Get It By Your Hands, a Logical World short
Posted: 2006-03-29 10:58pm
Well, I haven't had a snapshot in a while and I've been working on this one for ages. It's finally done, so here you all go. There's a lot to think about in this one (including "Idea stealer! Idea stealer!"); I really wanted to see whether I do more than just tug heartstrings, like I did with The End of all you'll Know. Also, if you get the chance to watch the anime Gunslinger Girl - do it. It was my primary inspiration in regards to the piece; perhaps one of the more obvious ways I could get across the idea of governmental corruption in The Logical World.
Get It By Your Hands
“She’s only a child.”
The voice was soft, but urgent none the less. The comment was not hissed, for the speaker seemed to in control to let that happen. Through his words one could hear the gentle pulsing from smooth white machines, soothing and frightening at the same time. In response, eyebrows were raised.
“A child? Yes, yes she is.” Was the reply, not as quiet as the first man’s voice, and with not nearly the same level of emotion “But what does that matter? She, like all of us, owes her status and the body she was born with to the Imperial Commonwealth. She is simply performing her civic duty.
“Klaus, we can rebuild her. We have the technology. We have the capability to make one of the galaxy’s finest cyborgs. She will be that cyborg. Better than she could have been before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster.”
A hand, marked by a ring mounted with a small green stone on his second to last finger. It laid itself against a slopping pane of buckyglass before forming itself into a fist. “It’s not right.” Shook the first voice gently, almost imperceptibly. “I know the concept; I’ve read the papers. But just building her a mechanical body won’t change the fact that she’s a human being.”
The other waved his hand, dismissing Klaus’ objections as easily as he would brush away an insect “We can easily deal with that, or more specifically, you can deal with that. Through your tutoring, she will be capable of being a perfect little assassin, though she will retain her humanity to the extent that people would not be disturbed by her presence.”
“Mori’s work on human-like robots? I thought that was considered too old for today’s galaxy, Borgio. We can easily create mecha which appear perfectly human – you’re going to do it now.”
“You’ve met combat AIs before; you know that it feels strange, even when they’re hidden inside bodies which you couldn’t tell weren’t human.” Borgio paused “It isn’t about what they look like, but rather about how they seem. A hyperturing synthetic intelligence could easily fool a person into believing that they are a little girl, but they are so intelligent that they become problematic to work with. A low-class drone intelligence like we use in missiles and limpets are very intelligent, but they would never pass themselves off well enough as children – though they are as cruel and as innocent as one. Constructing an artificial intelligence which will not ‘creep out’ an orga is difficult, to say the least; which is the concept that Masahiro Mori explored in his more recent piece on AI.”
Borgio looked down on the body of the girl upon what would have been a cold, hard slab of metal “On the other hand, she already has a psychology which would not disturb another organic, including a waveform which would not immediately raise the attention of a Psyker without probing. With conditioning she can be made into a relentless, dangerous killing machine whom would not hesitate to murder or maim if ordered to, but can remain as innocuous as any normal girl.” He looked over at Jules, pushing his fingers through grey hair “Seems strange doesn’t it?”
There was a long pause, and a smile touched the lips of the other.
“I knew you’d understand. You always did.”
*
Click goes the slide on Orione’s handgun, locking back behind her wrist. She turns it over in her hands, before passing her hand over it. The slide comes away easily, and with the ease of a machine, she takes the gun apart, laying each piece down in a parts map. She pauses for a moment, before taking up the barrel and slowly begins to clean it.
“‘Rione, what are you doing?” asks a girl’s voice, thick with sleep.
“Hmm?” she replies, looking over her shoulder at the speaker “Did I wake you Leona?”
The other girl, Leona, raises herself up on one elbow. Her hair is mussed; looking so much like a blonde briar patch. She sighs and runs her fingers across her scalp. “You did,” she says “Why are you cleaning your seven at one o’clock in the morning?”
Orione places down the barrel in her hand, turning herself around in her chair. She pulls one leg up underneath herself and looks down at the floor. Strands of red hair fall lazily in front of her face and her arms wrap around carved wood of the chair’s backrest. A frown touches her lips, and the geometry of her face changes, as though she doesn’t quite know the answer. “I just think I should.” She bites her bottom lip and lets herself follow the grain of the wooden floor with eyes.
