Silent Order: Axiom Hand Read online

  The drone weighed about a hundred and eighty pounds, but March’s cybernetic arm handled that with ease. He yanked the robot off the ground, spun, and hurled the drone like a discus, its legs flailing as it tried to gain purchase.

  While March had been busy with the drone, the sniper had whirled and fled down another walkway towards the center of the factory. The drone’s center of mass missed her, but the legs raked her chest and legs. The woman lost her balance with a yell, her head clipping the railing as she went down. The drone bounced off the railing and landed with a crash on the factory floor. March sprinted towards her, gun in hand, but the sniper reacted with greater speed than he would have thought.

  She rolled to one knee, yanked one of the plasma pistols from her belt, and started shooting. March threw himself to the side. Aiming a handgun one-handed was a challenge, and doing it while under stress was even harder. Nevertheless, if March hadn’t dodged, the first shot would have drilled straight through his chest, and the second through his skull. The air around him heated up from the plasma bolts, and he squeezed off a quick pair of shots with his pistol. The bullets came nowhere near hitting the sniper, but they did force her to duck and stop shooting at March.

  The sniper pushed off the catwalk and dashed forward, coat flying behind her. As she did, March saw that the goggles had fallen away from her face. Likely they had been knocked off when she had hit the railing. March jumped to his feet and sprinted after her.

  The woman dodged around a corner, vanishing behind a machine jutting from the ceiling. March ran after her, skidded to a stop before he reached the corner, and tucked his shoulder and rolled. It seemed excessive, but his caution was proven sound an instant later as another plasma bolt shot past him. The woman stood twenty meters further down the catwalk, and she had climbed halfway up a ladder to the ceiling. March snapped his pistol up, tracking towards her, but the woman was already moving.

  As she disappeared through a hatch in the ceiling, March caught a glint of metal from her face. No, not her face, from her eyes, as if she had metallic lenses over them.

  A dark suspicion gripped March, and he sprinted forward, stopping at the base of the ladder. He edged forward and peered up the ladder, expecting the sniper to take a shot at him. But he looked up just in time to see her boots and backside (which was admittedly shapely) disappear over the lip of the well.

  He heard a throbbing noise coming from the rooftop. An engine?

  No, a helicopter rotor.

  March jumped, seized one of the ladder rungs with his metal hand, and yanked himself up. The strength of his cybernetic arm heaved him up the ladder faster than he could have managed otherwise, and he caught the last few rungs and scrambled onto the rooftop, rolling and coming to a crouch, pistol held ready.

  He looked up just in time to see the sniper jump into a waiting helicopter, which took off at once.

  The helicopter was a small two-seater with little room for cargo and no weapon mounts, likely intended to help ranchers with large herds keep watch on their cattle from the air. March caught a glimpse of the pilot. It was another woman, her eyes hidden beneath sunglasses and her head concealed beneath a heavy headset and microphone, her brown hair dancing in the blast of air from the chopper’s rotors.

  The sniper swung into the passenger seat and strapped in as the helicopter took off, and she looked down at March as she did. He got a good look at her face. It was a pretty face that would have been much prettier if she had grown her hair out.

  But her eyes held his attention.

  They were a metallic gray, and scar tissue marked the skin of her face near her eyes and on her temples, making it look as if she wore a mask. And the eyes didn’t just look metallic. They were metallic, cybernetic implants that had replaced the eyes she had been born with. If March had been closer, he knew he would have seen that the irises of her eyes looked like an intricate clockwork mechanism.

  He had seen eyes like that many times before, and he knew just what the sniper was.

  Or, rather what she had been.

  The helicopter spun away, and March tried to get a look at the sniper’s neck. There was no sign of a hive implant there, though she was far enough away that he couldn’t tell if she had a scar at the base of her skull or not. The sniper looked back at him, and March tensed, preparing himself if she tried to shoot him again.

  But the helicopter flew away, picking up speed as it gained altitude.

