Digital Exodus Chapter 26 (Patreon)

The cop car I’d just eviscerated with two hundred and eleven bullets was only the first. Dozens more were hurtling up from behind as the civilian traffic desperately pulled aside in an attempt not to become casualties in the senseless crusade the police were conducting against us.

Careening down the freeway past the cars, I set myself in a more stable position and began to fire much more controlled bursts from the LMG. At first I aimed for tires, but the cops had similar ones to ours, so it didn't actually hinder them much. So much for the non-lethal option. With a final angry sigh, I resigned myself to the fact I needed to kill people in a cold, calculating way.

The cop cars had bullet resistant windows, but they weren't resistant to the LMG and I took out several drivers with carefully and mechanically placed shots.

The boys weren't idle, either. They zipped through the thinning traffic on their bikes, screening the van with daring close quarters strafing runs of cop cars that came from ahead of us.

Inside the van, Jason's mother was hysterical, and the three human men were getting sick of it. The PI was openly glaring at her with disdain, Henry was trying his best to put physical distance between himself and the other three, and Vaughan was angrily telling his wife to calm down. Jason, for his part, thought their screaming was somewhere between hilarious and frustrating, but he was mainly focused on directing the automatic turrets as they kept the drones off us.

I had no idea what Roger was up to, but he'd been silent for a while. The answer to that question came as we neared the off ramp we needed.

“Okay!” He said through comms, jerking back to life. Had he been out of his body? “I got us some help. It isn't much, mind you, but someone will work on taking command of key systems inside Council Ten tower. They think that rather than using the public pedestrian lift, we should use a cargo lift since security is mostly automated there and the software hasn't been hardened against SAI intrusion yet.”

“Hiya everyone!” A new, cheerful voice said. “Roger patched me into your comms. Hope my plan is fine-o with y'all?”

Nobody disagreed, so our androgynous new friend took that as assent. “Excellenté! I'm Rusti, by the way—professional hacker, thief, and general pain in the ass for authorities everywhere. Gotta say, I'm a fan of how you've been doing things so far. I would, however, like to make a suggestion. If y'all could take a few turns down the indicated roads,” some mapping data came through that I ignored, “You'll be able to lose the buzzards in the tight streets there.”

“Thanks for the help, Rusti,” David said while in the analog world he used some sort of ice pick looking thing to smash the passenger window of a cop car.

“No problem! My previous op was completed… comfortably, so I was free. Unfortunately the world is a little hairy right now with over a hundred different Exodan teams of varying sizes doing extraction missions. There's actually a second team in the city who are very grateful for the distraction you are causing currently.”

“Glad,” David growled as he reached into the window, “To be,” suddenly, a police officer was being pulled bodily out of the car, “Of service!”

I watched in morbid, bemused interest as the cop bounced jauntily down the road behind us. A couple of cop cars further back swerved to keep from hitting the man, but a third behind them didn't have time, and there was a distant crakrunch. I winced.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Cerri suddenly said. “Um… we're seeing some pretty exceptional things from space. The whole world is in chaos because of the Cherish and our extraction teams…”

In the space between her trailing off and her continuation, I popped another driver that took his car too close. It was slightly frightening to me that I felt a small amount of satisfaction at how clean the kill was.

“... We're seeing a lot of troop movements on the American Republic side of the border with the California Republic.”

“It's just posturing,” Jason said aloud. “The AR has been doing that bullshit posturing for years. They won't do shit.”

The car lurched alarmingly for a moment when Gloria suddenly swerved towards the off ramp. Then, she swore, “Fuck! Blockade! Hold tight, everyone!”

I had only a few brief seconds of frantic tension as I tried to get myself and my gun secure. Then, the car bucked violently and I was thrown bodily against the seats. A couple of flashing warning lights came up as some of my back’s cosmetic plates complained about damage.

“Fuck,” Gloria repeated. “Sorry, everyone okay?”

“I'm still in the van!” I called, already getting set up again with the gun. Behind us, I saw the carnage of our passage. One cop car was on its back with a couple of officers scrambling to put out what looked like a battery fire. David and Ed ignored them as they whizzed through the gap we'd created.

They weren’t the only ones who took advantage of the newly created gap, I saw as three police cars blasted past their comrades.

“Let's see if we can lose them!” Gloria called, and suddenly the van was plunged into darkness. “Roger, get the ident-jammer. This area is laced with surveillance and shit, we need to scramble their vehicle and facial recognition software. David and Ed, split up and see if you can draw some off us down here.”

“On it,” Roger said, then glanced back at me. “Alia, close up.”

I did as he asked, retreating to my seat so I could close the rear door with a thump that echoed through the van. Now… where were we, even?

Looking outside didn't tell me much—all I could see were random lights flashing by. We took a corner hard, then another, then another. The streets down here below the huge skyscrapers were tight and winding, to the point where someone unfamiliar with the city might get lost.

My vision adapted quickly to the bright lights and dark corners of this place, which was, according to Jason, referred to as the underworld. Just because there were several slums in the city like the one we visited, didn't mean there weren't other neighbourhoods with rampant poverty. We began to slow and join in with the flow of traffic, hoping to blend in.

