Land
of the Free
01.01
The searchlight beam bathed the rain soaked alley briefly, soon moving on its monotonous survey of the city. It failed to register anything unusual in a beat up '22 Toyo-Chevrolet van parked by the curbside.
Randall "Crankshaft" Johnson readjusted his Firestone baseball cap and leaned forward on the steering wheel to observe the departing halogen search light beam. This West Seaway Drive, Brooklyn, was a real dump. Grime-covered warehouses populated this area of the city down by the East River. Debris from abandoned buildings cluttered the street. What little illumination was left from broken lampposts reflected weakly off the wet pavement. This is one hell of a place to build a research lab, Randall thought, absently chewing on a toothpick. Unless one wants to keep it secret.
The building looked just like all the other warehouses in this area. Three floors, with a loading dock area on the back. There were no signs to identify the place as Norcross Biomedical Research lab, but the building number, 1689, identified it as their target.
Their employer, this Weir guy, had provided them with a blueprint of the place, showing guard postings, camera and sensor locations and other data which should prove vital to their mission. Thanks to Svenson's shrewd negotiation skills, he had also provided them with this vehicle to facilitate their insertion and extraction from the site. Randall had gone over every inch of the vehicle, making sure it was in top working condition. The exterior was rough and shabby, but it would suit their purposes perfectly.
Randall checked his watch. It was almost 1:30 AM. They had been parked here for over two hours and this was the only patrol they had seen. The street was deserted, except for the occasional bum, staggering drunkenly into one of the abandoned buildings nearby, presumably to find a place to sleep.
"We should get started, 'Shaft," "Killer" Caine said. The man was always fretting and fidgeting. Patience was not one of his virtues, and he was always worried and worked up about something. He tended to babble incessantly when anxious, which annoyed Randall, as the man was usually nervous all the time.
"Settle down, Cornelius," Randall said. "We wait for the solos to give the go-ahead."
"Don't call me that," Caine replied, frowning.
Randall chuckled softly. He knew the man disliked being called by his given name. Still, he thought that it was a bad idea for a medic to call himself "Killer". It didn't help to inspire confidence in his abilities as a healer, for one thing. But the thin, cockeyed man was good at his job and, strangely enough, was very cool under battlefield conditions. His restlessness all but disappeared once he had something to do.
But tonight he'd be insufferable, as he had been relegated to babysitting the netrunner and providing cover for the getaway, along with Randall.
Speaking of which, Randall thought. "You okay back there, Tiny?" He said, looking through the rearview mirror at the man sitting behind him.
"Certainly," the Netrunner replied. Tiny Tim Smalls was anything but. Nearly 6 ft. 7 inches tall, the black man was a towering colossus. Grafted muscles bulged and flexed beneath his ebony skin in places where none should have been. A linebacker or a professional bodybuilder would have looked slim beside his massive bulk. Metallic interface plugs glittered at his right temple and at the back of his shaven head, where an interface cable connected to a small cyberdeck on his lap. An implanted slit-like visor concealed his eyes, giving him an even more intimidating appearance, robbing him of all human emotion revealed through the eyes.
His manner contrasted sharply with his appearance, though. He was very polite and refined. The son of a successful corporate executive, Timothy had received an excellent education. His gift for computer science, his overwhelming curiosity and his lack of trust and dislike of the modern corporate mentality had led him to a career as a hacker and netrunner.
Maybe I should work out, Randall thought, patting his overweight belly. Nah! Chicks dig me, he thought, readjusting his cap over his balding pate. What was left of his hair was kept long and tied in a ponytail. A short beard made his prominent nose less conspicuous. His left eye was a synthetic cyberoptic, whose iris and pupil were designed to resemble a car tire. The word "Firestone" could be made out over the iris, if one looked carefully. Yep. Crankshaft wasn't very attractive, but he did know what the girls liked. And the oversized Mr. Studd implant was certainly an asset to his technique.
Randall's love, aside from women, was cars. Any vehicle, really, as long as it moved really fast. If it had a motor, Randall could build it, fix it, customize it and drive it. Really fast.
Even after having checked out the van this morning, Randall continued to monitor its status through the electronic diagnostic equipment built into his cyberarm, which was plugged into the vehicle's cybercomputer via a pair of interface cables. Everything from fuel level to tire pressure was displayed in the Times Square Marquee display in his cyberoptic. Every system was in optimal performance condition, so they would just have to wait.
"Bravo, this is Alpha," Myers' voice came in on the tactical channel. "We are go. Repeat: we are go. Over."
"Roger that, Alpha," Randall replied. "You're up, Tiny."
-----o-----
Tiny pressed the 'go' button and everything went black. There was the familiar falling sensation, identical to that experienced in the state between wakefulness and sleep, when the ground seems to drop beneath your feet.
Then he was there.