  March let out a long breath, flipped the safety on his pistol back on, and shoved it into his coat.

  “March?” Dredger’s voice crackled in his ear. “You still alive?”

  “Yeah.” In the chaos of the fight, March had forgotten about Dredger. “You get all that?”

  “Yup,” said Dredger. “Spooky chick with the weird eyes? You recognize her?”

  “No,” said March. “But I know what she is. Shouldn’t talk about it over the phone, though.”

  “Speaking of that, you’ve got to move,” said Dredger. “The Securitate has figured out that the shots came from the factory complex. They’ve sealed off the main gate, and they’re coming through the entrance you used. If you don’t get out of there, you’re going to get arrested.”

  “Right.” March jogged back to the hatch he had used and peered over the edge. He caught flashes of light from far below and heard a harsh voice shouting orders. The Securitate’s first responders were storming into the factory, and if March didn’t move, he was going to get arrested. Or shot. The Renarchist Republic’s Securitate struck him as the sort of police force that arranged “accidents” for inconvenient persons.

  “The north face of the building,” said March, breaking into a run as he dashed in that direction. “Any Securitate forces there?”

  “No,” said Dredger. “But there’s no way down on that side of the complex.”

  “Leave that to me,” said March, dodging around a rusting air handler. “Just wait for me there.”

  He reached the northern edge of the complex and stopped. As Dredger had warned, there was no way down. But the northern wall was a maze of pipes and ducts, spreading down in metal lines towards the ground a hundred meters below.

  March stepped off the edge of the roof and jumped.

  A massive metal duct hurtled past him as he plummeted towards the unyielding ground. March punched out with his left arm, and the cybernetic limb drove through the sheet metal of the duct. He fell another few meters, his arm ripping through the sheet metal like a knife through plastic wrap. His arm caught on a weld, and March jerked to a halt. His left arm didn’t feel pain, but his shoulder and chest and back did, and he grimaced as his muscles strained. Just as well he spent so much time lifting weights while the Tiger was in transit.

  He took a deep breath, pushed off the duct, and repeated the process, falling a few meters and then driving his cybernetic fist through the sheet metal. His shoulder and back screamed with the strain, but he went from the roof to the asphalt of the parking lot in less than a minute. Dredger’s van was idling on the street, and March sprinted across the parking lot, jumped over the fence, pulled the door open, and threw himself into the van’s passenger seat.

  “Go,” said March, trying to catch his breath.

  Dredger was already driving off before March had finished speaking. “Good God, man. Did you just punch your way down the side of a building?”

  “Yeah,” said March, glancing at the side mirror. In the distance, he saw the flash of emergency lights, but they weren’t pursuing Dredger’s van. “I don’t recommend it.”

  Dredger snorted. “Remind me to never challenge you to an arm wrestling contest.” He glanced at March’s left arm. The repeated blows through the sheet metal had shredded his glove and bracer, though it would take far more than jagged steel to damage his arm. “That’s a Machinist cybernetic arm, isn’t it?”

  March grunted. “And you thought your past was colorful.”

  Dredger snorted again. “Not like that. You were an Iron Hand?�
��

  March nodded. “And now I’m not. The arm’s useful, though.”

  “Yeah, for punching your way out of an abandoned factory,” said Dredger. “But that woman with the spooky eyes…you said she knew what she was.”

  March nodded once more.

  “Was she a Machinist drone too?” said Dredger. “I mean, a former drone? Someone who got out of the hive mind?”

  Dredger, March reflected, was quite a bit brighter than he looked.

  “I think so,” said March. “We had better talk to Tolox about it.” He glanced out the window. “Assuming we don’t get arrested first.”

  ###

  As it turned out, they didn’t get arrested.

  Tolox was massively annoyed once they returned to the warehouse base. March suspected that Tolox preferred to operate behind the scenes, doing the work of the Silent Order on Rustaril through bribes and blackmail and the occasional quiet assassination. The sort of thing March had done, chasing a sniper through an abandoned factory, was not the sort of covert operation that Tolox preferred. Yet March was an Alpha Operative, free to act as he saw fit, and he knew that Tolox cared more about results than methods.