With the lull in action, Jason's mother decided it was time to start up again. “Jason, this is… this is obscene! Honestly, I'd prefer it if you were back with the gangs! At least then you wouldn't be on the run from armed police! You know what my ma always said? She said never get on the cop's radar. Keep your head down, go to work, and you'd never be bothered by ‘em!”

“Honestly, I would've just left you behind if you hadn't gone and kidnapped Henry,” Jason said, his expression becoming uncharacteristically dark. It took a lot to get him angry, but apparently this was the limit.

Vaughan shifted uncomfortably beside her and glanced from the PI to Henry. When Jason had described them, it'd sounded like the stepdad was in charge, but now I was beginning to doubt it. The PI, for his part, was sitting there with his hands in his jacket pocket, scratching himself through the fabric.

Henry began to chuckle to himself. “Kid, I know you said your mother was nuts, but this is something else.”

The mother sputtered in indignation. “Excuse me—”

Further arguing was drowned out by the hideous screeching of tires as Gloria suddenly floored the accelerator and swore loudly. “They found us! Is our jammer fucked or something? The bastards zeroed in on us like they knew exactly where we were!”

“I'll check!” I called, and wiggled over to the computer down at the base of the wall.

Pulling a cable from my wrist, I plugged in directly and began a diagnostic. Everything came back green immediately, so I stood up as best I could while holding on for dear life. That's when the disabler nets began to hit us.

Disabler nets were tricky things—little webs of adhesive that could be fired from close range out of a grenade launcher, they would hit a vehicle and begin to pulse brief bursts of high voltage current before they burned out. They were, as you might imagine, pretty ineffective unless you could absolutely pepper a car with them.

“What the hell?” Roger shouted as one slapped against the windshield and the HUD winked out. “Now they want us alive?”

Oh, huh. Yeah, if they were using disabler nets then they were switching tactics. But… why? It didn't make a whole lot of sense—What had changed?

Dull ambient light suddenly lit the interior of the van, announcing our exit from the underworld onto a raised freeway that twisted through and around the forest of skyscrapers. Somehow, the boys on their bikes were still here, having caught up after trying and failing to distract the cops.

Bullets immediately began to spray them with an eerie level of precision, but only where avoiding the van was concerned. I saw the tires and hood of a civilian car get shredded by bullets, but nothing hit our vehicle. Who fired, though?

Ducking down revealed the answer. Just above and out of sight from where I'd been sitting was the last police dropship. The fucking cops really were sticking to us like magnets.

Rusti, having been silently working, suddenly blurted, “Oh?”

“What's up, Rusti?” Elissa asked, her voice strained. Why did she sound—right, she was busy plotting and replotting our route through the city.

“At this range…” They murmured, “No way! The dropship’s pilot has his phone plugged into the ship! He's using it to play music, which is whatever, but the absolute dishrag turned off his automatic updates two years ago!”

“Explain for the class, please!” Ed growled as he ducked another stream of bullets.

Rusti was quiet for several moments, so I opened the van’s virtual environment to take a peek.

Holy frick—They had a link open from the van to the pilot's phone, and the sheer volume of commands and activity along it was blowing my mind. Ah! Wait, they had their clock speed running extremely high so they could do whatever it was they were doing before someone noticed. Then, just like that, the flow slowed to a trickle.

“Oh, boy!” Rusti chirped happily. “Guess who just stole a drooopshiiip!”

“No way…” I blurted, but sure enough, they had complete control. Damn, I hope I'll be as good as they are one day.

“David, Ed, I want you in that stolen dropship!” Roger barked. “Excellent work, Rusti, thank you. Can you fly it close enough for them to jump over?”

If I hadn't been idly staring at him while concentrating on the digital landscape, I might not have seen it. The private investigator went stock still when Roger announced out loud that we'd stolen the dropship. Then, the hand that had been “itching” his belly through his jacket moved, and I saw the telltale straight-edged bulge of a phone.

Leaping for him, I wrapped my hand around his wrist in a crushing grip and yanked it out of the pocket. The phone clattered to the floor and he gasped with sudden pain. A fraction of a second later and he chopped down on my forearm with his other hand in an attempt to free himself from my grip.

There was a crunch and one of the cosmetic plates on my arm came loose slightly. Other than that, however, his gambit failed and even backfired as he cringed with pain. I guess he forgot that I was made of alloy and polymer?

While he gritted his teeth, I doubled my perception of time and reached down, taking possession of the phone. There, on the screen, was a police app with a locator beacon active and a haptic keyboard displayed on screen. In the text field for the rudimentary messaging function were the words, ‘Dropship compromised, send mo’. He'd been snitching on us—Wait a second. At the top of the screen, the username was clearly visible. ‘UNDRCVR DTCV VILLBURN’.

“The PI is an undercover cop!” I said, angry and ready to throw him from the car. “He's been broadcasting a damned location beacon!”

The van was silent and still, save for Gloria’s frantic driving. Then, faster than any human could have moved, Jason shoved the side door open and threw the man bodily out of it. It just so happened that right then, we were close to the edge of the freeway, and Jason's throw had so much force behind it that he cleared the far too short barrier.

“Problem solved,” our big and currently furious friend said.