“But you had already cleaned it today.” Leona says, pushing back the covers and pulling herself barefooted onto the floor. She slapped over to Orione, placing her hands on the smaller girl’s shoulders. “More than once. And I bet you’ve been cleaning it almost continuously since you left Frankfurt. Did the mission go badly? I haven’t had a chance to talk to Rachel yet; and really, that girl thinks too much in terms of success and failure.”
“Badly?” Orione raises her eyebrows “I wouldn’t say that.”
*
“Hershin’s an information broker by trade. He’s got ties to the Commonwealth’s criminal underground; but also to the URSS and American Empire through their own Omertàs.” The speaker’s voice was terse. He gestured towards a large picture floating nearby, showing a man with an ashen face with sunken eyes “We can infer that the recent conflict across Tyr, Reims and the fall of Belgrade was at the end result of his selling of secrets. He’s grown fat on our loses.”
“He’s a traitor then, Pascal.” Asked someone further down the table, who was adjusting a hideously green tie.
“Indeed Klaus. We fully intend to kill him.” Pascal paused for a moment, and the picture changed, no longer showing the man, but instead the light side of a beringed planet floating in space, huge dark splotches of cities pock marking its surface. The words ‘real time’ sat smugly in one corner. “Hershin is on Hesse; in Frankfurt am Main, to be precise. He’s there under the pretence of visiting the Wertpapierbörse, however we know that he’s attending a function being held by the Imperial Central Bank in nine hours, and is planning on meeting with confederates with the Cellestial Intelligence Agency there.”
“The CIA?” the screen flickered, showing not the planet, but instead a sweeping room of marble litered with floating numbers and letters and people in sharp suits. The camera focussed on a man standing looking up at one of the lists constructed out of light, Hersin in the process of some afternoon banking. The area around him was devoid of people and robots; most probably disconcerted about his dangerous looking bodyguards.
Pascal smiled grimly “We’ve had SGN3 feed Hershin false information that our Yank friends would find . . . palatable, to say the least. However, it’s just a lure to get some of their agents within striking distance.”
A woman with short blonde curls and a lined face brought up her eyebrows “Why has SGN4 been chosen? Considering the pangalactic nature of this, I would expect the Number Threes to deal with this. And the deal with Hershin seems appropriate for SGN1; the Thoughtpolice deal with infrmation crime as well.” Pascal opened his mouth to answer, but another, older, man raised his hand.
“We intend to send a message, Litcria.” He said, gently adjusted a pair of slim, plain glasses before he continued “The SIS does not allow intrusions into the Imperial Commonwealth to go unpunished. SGN4 sends these messages. We are good at making them heard.”
“Thank you Borgio.” Litcria replied as a man with neat black hair and an air of efficiency about him raised his hand.
“Hubbard?”
Acknowledged, Hubbard continued, “Whom will you be sending out on this mission? How many girls?”
Pascal answered this time at a nod from Borgio “We’ll be sending two teams; a sniper and an infiltrator. I myself will be travelling to Hesse with Rachel as the sniper. Any one to volunteer.”
Klaus and his green tie sat further upright “Orione would be good to go.”
After exchanging a brief look (and a rapid tightbeamed conversation) with Pascal, Borgio turned to Klaus “I can’t see anything wron-” his words were suddenly cut off by a strangely reverberating and impossibly deep voice, and Borgio pulled his glasses down his nose to look at the speaker: a ten foot tall, humanoid machine.
“With all due respect Borgio, Klaus, but I have to protest Orione’s selection.” The mechanoid said from the far end of the table “I honestly do not believe she is suitable for this mission.”
“You have concerns that she is not skilled enough for it, Chamli?” Pascal questioned, steepling his fingers. “I have only exemplary reports regarding her training.”
“That is correct.” Chamli replied, artificial light glinting from the edges of his artificial frame. Pascal frowned and rubbed his chin, while Borgio scratched at one grey sideburn. Those sitting at the table all turned to look at the machine.
“So what’s the problem?” Pascal sighed.
Chamli uncrossed his legs and took his enormous weight off the wall, which bent back till it was straight again. “Orione is the newest addition to our little part of Ragazze. Despite her relatively recent addition, she has shown to be skilled in a close support capacity and a dead shot at sixteen kilometres. However, she has shown a fatal flaw outside of her martial skills.
“She hesitates.”
There was a slow silence that was broken suddenly by the hump of Klaus chair against the wall. He stood facing Chamli with both feet spread and one arm bent; his tense hand hovering level with the small of his back. “Are you suggesting that Orione has been badly conditioned? That she would be unable to perform her duties?” he snapped.
