Move the arm, the shield!
Within Nicolai’s unconscious form, where even the thrill and the dark and the mask were all put to sleep, two remained functional.
In an odd reversal of the moment the long ago EMP had hit Zero-Twelve, and shut everything except Nicolai down, now, Threat Analysis and Cyberwarfare remained functional. The concussive force that had rolled through the organs, so disruptive to biological matter, had posed little problem to the hardware they ran on.
Through the single drone that remained with them, which had been watching from a distance, they saw two figures taking aim out of a window above.
Using his BSI, the same system designed to allow combat chips to operate, they had taken limited control of Nicolai’s body, and raised his arm towards the window.
But to activate the shield, they needed the cooperation of Nicolai’s Soul, and spiritually they were only tiny limpets attached to a shark.
The Soul was asleep. Doing the best they could, they managed to send two tiny streams of Oma from his Nodes, towards the Sheltering Glove Symbiote, but it was a long journey through a body and Soul that only grudgingly gave way.
Nicolai! Human Resources! Wake up!
The Soul stirred, just a little, but it wasn’t enough.
YOU’RE GOING TO DIE.
Nicolai slammed awake and poured Oma into his arm. A hazy shield swam to life at the same moment as cracks rang out from above, and then fault lines were spiderwebbing over his shield as the bullets arrived.
The wind tore at his ears and he knew the ground was close below. His Nodes were guttering, empty of Oma. There were big holes in his body, spewing blood.
But within him, the Thrill and the Dark thundered, and the majesty he had glimpsed beckoned.
His mind seized, everything within it coming together and beginning to fuse into one.
Under his clothes, Oma crystals were strapped to his body, digging into his ribcage. The emergency supply. He drew on them with everything he had and Oma poured into his Nodes and from there immediately to the shield and the Pegasi ring. As soon as he had the Oma he activated the Bloodbite ring, and the blood stilled where it sought to leave his body. Tilting his head, he breathed through the Orb of Rejuvenation that was attached to the shoulder-strap of his vest.
Meanwhile, his body moved into position, raising the AA-12 one handed while holding the shield towards the enemy with the other. There was no pain because pain was of no value in this moment, and his movement became easier and more fluid as the vapour from the Orb settled inside of him and worked on his injuries.
Their shots were accurate and getting more accurate all the time, as they adjusted to the way his movement shifted slightly as he activated the Pegasi ring to slow his fall.
The world smeared and shifted around him. Within him there came a beat, a pattern written in alien code, and in a fading moment of utter clarity he knew what it represented. The rain of bullets, their exact timing and positioning.
He crafted the shield and it responded as an extension of his will, shifting faster than ever before. Its form altered until it was more like a slender, sharp cone extending ahead of him than a shield, and with it he deflected each bullet exactingly. No more did they crack heavily into his shield, now they caught it on the forward point and were simply guided away at a slight angle, enough to pass him by. The expenditure of Oma in his shield, previously something that had been overwhelming and which would have soon seen it broken, significantly lessened.
His world became the shifting of his shield and the pattern of bullets within his mind.
Nicolai could feel the guns shooting at him, feel their magazines, guess at their load. They existed as concepts within his mind, and he was ready for what happened next. There came a brief pause when a magazines ran empty. First one then the other. Almost timed so that the first was reloaded before the second ran empty, but they were slightly off.
Before the second gun had stopped firing Nicolai was ready. His shield faded away after he deflected the last shot, and the AA-12 shifted into position.
His arm was injured and trembling, no amount of control could stop that. It was flesh and bone, after all. But it didn’t matter. All that was necessary was for the gun to aimed on-target for the barest instant, and for him to pull the trigger and provide just enough bracing, in that moment. He didn’t need to hold it steady for a lengthy period, because he could feel the AA-12, feel its eagerness and the line between it and the enemy, feel the sabot-slug it was loaded with, feel where the slug would go.
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The AA-12 howled. The first shot hit one of them dead-centre in the head, blowing a hole through the faceplate. The second glanced off the side of the other’s head, as he or she threw themselves sideways.
Neither shot was lethal, but he’d bought himself a moment. These Cyborgs kept their brains inside their metal chests, which were lined with ceramic plating, but he chose to shoot their heads because only heads and arms were visible, poking over the thick stone window sill, and most of their cameras and sensors were in their heads.
Nicolai reached ground level and skated along it, reforming the shield and keeping it raised in one hand while reaching and pulling with the Grasping Finger with his other.
