She was probably just trying to get you into bed with her and Sam.’

  ‘My analysis suggests that was about fifty-five percent of the reason for the compliment. I am waiting for that foursome, however. She won’t tempt me before then.’

  ‘I’m sure when Terri designed you, she had no intention of you holding out for foursomes.’ Fox frowned. ‘Maybe that didn’t come out quite right.’ She was talking because no matter how suited she was to stakeouts, Fox still found them boring. They were boring, until they were far from boring. ‘That’s a new face.’ Fox zoomed her vision in on the face in question, a man walking toward the building she was watching.

  ‘That is Richard Metzner,’ Kit replied after a short pause. ‘The face recognition match is ninety-eight percent. Richie to his friends, and those friends are primarily United Anarchy activists. Mister Metzner is on NIX and UNTPP watch lists. He is currently believed to be in Germany, which is obviously incorrect.’

  Metzner was a tall, heavily built man with bedraggled, black, shoulder-length hair. His eyes were a deep blue, and cold as winter in the Antarctic. He was moderately good-looking, but Fox doubted many women, or men, would touch him with a ten-foot pole: the man looked like his favourite hobby was strangling kittens. He was dressed in black: black jeans, black shirt, and a leather jacket which looked a little wrong, like it had armour in the lining. Fox was also sure there was a weapon hidden away under it.

  Kit popped a window into Fox’s vision field. Metzner was not a nice man. United Anarchy did not generally have specific roles they assigned to people, but Metzner was viewed as being primarily a hitman.

  ‘Great,’ Fox said. ‘We still have connectivity to HQ?’

  ‘Of course.’ One of the things Palladium had done to assist their policing efforts in the Sprawl areas was to run a series of drone patrols. The machines were semi-autonomous, high-flying, and could stay in the air for days. They watched the streets and buildings below, looking for signs of trouble – one of them had spotted the odd goings-on on Nostrand Avenue, for example – and provided network connectivity to areas in regions where there was basically none normally.

  ‘I want four RRUs here as soon as they can get them. Task them with containment. No one leaves this area once we get started. Send a message to Candler through the usual channels saying that we have a possible UA cell. Further indicate that I’m going in immediately since I believe there to be a public safety aspect to the situation.’

  ‘Is there a public safety aspect?’

  ‘Just looking at Metzner’s résumé, yes. He’s probably in the metro to kill someone, and I’m not going to give him the opportunity.’

  ‘Messages sent. The Rapid Response Units will be here in twelve minutes.’

