Chương 41: Dispatched

The thing on my heels took the stairs the way I would have taken them, three at a stride, cutting the inside of the turn to steal the half-second, and that was how I knew it wasn't an Enforcer. Enforcers chase the floor plan. They walk the route the System drew for them and they kill whatever the route hands over, and you beat them by being somewhere the route never thought to send them. This one had thrown the route away.

It was chasing me, up through the dead top of the Service Tiers where I'd gone to pick my ground, and it ran like something that had spent a long time studying just how I ran.

"Carole." Errata, in my ear. She had quit pretending at calm a while back; she just talked, fast, because my hands were busy.

"That's not patrol stock. Don't waste a read on its plating. There's nothing on it worth the name. Watch how it takes the corner instead." I'd already watched. That was the problem. It cut the corner the same side I would have. I broke up and left at the next landing, out onto the gantry over the stilled conveyor, because up-and-left was the stupid choice, and the stupid choice was the one thing a hunter this prepared might not be holding ready for me.

It was on the gantry before my second stride, set square between me and the stair I wanted, and it wasn't even winded. It had my measure like a mechanic who'd had the same part down on the bench twice and could do it a third time in the dark. [Asset profile: non-conforming. A dedicated remediation is in attendance, for your convenience. Please remain available.]"In attendance," I said.

"It's being courteous. That's the only courteous part of it." Then the other note came in under the dry, the one I'd learned to hear past it.

"It came pre-loaded with you. I knew the class the second it stood up out of the dispatch order: we never made many of them, and we made each one around a single file. Yours is the file it's carrying. It doesn't want the Tiers. It wants you, specifically, and it has had time to learn the shape of how you move." So I'd have to stop moving like myself.

I gave it the Veyr vent first: thumbed the regulator and dumped a white shriek of pressure across the gantry, the move that had cleared me a dozen rooms in the dead Tiers below. It was already stepping out of where the pressure would be, before the valve had finished opening. I went low and inside instead, for the knee housing, the cheap reliable kill that had never once let me down against patrol stock. It gave me the knee.

Let me have it, almost, turned a half-degree so the blade skated off the housing into nothing, then brought its other arm down across the back of mine, and for one bad second I was folded over my own dead angle with its weight learning me.

"It is not fighting you," Errata said, and there was no joke anywhere near it now.

"It's reading you. Every trick that ever worked, it already knows the answer to. The loadout won't carry this one."

"Then what does."" And." She had never left me sitting on an and for long.

"Objection logged, at volume, because the answer is going to cost you the hand. It knows the Auditor core has to cycle. It knows that the second you spend the discharge you're a woman with a dead arm for a count of three, and it has built its whole night around those three counts. So give them to it. Spend the discharge. Let it count you empty. Then be the thing standing in the gap it cleared to wait in."

Nobody else who'd ever pried a core out of a corpse could have done what came next, and it wasn't the core that did it. The core was only the cost. The read was mine: the seam wasn't in its build, it was in how sure it had let itself get of mine. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. I tore loose, found the angle, and fired the discharge into its center mass.

It shed the worst of the hit exactly as its file on me promised I'd aim, rolling the kinetic off its shoulder line, throwing its whole guard to the side it had always known the discharge would come from. My arm died on schedule. The core wound down into its small empty hum, three counts from doing anything at all, and the Hunter felt the silence where my power had been and did the one thing it had been grown to do. It closed in to collect the spent thing.

Which set the open side of it, the side it had given away to brace against a discharge already gone, a hand's width off my off hand. And my off hand still worked. I put the blade in under the seeker array, where the plating gapped to let the optics see, and leaned on it with everything the dead arm had nothing left to give. It came apart against the gantry rail in one long unmaking, and I was still standing on the gantry, which was the whole difference between us.

For a moment there was only the runoff and my own breathing, which hadn't agreed to slow down yet.

"That." Errata, fast.

"Under the optics. The seeker lattice, the thing it read you with. Get it out before it cools." I worked my good hand in and pulled. It came free with a sound like a tooth leaving a jaw. [HARVEST: Seeker-Lattice. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 78%.]"Seventy-eight," I said.

"Bank it. Not tonight, and not into that arm. Tonight it rides along and keeps its opinions to itself." I sat back on my heels in the wet and took the count it always let me have before the itemizing started.

"Net," she said, when the count ran out.

"One Hunter-class lattice, the only one of its make I'm likely to lay eyes on this year. Against." The gentleness left it once the math started; it always did.

"A right hand you won't close past half until morning. The quiet week you'd promised yourself. And this." [Anomaly profile: 44/100. Correction class under review.]"It went up," I said.

"It went up. You killed the thing it sent to bring the number down, and the number climbed instead. Killing upward doesn't cool you, Carole. It buys you a worse address."

"Under review." I read it off the box twice, to be sure of it.

"That part's new."

"That part's the newest thing in the room." For once she didn't dress the read up at all.

"You've been a problem the System could answer out of stock. You just proved you aren't, so it stops answering out of stock. Somewhere under us a clearance just turned its face toward you. Something classed. Something that will never once have to take a stairwell three at a time, because up there the stairs open on their own for the people it sends."

I looked up the dead throat of the Tiers, to the gate where the Service stopped and the bright began: the Operant Levels, clearance-lit and watched and awake, every meter of it ground I had no standing to walk on. Down was the hold, forty people in a blind spot who went a little quieter every time my number climbed. And down was finished. I'd just proved the thing built to hunt me could run me down anywhere I had already been.

"You're not going down," Errata said. It wasn't a question. She had my decision in hand before I'd finished letting myself have it. A partner, the whole way through.

"No." I worked the dead hand into my jacket, where it wouldn't have to be looked at, and stood.

"I'm going where it isn't cleared to follow. Yet."

"That's also where it lives."

"I know." I started up.

"That's the other half of why."