Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

There's something about gunfire that makes me meditative. I wish the lights had all gone out dramatically when the shooting started, because then I could kick in the low-light capability in my prosthetic eye and have an advantage.

An advantage I need acutely, right now. Pity I'm not gonna get it. Ah well. At least it gives me something to bitch about. Gabe always did say that what soldiers did best, was bitch. And I argued that bitching was a second, after humping packs—

Fight now, Jenny. Compose your autobiography another day.

Besides, Min-xue's getting ahead of me, and it's my turn to leapfrog his position. My brain scampers on ahead, working so hard I forget the texture of the rug under my left hand, the stickiness of blood drying on my knees. Matson always used to say your brain's your best weapon, soldier. Use it. Name your weapons. Name your enemies. Name your objectives. Use A to get through B to C. What are you gonna do?

I'm trying, Sarge. You don't have to spit in my face.

I can track the bad guys by the sound of their weapons: four of them, I think. Small-arms fire, and small caliber. Well, maybe nine millimeter. Which doesn't make me happy, of course, but at least they only have handguns, and not big handguns — however the hell they got them in here — and they're being careful about firing now. Which means their ammo is limited.

Which is all the good. Or as good as it gets, anyway. But if you were gonna smuggle in guns, why would you smuggle in nine-mils, and not a crateful of automatics? Damn. I just don't know.

I'm up on Min-xue. He lies flat as I clamber past him, a bullet flicking sawdust into my hair when I risk a peek over the top of the desk. We've worked our way one aisle over; the enemy have taken cover behind the podium and the secretary's table at the back of the stage. Which means Frye's probably dead, and possibly the secretary general, too.

Be a pity if she is. I liked her handshake, and her hair.

But why did they run for the stage when they were already standing by Xiong? And then I remember the unobtrusive uniformed security officers collapsing like so many tipped over dominos, and I curse under my breath. Well, at least I know where they got the guns. They must have had some way to hack security's palm locks. They didn't bring the guns in. They took them away.

I risk another look as Min-xue crawls past, get a glimpse of muzzle flash, and duck fast. The bullet parts my hair. Another splinters wood off the desk, but doesn't come through.

They're definitely conserving their fire. “They're good shots at this range, with pistols.”

“They would be,” Min-xue says. “They're elite.”

“And wired.”

“Yes.”

“How about some good news?”

“Is that meant to indicate that you can provide some?”

I glance over. He's laughing at me, the son of a bitch — a silent, straight-faced laugh, but the curl at the corner of his lip and the dark flash of his eyes give him away. “Hah. Don't play poker, son. Yeah, I think I can provide some. I think if we can get our hands on those guns, we can use them, too.”

A moment's silence while he considers that. “No palm locks?”

It's gotten awful quiet out there. That's not reassuring. “I think they cracked the locks.” Straining my ears until I swear I can feel them swivel, I push myself into a crouch. Min-xue gets his toes under him when he sees what I'm doing, both of us ready to push. He looks at me and I look at him.

We've got that aisle, and a bank of desks between us and the podium. What the hell, right? It's not like we're going to get a better chance. Maybe they're out of ammo.

And maybe they're taking advantage of us hiding under cover, and using the lull to run up on Patty and Riel.

“Go?” he asks me, quiet and self-assured in a way I'd even believe, if I hadn't been inside his head.

But I guess I come across that way myself, until you get to know me. “Go,” I answer, and bolt from our hiding place, half a second before Patty screams.

The blood's worn off the soles of my shoes. I don't slip when I slap my meat hand against the top of the desk and propel myself over it, tuck — not as neatly as Min-xue, who moves like an acrobat in gravity, too — roll, take the fall on my shoulder, and come up like a snake, face to face with a surprised assassin.

No, he didn't expect that at all.

Pity he's the one with the gun.

I trigger, and the world rattles to a halt jerk-jerk-jerk like somebody's let go the dead-man's handle. My last thought before the programmed reflexes kick in is: Min-xue lives like this all the time .

Casey was slower than Min-xue expected: no quicker than a fast, agile, athletic normal woman half her age. Slower, that is, until she lunged to her feet under the nearest assassin, rolling onto her toes, glittering left hand slapping a bullet out of the air like she was taking a backhanded swipe at a badminton birdie, right one doubled into a fist that slammed into her opponent's solar plexus while Min-xue was still closing the distance to his.

An unaugmented human would have seen a blur. Min-xue saw her opponent double over, drop his pistol, grab hold of Casey's arm, and roll over it, disengaging, getting away.

Fast, too. Faster than Casey, if she hadn't caught him flat-footed. Faster maybe than Min-xue. He took another half a step toward them, but Casey had the gun, and her opponent was twisting like a cat to come up on his feet.

And there were three more armed men in the room, and behind him, Patricia shouted again — not surprise and fear this time, but fury, and the sound was divided by the report of a gun.

Min-xue turned on the ball of his foot, jumped over a cowering attaché in a baize-green suit, landed in a crouch as something seared his thigh in passing, and slung himself over the railing toward the podium and the enemy who had just stood up from behind it to level his gun. One of the enemy's comrades rose from the cover of the secretary's table, gun leveled. Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward.

A useless piece of advice, when the battle was already joined, and the fighting ran uphill.

The sound of bones cracking couldn't distract him. Casey and Patty were on their own. Min-xue dove left, buying whatever cover he could from the shooter behind the podium, getting that shooter's body between himself and the man farther back. He scrabbled forward, clawed under a desk, the creased thigh burning, another bullet chipping off an interface plate and sending fat blue sparks lazing through the air like dragons' tongues and chrysanthemum clusters. He crawled through them, skinny enough to weasel under the privacy panel, and hesitated behind the last row of desks.

Min-xue's last cover.

He grabbed two deep breaths, vaulted the obstacle, and, zigzagging, rushed the guns.

Jeremy met Charlie halfway back to base camp and knocked Charlie into a spiral when he clouted him on the head. Charlie spun back against a web of vines and branches, almost bounced out again, and clung until the greenery stopped shaking. He didn't dare laugh, although the suited and helmeted figure floating in front of him, wobbling as he recovered from the damage he'd done his own equilibrium, was a thoroughly amusing sight. “Action and reaction, Jer. What the heck did you do that for?”

“Damn,” Jeremy said, his voice tinny through speakers. “You know, Charlie, you about scared the air out of my suit.”

“I think I might have broken the nanonetwork somehow—”

“You also took off your bloody helmet. I can't talk to you without your suit radio turned on, you know.”

“Oh.” Charlie looked around for his helmet, hoping it hadn't sailed too far away in the impact. It was lodged a little farther over in the bush; he floated free and retrieved it. “I guess that explains what I did to deserve it.”