  Fox nodded. ‘Let’s hope that’s fast enough.’

  ~~~

  Fox was at ground level when the four black killbots flew in from the east. Having tapped the overhead drone to inform her of their imminent arrival, Fox left the dispersal of the RRUs to Kit, drew her pistol from its holster on her right thigh, and headed for the door of the target building.

  Once upon a time, the place had been a shop amid a row of shops with apartments over them. Brick-built and two storeys, the roofline was sort of crenelated. Up on the second floor, three windows were now covered in wooden boards. At ground level, the steel shutter over the shopfront was still in place and down. It looked a lot like it would be impossible to open, in fact. Beside it was an ordinary door, but that door was still in place. To the left, the neighbouring door was gone, as was the window and shutter of what had once been a barber’s shop according to fading signage. The drone’s view of the building showed that it went back a fair way, the upper floor a little shorter than the bottom one. There was an alley back there, but a couple of RRUs would secure that.

  Fox fixed her aim on the door’s lock and fired. The heavy slug smashed through the mechanism and blew pretty much any chance of anyone missing Fox’s entry, but she did not especially care. The roar of ducted engines behind her told her that the RRUs were settling into place as she kicked the door open and marched in.

  ‘Police!’ Fox yelled. ‘This building is under police interdiction. Put down any weapons you may have and prepare to be arrested.’ It was a waste of time. She was pretty sure that there was going to be resistance. She was fairly sure that the people here were selling weapons to the sprawlers. Illegal weapons. It was not like someone had to climb through huge hoops to get a legal weapon, but they did generally have to provide some ID, and that was something sprawlers often had trouble with.

  Ahead of her was a corridor. Two doors on the right, a third straight ahead at the end of the hall. Someone carrying a fairly modern personal defence weapon burst out of the nearest door. The PDW was a bullpup design, basically a caseless sub-machine gun, an
d it barely had time to rise toward her before Fox fired, punching a big hole in the gunman’s chest and dropping him back into the front room. Fox followed him, darting quickly in and rapidly scanning the interior. The front-of-shop area had been turned into a bedroom, though the bed was a sleeping bag on a sagging, ancient mattress. Light came from a small electric lamp; they had enough resources to charge batteries, it seemed. There was no one else there and the man lying on the floor with blood pouring out of him saw her weapon moving his way and threw his own weapon out of reach.

  ‘Good man,’ Fox said. ‘Wait there and I’ll get you some medical assistance. Or you can crawl away and die.’ She turned without waiting for an answer and stepped back out into the corridor.

  The door at the end was open and there was a big man in combat fatigues standing in it, holding a shotgun level. Whoever he was, he was not the kind of man who fired a shotgun very often. There were three massive bangs as the weapon discharged as fast as he could pull the trigger. Plaster exploded from the wall to Fox’s left and from the ceiling. Fox fired back, the round blasting through his chest and throwing gore into the room beyond. That one was probably not going to be needing medical assistance.

  Moving forward, she slammed open the second door on the right. No occupants, but a lot of guns. Crates of the things. Shotguns, PDWs, and handguns. Nothing explosive. Nothing with a really huge calibre. They were all weapons designed for personal defence, purportedly. Sure, you could murder someone with them, but they were marketed for stopping that happening to you. The quantity simply did not make much sense either, unless the objective was just to arm as many sprawlers as possible. But then why was what amounted to a UA assassin here?

  Turning again, she stepped out, walked down the corridor, and then stepped over the man she had shot. She dropped to one knee and, eyes still on the room, checked his pulse. Alive, just barely. ‘Kit, we’re going to need a full squad out here, with paramedics and at least one emergency evac unit.’

  ‘I’ve put the request through,’ Kit replied. ‘Do I need to remind you that you are not in your combat frame?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m wearing body armour.’

  ‘Without the helmet.’

  ‘Do I second-guess your assistanting?’

  ‘There is no such word. I’ve made my comment. If you end up restored from your backup, that’s your problem.’

  Fox smiled to herself and considered her next move. She was in what had apparently been set up as a kitchen. She doubted that had been its original purpose; kitchens did not routinely have stairs leading up from them. There was a portable gas stove, however, along with pots and pans, and buckets for carrying water from wherever the local supply was. Living in the sprawls was barely living. She would have preferred to head out into the wilderness areas in the protectorates, if she had ever been faced with needing to. The communities out there could be almost civilised. Not that she could do it now, not without a good source of power and the services of a robotics mechanic anyway.

  She still had not found Metzner, so she headed for the stairs. If he had gone out the back door, he would have been downed by one of the RRUs by now, so he had to be upstairs. She was guessing at two or three rooms on the upper floor, maybe a fourth if there was an old bathroom. There was a door at the top of the stairs and she slammed through it, accelerated perceptions taking in the corridor beyond and the man holding a PDW at the far end. She dropped and rolled, but four of the slugs still hit her chest and back. Only one of those hit hard enough for her to really feel it, and her synthetic skin took the hit without real complaint. Rolling upright, she fired and blood exploded from his back. He looked confused for an instant before his eyes rolled back and he was falling.

  Rising to her feet, Fox kept her eyes on the open door at the end of the corridor and moved to the first of two on her right. Pushing through, she found herself looking at another bedroom, this one occupied by two women and three children, all of them huddled against the wall under the window. They were terrified, but they were silent. Fox looked them over briefly and then moved back into the corridor. They would stay right where they were, and she would see to it that they were medically checked out and fed before this was over.