“My job is psychological profiling as well as assessment of the girls’ training, Klaus.” The mechanoid replied, ignoring Klaus stance.
“Perhaps then we should use someone else,” Borgio noted, looking towards the window “Handler as well as cyborg.”
Klaus almost melted as he heard that. He lowered his hand and turned towards the head of the table “I have to apologise Borgio. It’s just that Orione is continually passed up for missions like these. It bothers her, since her training was completed months ago.” The chair rolled up behind him and he sat back down. “Trust me Borgio. Orione can do this.”
*
“I don’t quite understand it.” Says a tired voice over the squeak of leather “She went crazy.”
He watches the level of amber liquid rising in the squat cylindrical glass sitting on the desk in front of him. She twists the lid back onto the bottle, places it down next to the glass and drops something into the glass. As she hands it over, it starts to glow. Klaus takes it and sips.
“Thanks Teo.” He sighs.
She sits down opposite him, flicks back her wavy brunette hair and rests chin on her hands. “She was supposed to kill them though. I mean, you can’t of gone there expecting anything different.”
Klaus taps the rim of his glass and shrugs “Teodora, this was mad. You saw her before she left. The change was frightening.”
“The change is always frightening.” The woman called Teodora says, quietly “I don’t know how you can stand it; watching them turn from sweet little girls into almost mindless killing machines. It’s not right.”
“No,” Klaus agrees, looking up at the ceiling “It isn’t.”
*
“You won’t need an anti-material rifle or needle missile launcher.” Pascal said as he looked over a navi-file. Behind him, a girl with black hair took her hand away from a bulky rifle taller than her by more than a foot. She looked over her shoulder. “Take your Walther.”
“Yes Pascal.” Replied the girl, stepping away from a rack of extremely large guns; some which wouldn’t have looked small in the hands of big machine like Chamli “The mission profile mentions that I could very well be shooting at CIA agents. I’ll need something more powerful.” Internally, Pascal noted her tactical sense and nodded.
“Take a plascannon then.” He said sharply “In future do not just note what may happen in an operation; actively plan for it.”
“Yes Pascal.” Rachel replied passively, moving further down the gun-rack. Further away, amidst the spiralling racks of weaponry stood Orione, almost dancing from foot-to-foot with excitement. Loose strands of hair whipped around her face chaotically as she touched the cold metal casings of various weapons as she circled one rack. She snatched up one weapon and pulled it up to her shoulder.
“A Heckler and Koch MP779!” she cried in a singsong voice, pulling back on the action “Chambered for five-point-five-six millimetre ICE,” she squeezed the trigger and the empty weapon clicked loudly “With a muzzle velocity of twelve-point-eight kilometres a second; it is one of the preferred weapons for-”
“Dealing with lightly armoured posthumans.” Klaus interrupted, smiling. Orione bounced around to face him, so quickly that he didn’t catch the movement. “You’re very excited.”
“Yes Klaus!” she beamed, clutching the submachine gun close to her “I’ve wanted to take part in a mission. Every time Leona or Elysia or one of the other girls went out on a job I envied them. Now it’s my turn.” Klaus placed a hand down Orione’s shoulder; in the other he held an instrument case.
“In any case, you’ll need a larger calibre then that. Something to put a person down quickly, not penetrate a LPCV.” He held up the instrument – Orione guessed from the size it was for a viola – case “It needs to be able to fit into this, along with your five-seven and,” he paused briefly to open the case and pull something out and Orione squealed briefly. Both Pascal and Rachel looked up from whatever it was they were doing and glanced down at the small figures, ignored them, and went back to their own business.
To anyone who wasn’t a ballistophile, it would have looked like an archaic and rather large handgun. Technically it was an archaic and rather large handgun, but for Orione it was something more than that.
“A Bolo Mauser!” she breathed “I didn’t think we even had a classic weapon like this in this entire star system.”
“Think of it as gift, for your first mission.”
The little girl assassin took the gun in her hands and sighted down the barrel, finger off the trigger. She held it up to her face and ran her fingertips over the polished wood of the grip. “Oh wow.” Orione gushed, and looked up at the sound of feet against the ferrocrete floor. Orione ran to the woman, instantly disappearing from Klaus’ vision and appearing a metre and a half in front of the newcomer. The woman gave a little scream and grasped at her chest.