  Her sources within the Securitate let her access transmissions from the response team at the Video Parlor, and March and Tolox listened for an hour and a half after he returned to her office. It seemed that he and Dredger had gotten away clean, and there was no mention of March, Dredger, or Dredger’s van in the reports. For that matter, the Securitate wasn’t having any luck tracking down the sniper, and no one had noticed the helicopter. Either the Securitate was massively incompetent, or Deveraux and Lorre were liberally supplying bribes to shut down the investigation as quickly as possible.

  Or, most likely, both.

  At last Tolox shut off the updates scrolling across her computer, leaned back in her desk chair, and sighed.

  “All right,” she said. “You took a risk.”

  “I did,” said March. “A calculated risk, yes, but still a risk.”

  “I don’t like risks,” said Tolox. She smirked a little. “I suppose it’s the culture of the Rustari to avoid risks, but we’re in the wrong business for them.”

  “We are,” said March. “But doing nothing is its own risk as well. If Dredger and I had waited at the Video Parlor, we might have gotten arrested. If Lorre recognized me, he wouldn’t stop at anything to eliminate me. For that matter, if I hadn’t chased the sniper, we would have even less information than we do now.”

  Tolox nodded. “You’re right. It was a risk. But it paid off, didn’t it? You found a great deal of useful information, and we’ll be able to plan our next move.”

  “Agreed,” said March. “If Lorre is working with Deveraux, then that’s almost certainly the source of what happened to Philip Reimer.”

  “Simon Lorre.” Tolox tapped her fingers together. “You’ve run into him before?”

  “More often than I would like,” said March. “He’s a Machinist agent, and he’s been involved in some high-level trouble.”

  “In other words,” said Tolox, “whatever’s going on here isn’t a sideshow. He’s one of their top operatives. The Final Consciousness wouldn’t send him to Rustaril unless they planned something big.”

  “Yeah.” March’s left hand clenched into a fist with the memory. “He’s gotten away from me twice before and killed a lot of innocent people in the process. I don’t want him to get away a third time.” He rubbed his jaw with his right hand. Stubble rasped beneath his palm. He needed a shave. “And recruiting from a local criminal organization is exactly Lorre’s style. We can assume that Maurice Deveraux’s organization is basically an auxiliary arm of the Final Consciousness now. Likely Reimer was a trial run for whatever Lorre and the Machinists have in mind.”

  “All right,” said Tolox. “But it looks like there’s a third player in the game now.”

  “The woman who shot Deveraux’s lieutenants,” said March.

  Tolox began picking off points on her bony fingers. “There are three possibilities. She was out for private revenge against someone in Deveraux’s organization. That seems unlikely, given the kind of equipment and support she had. The second possibility is that one of Deveraux’s rivals hired her to take him out. The final possibility is that she was there to assassinate Lorre.”

  “And it went bad, and she hit Deveraux’s lieutenants by mistake,” said March. “I’m not sure, but I think she was aiming for either Lorre or Deveraux. At the last minute, one of Deveraux’s men stood up and caught the shot. Sheer bad luck. I’m not certain, but I think that is what happened.” He tapped his metal fingers against the arm of the chair. “An assassin like that…I don’t think she would have missed otherwise. Not someone like her.”

  “You know her, then?” said Tolox.

  “No,” said March. “But I know what she is. Or what she used to be.” He nodded at the holodisplay. “Bring up the video.”

  Tolox tapped a few commands into her keyboard. The holodisplay showed March’s chase through the factory. Tolox sped through the playback and froze during the gunfight on the catwalk over the factory floor. The camera in his earpiece wasn’t great, and the image was blurry and pixelated. Nevertheless, it had captured a good picture of the sniper in the black coat. The coat flared around her, and the metallic glint of her eyes was visible.