  The next door had once led to a bathroom, but all the fittings had been ripped out and replaced with battered mattresses. There was no one in the room, but there were a couple of weapons lying in plain view. That left one room; Fox went into it with her weapon raised, taking in the scene in an instant.

  Metzner had a hostage, a terrified teenage girl. Blonde and blue-eyed, and cute if you discounted the ragged clothes and smudged face; Metzner was holding her to his chest, trying his best to keep his body covered. She was not making a sound, but her eyes screamed for help. The ten-millimetre automatic in his hand was aimed at her head, but she was a good six inches shorter than he was, and that gave a fairly clear view of Metzner’s head. Still…

  ‘Let her go, Metzner,’ Fox said. ‘You let her go, and I take you in without perforations.’

  ‘You let me go, and I leave her brains in her skull,’ Metzner replied. Fox was not sure where the accent came from. Germany? Maybe Eastern Europe somewhere. It was not American.

  ‘I have four armed killbots outside this building. How far do you think you’re going to get?’

  His eyes tightened. ‘Lower the gun, or I shoot her now.’ Fox seemed to consider for a moment, and then her pistol was lowered toward her hip. Metzner was not focusing on it enough to see how it was being lowered. ‘This must be my lucky day,’ he said, and his own gun began to move, swinging out toward Fox. There was a sound which was not really like a gun being fired. It was a sharp crack, the sound of something being accelerated past the speed of sound by a powerful magnetic field. The back of Metzner’s skull exploded, painting the wall behind him in red and meaty-grey with bone-fragment texturing. His arm slipped from around the girl and she stood there, silent but shivering, as he slid to the floor behind her.

  ‘You’re okay now,’ Fox said. ‘Just… don’t look behind you.’ Of course, it was entirely the wrong thing to say. Fox stepped forward and caught her when she fainted.

  Airborne, Southbound from New York Metro, 14th February.

  ‘We’d have liked Metzner alive,’ Candler said. He was a virtual image, an animated video, but not a 3D representation. Fox was in a jet heading for Washington. The appointment had been booked for weeks and she had forgotten all about it while she was working the stakeout. It had been a little annoying to discover that no one else had.

  ‘He was threatening the life of an innocent,’ Fox replied. ‘I took the decision to save her rather than whatever intelligence you could have got out of him.’

  ‘She was just a–’

  ‘If you finish that sentence, Blake, I don’t think we can remain friends.’ Calling Blake Candler a friend was probably pushing things more than a little. He was her opposite in NIX, liaison between the civilian police contractor and the National Intelligence Executive. He was a colleague, and one she did not entirely trust, but they got on better than Fox had expected.

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. We’re going over everything we can find in the place, but so far we think you’re right. The people were UA operatives. We’ve suspected them for over a year, but they’re not major players and this doesn’t seem to have been an “official” UA operation. It’s that damn Doomsday meme again. They were trying to arm the sprawlers ahead of the coming world conflict.’

  ‘UA and that meme mesh nicely. You’re going to get a lot of UA members infected with it. The weaponry was just wrong for some sort of UA assault operation. It didn’t feel right. You can class it as terrorism if you like, but–’

  ‘Nope. My bosses say we get what we can from what we’ve got, but it’s a civilian, illegal arms, purely criminal matter. I was told to bitch a little about Metzner, but we’re happy to leave this to Palladium.’

  ‘Thanks. It does mean we have an unknown number of semi-milit
ary weapons on the streets in the Brooklyn Sprawl. That’s going to be annoying.’

  ‘I’d imagine. What are you doing in Washington anyway?’

  Fox gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘The Committee on Non-human Rights decided they finally want me to show up and be annoyed at them.’

  Candler’s image frowned. ‘What for? Aren’t they supposed to be reporting their findings next week?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I know enough people on the committee to know that the final report is already being compiled. I am not best pleased. Then again, it’s politics. I’m never best pleased when I have to deal with politics.’

  ‘Well, best of luck.’

  ‘I think “best of tolerance” would be a better blessing. I’m going to need that more than luck.’

  Baltimore–Washington Metro.

  The Capitol was just the same as it had ever been, and the hearing rooms had changed only in being better rigged for media and computer connections. The latter had been somewhat controversial at one point, until someone had pointed out that smartphones could give anyone access to the entire internet. Now everyone and everything was plugged into the net, but the setting remained the same. Audience seating at the back, moderately crammed today since someone had apparently told the media that Tara Meridian was to be giving evidence. Then there was a barrier, tables for the witness and their counsel, and the raised area where the committee members sat behind their hardwood pulpit. It reminded Fox of criminal courts, and she imagined that it had been set up very much on that basis. ‘Here we sit in judgement upon you, the lowly witness.’ Fox viewed the entire event as a pompous waste of time.

  Still, Fox did have some people there who were definitely on her side. Jackson Martins sat to one side of her, not close enough to speak to, but he was there. He was there, in fact, to provide technical support if such was required. He had been doing that a lot for the committee who were mostly fairly technically illiterate. Terri, his daughter, was in the audience. Terri had been ultimately responsible for the Akh project which had resulted in Fox becoming an infomorph and she was one of MarTech’s best AI programmers; she had a strong interest in the proceedings. And up there behind the dark wood, Naomi Lind sat as part of the committee. She had been inducted into it as an advocate of non-human rights, because a lot of the other members were not. Originally anyway. Many had been persuaded.