“Look Teodora! Look what Klaus got for me!” Orione held the weapon up in the air “An R96; one of the classic weapons of the past thousand years. Chambered for spatial defects instead of-”
Klaus’ hand came on Orione’s shoulder and the girl stopped speaking suddenly “Don’t bore Teo with the technicals of the gun, Orione. She doesn’t like them, remember.”
Orione pulled the handgun to her chest “Sorry ma’am.” She said, and meant it too.
Teodora sat down and swept some hair over her ear and smiled; lifting the girl’s chin up “That’s alright. It’s a nice gift if you like it. Now run along and finish preparing; I have to talk to Klaus.” Orione nodded rapidly before dashing away, grabbing a hold of the viola case from her handler. Teodora stood up straight and smiled after the young girl, before her face visibly drooped. Klaus noticed from the corner of his eye and raised his eyebrows.
“Not pleased, Teo?” he asked conversationally, in a tone out of place in a room with filled enough weaponry to run a moderately large war. In reply, she shrugged.
“You couldn't have gotten her a nicer present?”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Klaus asked and Teodora replied by twitching one eyebrow. He sighed “Don't give me that; she needed a heavy handgun. And besides, Orione likes guns; she's a ballistophile.”
Teodora snorted shortly, looking after Orione as she sighted down another rifle. “She was written like that, and you know it. No twelve year old girl could be this enthused about guns.”
“Well, I have a cousin who-”
“Enthused about guns with which to kill people.”
Klaus opened his mouth to speak, but shut it again. He physically slumped, as though some one had draped a heavy cloak across his shoulders. “You have a message for me?”
“I do.” she reached into her jacket and pulled out a shiny red rectangle smaller than a pocket notebook. Klaus took it, grabbed one corner and yanked, whipping it around to the back of his neck. He disconnected the little computer almost instantly, handing it back to its owner.
“Thanks Teodora.” Klaus said, walking away.
“I'll see you in a few days then.” she said and he waved vaguely over his shoulder.
*
“Klaus seemed distant after Teo came to see him.” Orione notes, a breeze slowly blowing up and stroking her hair back. She looks over at the other girls lying back against the crest of the hill; each one staring up at the sky and the clouds sailing across the cerulean expanse.
“Distant?” asks a girl wearing unnecessary glasses, fingers lost in her dark brown hair. “Seems a little different for Klaus; of all the handlers in the whole of SGN4, he could probably be said to be the closest to his charge.” She says it in a way that suggests she has put research into the statement.
“Hubbard’s pretty good in his own way though.” Leona says, chewing absentmindedly on one thumbnail “And what about your handler Elysia? Benoit – he always seemed rather close to you.”
Elysia turns her head sideways to look at the blonde girl “Benoit? Oh, I suppose he’s not as detached as someone like Pascal. But he treats me less as a child and more as what I am.”
“Like that cute investigator from SGN1?” Leona muses.
“Agent Bramwell?” Elysia asks, sitting up “You can’t honestly still have a crush on him.”
“There was something there, I know it.” Leona replies, propping one booted foot on her bent knee. The bespectacled girl pulls off her glasses and starts to clean a lens with the hem of her blouse.
“Honestly Leona; you’re fifteen and a half. He’s over two hundred and thirty.”
Leona smiles, foot bouncing in time to some internal tune. Her eyes are closed “Age means nothing in today’s society. Besides, he doesn’t look two hundred thirty.”
Elysia leans away from the now humming girl and rolls her eyes at Orione, tightbeaming She’s a very strange girl. Orione giggles, putting her hand over her mouth. Leona frowns, but says nothing, rather choosing to open her eyes and watch the cloud formations soaring overhead. There was an extended silence before Elysia asks:
“What about you, Rachel? What did you think of the mission?” she says, and Orione leans forward to look around at the other girl. Leona pushed herself up to look as well.
Rachel lays back unblinking, starring up at the sky; her hair spreads around her like a halo of black silk. She waits and then opens her mouth.
“It went well.”
*
Three hours and twenty eight thousand lightyears worth of travel had the SGN4 strike team in orbit around Hesse, specifically, aboard the Hesse Equatorial Ring. The construct had a diameter of several hundred thousand kilometres, but even that was tiny compared to the object that Orione and Rachel were looking at.
From where they stood, they could see the system’s star, and the thin cord of black sliced out of it. “A Niven class orbital.” Klaus said from behind them “It’s pretty big; care to guess just how big?”