A shot sounded from above, and his shield took a heavy hit, which even deflected at a good angle sent cracks through it. Sniper. His movements changed, becoming more random and unpredictable, forcing them to pick their shots, but he knew that wouldn’t be enough, not against chipped Cyborgs, not from this range.
But the merger of his mind had reached a peak and around Nicolai the world was writhing, the air somehow visible to him, moving like a sea, full of ripples of information, and within him the hole was open. Even as cold filled the air around him, as strange energies and entities reached into him, Nicolai remained firm, because he was more than Nicolai.
He was Zero-Twelve, and Zero-Twelve was a combination. Nicolai, Threat Analysis, Cyberwarfare, the Mask, the Thrill, and the Dark, all together.
The Thrill burned as an engine, one that brought him utterly in tune with his body, gave him endless energy and demanded perfection from every movement. Threat Analysis and Cyberwarfare read the world and the Local around him with their own means, the information joining the sea within Nicolai. The Dark gave them information in its own secret language, and hungered for blood, a hunger that was controlled and used to hone their edge. And the Mask, the Mask balanced the Dark in a way none of them quite understood. Only that if it was gone, the whole construction would collapse.
Even with his control he knew that they were reaching out of the Hole and into the Dark, and from there they sought to reach into the rest of him. He knew that as this very moment they were actively furthering their aims, twisting him, pushing him closer to some kind of edge. Somewhere inside of him a clock was ticking. But, the efforts of the Mask at the breach helped to firm it, and to block the spread of the corruption from the Dark. The clock was slowed.
In this moment he didn’t care about the clock because through the Dark and the Hole came more than just corruption. There also came information. The beat of the world and reality, laid bare. Through this, and through the ripples, he felt something emanating from behind him, from the tower.
A sense of lethality, an intention to see him dead. But within him was the Darkness Module, and it spoke to the bullet in their gun and the chip in their head, and the bullet and the silicon responded.
The silicon spoke of feet-per-second and the merciless certainty of a line, drawn from point A to point B, arcing at the midpoint. It spoke of wind and gravity, the movement of the target and the weight of the bullet.
The bullet only said that what it hit would remember it.
And, through this, Zero-Twelve learned how to move.
Zero-Twelve dismissed the shield to better position his body. He reached with the Grasping Finger, primed it, and then, just as he sensed a spike in the killing desire, one that spoke to him of a trigger being squeezed, he pulled. A bullet came but Zero-Twelve knew its route. His body slipped to the side, and he felt the crack of broken air as it buzzed over his shoulder. The bullet grinned at him as it went, and he grinned back.
###
‘What are you doing? Fucking shoot him!’
‘I’m trying,’ hissed the least-damaged Cyborg, aiming down the sight of his sniper rifle, its barrel resting on the window ledge. He tracked the distant, racing target, his chip analysing every factor, telling him the exact moment to pull the trigger.
He squeezed, and the gun jerked against him.
But in that moment the target slipped to the side as if the man had felt the pull of the trigger, and only a puff of dirt showed its effect, exactly like the last shot. The Cyborg pulled the bolt and slammed a fresh round in, taking aim again. If his face hadn’t been replaced long ago by metal, his teeth would have been clenched tight in fury.
Never had he missed so many shots in a row.
‘Christ,’ said the leader beside him, and the other Cyborg took up position, aiming with his assault rifle. The leader had a big hole in his head but was largely unbothered by this; his primary cameras were out, but he’d drawn an eye-wire and affixed it to his gun’s sight.
The pair of them fired together, a full-auto burst and a single shot.
The target danced maddeningly, bullets that should have been impossible to avoid hitting the ground around him, and the few assault rifle rounds which were—perhaps only by chance—on target were intercepted by some kind of magical shield.
A moment later, the target’s movement—which had been continuously moving to the right, so as to cut their angle of fire—took him outside of their field of view.
‘What the fuck is this guy!’ he snarled, jerking the sniper down.
‘All right.’ The leader regarded the sniper. ‘Then we pursue,’ he said.
The sniper nodded, taking his assault rifle. They glanced to the side, where the third Cyborg rested, struggling to get his body working properly after taking so many hits.
These two were also damaged, having taken shots to the head, but the most important shielding—ceramic plating over their torsos—was undamaged.
‘See if you can get anything out of this mess, then head back,’ said the leader to the injured Cyborg, who nodded.
The pair leapt out the window and descended rapidly to the ground, where they were forced to run having used up all of their jet fuel earlier. They hadn’t expected to need more. From down here the target was impossible to hit, having gotten far enough that the various stony outcrops and trees and clumps of struggling bugs and undead blocked him.