  “The eyes,” said Tolox. “They’re cybernetic, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” said March. “You’ve read my file. You know I was an Iron Hand.” Tolox inclined her head. “This woman used to be an Iron Eye.”

  Tolox frowned. “I know what the Iron Hands are…”

  “Commandos,” said March. “Infiltrators. Assassins. Saboteurs. Experts in black ops. If we’re unlucky, Lorre brought a squad of them with him to Rustaril.”

  “But what exactly did the Iron Eyes do?” said Tolox.

  “Calculation,” said March, remembering.

  “Calculating what?” said Tolox with some impatience.

  March shook off the dark memories of the past. “Her eyes will be cybernetic, and her brain is fused with a powerful computer. Her perception of time is different from yours or mine because she can think much, much faster thanks to that computer. Her ocular perception is a thousand times superior to normal human eyesight, and she can see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums.” March took a deep breath. “And because of that, the Iron Eyes are supremely good at anything that requires perception and calculation. Piloting, prisoner interrogation, navigation…and long range shooting. The Final Consciousness uses them as pilots, navigators, and fire control. If you have a group of Iron Eyes linked to Machinist soldiers through the local hive mind segment, and the Iron Eyes are directing the fire…it will be a total slaughter. A hundred Machinist soldiers backed up by ten Iron Eyes can slaughter twenty times as many soldiers.”

  “But she’s not with the Machinists,” said Tolox. “Not if she tried to shoot Lorre or one of the Machinists’ local allies.”

  “No,” said March. “I think she’s like me. I didn’t see a hive implant on her neck when I was chasing her, and I didn’t see one when I checked the video.” He nodded at the hologram of the fleeing sniper. “I think she was part of the Final Consciousness, but broke away.”

  Tolox waved a finger through the woman’s image. “It’s possible the hive implant was attached elsewhere on her body. I believe it has to be affixed to either the brain stem or the spinal column, yes?”

  “It does,” said March, “but an Iron Eye’s hive implant must be at the base of the skull. The computer wraps around her cerebral cortex. That’s the only way to generate the necessary computational power for her calculations.”

  “So why is a former Iron Eye running around shooting at Machinist operatives?” said Tolox. “Revenge?”

  “Maybe,” said March. “Better guess is that she’s gone freelance. Someone hired her to shoot Lorre or Deveraux, it went bad, and she bugged out.”

  “Then who
hired our sniper?” said Tolox. “It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t any one of my people.”

  “Two possibilities,” said March. “Either one of Deveraux’s rivals wanted to get rid of him, or someone knows what Lorre is up to and wanted to shoot him.” He leaned back in the chair and frowned. “And that leaves us with two options. We investigate Deveraux and Lorre and risk tipping them off that we know they’re up to something, or we try to find who hired our sniper and make friends with them.”

  “Maybe we can do both,” said Tolox. “You were right about one thing. That little adventure of yours brought up some useful information. We…”

  Someone knocked at the office door.

  Tolox hit a key on the computer, and the display shifted to the feed from the camera over the door. March glimpsed a woman in the image, and Tolox nodded to herself and pressed the intercom button.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The door opened, and a young woman with the look of an Administrator came inside. She had the same gaunt look as most of the bureaucrats of Rustaril’s government, but her skin still had the flush of youth. March guessed her to be no more than twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. She had dark hair and wide green eyes the color of jade.

  The woman took a step into the room, saw March, and came to a stop.

  “Oh,” she said. She looked at March, looked away, and then looked back at Tolox. “I…I didn’t know you had company, Ms. Tolox. I can come back. It’s not a problem. I can…”

  “It’s all right, Revel,” said Tolox. “Jack March, meet Juliette Revel, one of my Delta Operatives. She works in the Republic’s government, but the less you know about each other, the better.”

  March rose and shook Revel’s hand. She met his eyes, licked her lips, and looked away again.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. March,” said Revel. She collected herself and looked at Tolox. “I think I found the owner of the helicopter in the video, ma’am.”