Sight returned. Tiny stood in pitch blackness, surrounded by lit candles. Brightly colored three-dimensional objects floated in the air beside him. It was technically referred to as the Workspace, the modern equivalent to the 20th century's computer desktop. Users could select their own wallpapers to customize their Workspace, from Tim's austere candlelit void, to endless landscapes of every conceivable appearance, from the real to the imagined, stretching into the horizon as far as the eye could see. Tiny called it his sanctum sanctorum. The Holy of Holies, for here he was as a god.
Moving with practiced ease, Tim went right to work. He touched several icons, activating the programs needed. Several screens opened up in midair. Decryption programs were loaded and codebreakers booted up. The netrunner touched another object, which turned into a control panel. Smalls had routed his cyberaudio implant through his cyberdeck interface. He opened up a link through the tactical channel.
"Alpha, this is NetOps. I'm commencing my run."
"Roger," Myers' voice responded. "We're in position, waiting for your signal." Tim touched an icon shaped as a telephone. He hit the speed dial button, connecting to the Net. The darkness of the Workspace became a tunnel of scintillating colors, simulating movement at vertiginous speed. The Jersey.net icon appeared as a large building before him. Tim frowned and touched another icon beside him. The Jersey.net building became just another window floating in the air, as the darkness of the Workspace returned. Smalls would maximize the view later, once the actual run began. This was just the preliminary phase: gaining access to the net under an anonymous account and bouncing the signal around a couple of satellites, to muddy the trail, before the real work began.
Tiny activated another program, and a crystalline plate crisscrossed with a neon grid materialized in the air at torso level. Glowing characters marked each square in the virtual keyboard.
Tim reached out and touched a shining disk-shaped icon. He smiled, as the first notes of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" began to play. Then, with alternating keystrokes and subvocalized commands, Tiny Tim went to work.
-----o-----
Tim flew over the neon landscape of the NeoYork city netgrid. Now that the real work had begun, the hacker had expanded the view to cover the entire Workspace, so that he seemed to fly over a virtual metropolis as he scrolled through the three-dimensional city image map. One could choose to view the map as a hyperlink list, but this way was more fun. He typed in the LDL address and moved directly toward his destination. The netrunner reached out to touch the shoebox shaped icon that represented the Norcross Pharmaceutical subgrid.
Norcross Biomedical Research had turned out to be a small, privately held corporation specializing in surgical nanotechnology. The owner was listed as Mr. Edwin Lesh of San Diego, SoCal. Tiny had performed a thorough search of the San Diego grid and had found no listings for an Edwin Lesh or other references to Norcross Biomedical. All other avenues of net research had come up empty.
Tim entered the access codes provided by Weir. The Workspace became a deep, soothing blue, with the Norcross logo in red letters in the distance. Multiple new icons floated in space within easy reach. Smalls reached for one of the open windows beside him and activated his codebreaker program. The program defeated the password protection routines and bypassed code authentication. Tiny ran a diagnostic utility to monitor the system's response to his probe. None was detected.
The codebreaker, the culmination of the netrunner's programming skills, ran to completion. Tim obtained root access, gaining complete control of the subgrid. The Workspace changed subtly as new icons appeared, reflecting Tiny's status as system administrator. The codebreaker program installed a "back door" into the password verification program, so that he could return later, if necessary, without having to break back in.
Tiny ran a quick directory listing, and selected the appropriate icon to summon the security camera controls and the building's electrical systems schematics. The camera submenu appeared on the right hand wall of the Workspace, while the blueprint diagrams of the building occupied the font wall. The camera system was a fairly standard setup. Tiny smiled. The wonders of modern digital media would make it very easy for an expert such as himself to alter the feeds as he saw fit. Back in the 20th century, video was stored in analog magnetic tapes, which were harder to alter. Digital data, however, could be easily manipulated. Tiny called up a simple program on his deck, which started reviewing old records, changed the date and time stamps and rerouted them into the live feed monitors. The guards would only see yesterday's empty corridors and rooms on the security station's monitors.
The building's layout was identical to the blueprints Weir had provided them with. As for the building security... Drek!, Tim thought.
"Alpha, NetOps. Electronic security is not routed through the building's computer system. I can open the doors from here, but you'll have to bypass the alarm system manually."
-----o-----
Four shadows detached themselves from the darkness and convened by a door on the western side of the Norcross building.
Bjorn Svenson wore his customary mission gear. Black Kevlar-reinforced bodysuit, with a combat vest loaded with spare clips and grenades. A Kendachi monokatana II was strapped to his back, and he held a large Desert Eagle Action Express autoloader in both hands. The powerful gun was linked by a thin cable to a headset holding a transparent rectangular monocle heads-up display, which in turn was plugged into a socket at Svenson's right temple, hardwired into his nervous system.
Svenson was the team leader as far as negotiations were concerned. But during the actual missions, even though he always went along as backup, he deferred to Blake and Myers' expertise in these situations.
Myers and Blake looked like twin dark avenging angels clad in long, black leather armored trenchcoats over black shirts, trousers and combat boots. The similarity ended there, for Blake was slightly taller and heavier of build. His short cropped blond hair was tied back behind a black bandanna, and dark-tinted smartgoggles hid his eyes. He held a large, heavily customized Militech Naja 12 mm autopistol in a two-handed grip, smartlinked through induction plates in the gun's grip and the fingerless glove on his right hand. Like Svenson's weapon, the autopistol was hardwired through the man's nanoaugmented nervous system, interconnected to the smartgoggle display.
For the tenth time in as many hours, Blake ejected the pistol's magazine and visually verified the rounds loaded. Satisfied, he slammed it back into its unusual housing, in front of the trigger guard. The smartlink system immediately supplied the pertinent data into the Times Square Marquee display on his goggles.
Ammunition: 12 mm dual-purpose caseless, locked and loaded.
Rounds remaining: 10.
Barrel temperature: nominal.
Recoil compensators: on.
Laser sighting: standby.
Flashlight: off.
Smartlink system: connected.
Safety: off.
Fire mode: smart/auto.
Status: standby.
Blake squeezed the trigger. The gun's laser sight turned on, a crosshairs appeared on the goggles' heads-up display, and the laser sight and status indicators changed to ready. On its present setting, the gun would register its owner's desire to fire and would do so when the laser beam crossed over the targeting reticle. Without the need for squeezing the trigger to fire, the gun would remain better centered on its target.
Blake released the trigger and verified the silencer attachment. The silencer cylinder would suppress the pistol's noise by eliminating the sounds of the gas expansion generated when a bullet was fired. These new state-of-the-art silencers also reduced the velocity of the projectile below the speed of sound by the use of a powerful magnetic field. The development of stable room-temperature superconductors allowed for the creation of strong electromagnets by the application of small electrical currents. The reduction in the bullet's speed negated the noise of a sonic boom, but also decreased the projectile's penetrating power. This drawback was partially offset by the Naja's heavy caliber dual-purpose ammunition. Unless they ran into heavily armored opposition, they should have no problem.
Pleased with the results of his inspection, Blake raised the gun and nodded to Myers.
-----o-----
Myers drew a pen-sized power screwdriver and removed the cover of the keypad lock by the door. With practiced ease, the former Special Forces infiltration/assassination specialist hooked up two leads to several wires. He studied the readouts on a palm-sized scanner, and punched a series of keys.
John Myers' cybernetic arm moved with the same preternatural speed as his flesh and blood one did. The prosthetic limb was built over a light-weight titanium alloy endoskeleton frame. Movement was provided by a series of myomar synthetic muscle bundles. Myomar was a mixed weave of nickel/titanium alloy wires and polymer fibers: memory metals and plastics, capable of been bent and deformed, but returning to their original shape and length upon the application of an electrical current. These bundles were anchored in analogous fashion to normal muscles. They were arranged in opposing extensor and flexor counterpart pairs. Tiny nanoprocessor relay stations received afferent signals from motor neurons. In turn, the processors activated microcapacitors which stored bioelectrical energy. Polycarbon superconducting wires transmitted the electrical charge to the myomar bundles, inducing contraction. Multiple nanoprobes and minute gyroscopes relayed propioception and kinesthetic feedback to the nanoprocessors: data on position and movement, which in turn was converted into an electrical signal to the sensory neurons, providing the corresponding sensations. Nanoprobes at the fingertip plates provided tactile sensory data in the same fashion. Microservomotors assisted in fine-tuning the movements of the extremity. These emitted whirring sounds at frequencies located at the lower end of the normal hearing spectrum. These nearly subsonic sounds could be perceived by animals and sensory equipment designed to register on this scale, such as most cyberaudio enhancements. In optimal conditions with low background noise, even the naked ear could make them out.
The limb was covered by a thin, light metallic shell, reinforced and armored with ceramics and high-impact resistant polymers.
Indicator lights flashed green as Myers bypassed the alarm system. He quickly removed the electrodes and stowed the device in his trenchcoat. He reached for the pistols in his shoulder holsters with both hands. Electrosynaptic contacts were established as the induction plates on his cyberhand and left smartglove touched their mates on the handles of Myers' twin Colt Alpha-Omega 10 mm automatic guns. Smartlink systems engaged, projecting weapon data into Myers' right cyberoptic. The apparently normal eye turned into a solid chromed orb, as John activated the image enhancement option. Like Blake, he had silencers on his weapons, and used dual-purpose ammo.
"NetOps, this is Alpha. All clear. Open the door," he whispered. The microphone wire glued to his jaw registered the vibration and transmitted his words. The communication unit's receiver behind his ear relayed Tiny's response by emitting vibrations into his mastoid bone. Myers' inner ear registered these as sounds.
The door opened silently.
"Let's go," Myers said softly.
-----o-----
Blake took point, gun held in front of him in both hands. Soft rubber soles on his combat boots enabled him to advance silently into the hallway. The rest of the team, wearing similar foot gear, followed closely behind.
-----o-----