“It’s a hundred and eighty million miles across, as far as I can tell from here. Which is smaller than ours.” Rachel said, hands clasped in front of her. Orione had her hands tightly against the small of her back, and was rolling from her toes to her heels.
“That’s still huge; though not as big as a Dyson sphere.” she whistled “Klaus, how built up is it?”
“I haven’t been to Hesse in about fifteen years. When I moved away they had city across about seventy six percent of its surface. Come on girls.” They picked up their bags and started moving towards where Pascal was standing.
Orione looked up at Klaus as they walked “You used to live here?” he nodded in reply.
“I didn’t live in Frankfurt am Main though. I lived in a smaller city called Giessen, which is roughly on the other side of the world.”
“How are we getting down to our location?” They came up onto Pascal, who broke into the conversation.
SGN2 has a car ready for us, he tightbeamed Be aware that in all likelyhood the CIA has their claws into this system. Do not give any indication that we are with the SIS.
There were acknowledgements from the other three and Pascal smiled broadly. Orione found it remarkably inconsistent with the man himself, but it looked perfect. From the outside, she supposed they looked like any other travelling musical family; instrument cases in the hands of three of them. No one would know from looking, however, that these cases contained no instruments and instead weapons and ammunition. Not even the highest gain sensory or most powerful quantum magician could tell either; for each case, and the girls themselves, were constructed to move easily through checkpoints and security. In the hands of someone so inconspicuous as a young girl, they went unnoticed.
The descent down to Frankfurt am Main took close to half an hour, due to traffic. Orione gathered if it had not been for the clouds of tens of millions of craft running back and forth between the planet and its ring, they could have made it to the surface in about thirty seconds. As it was, the relative length of the trip didn't bother her overly much; it allowed her to take a look over the ships swooping around it in a hazy veil. She followed ships that looked like pinpricks and picked out things painted on them all over the visible spectrum.
“Swing around the Imperial Central Bank.” Pascal ordered and Klaus complied, peeling away from the coordinate-locked river of aerial traffic. The car swept over the roofs of buildings that reached up for hundreds of stories, coming upon a building taller than the others. It stood tall with one thousand, one hundred and eleven floors; the number of floors was also its adress.
“The function is being held on the six hundredth and forty eighth floor.” Pascal noted as they all peered down upon its green glass gleaming in the sunlight.”Hershin has a private room booked; we have altered his booking so that he is facing our hotel. Rachel will be able to cover the assault from the roof. This location also allows for Rachel to get into a close support position should the need arise.” The car rotated and zipped back almost three hundred metres, over a building about three quarters the height of the Imperial Central Bank. “Our operation will begin in five hours.”
*
“Going somewhere Klaus?” asks the deep voice of Chamli as Klaus steps out into the courtyard of the section building. The mechanoid is sitting out on the grass, playing with a chain of flowers, using his fields to manipulate the delicate petals; his hands too large to work with the little plants. Klaus pauses and looks over the machine.
“I was planning on going to see Orione before I meet with Borgio.” he replies.
“She's not in her room. Some of the girls went out cloud-gazing,” the chain of flowers floats over to Klaus and the Knight takes it “Orione included.” the dark machine stands up and turns to face Klaus. “Are you pleased with her performance during the course of your mission?”
Klaus narrows his eyebrows at the teardrop shape of Chamli's face; his brow wiggles like archaic television interference. “You're dieing to say 'I told you so' aren't you.”
“Not at all.” Chamli replies, his voice more airy than the weak breeze crossing between them “I'm not nearly petty enough for that. And really, was I right? After all, she did not hesitate, not for a subjective second. If you'll excuse me, I have some business regarding muscle upgrades I should attend to.” Chamli turns fluidly and walks away; movements perfect as when he had been first designed. Klaus watches the mechanoid go, crushing the flowers within his fist.
He twists on one heel, dropping Chamli's gift; looking for all the world like they had been subjected to a hydraulic press.
*
For Orione, the five hours between their landing at the Grange Holborn Hotel and the beginning of the operation were some of the longest in her life. She was anxious to leave for the Imperial Central Bank and wished more than once that she had Rachel's patience. The other cyborg had spent her time patiently going over her DeLamenter plascannon and her WA-24000. Orione had seen her pull apart the latter and put it back together again more than a dozen times.
It hadn't helped that Klaus hadn't been paying her much attention; and really, you couldn't expect Pascal to be any better. Even now, as their elevator crawled scenically up the side of the bank building, he had not stop to offer any words of encouragement. Not wanting to bother him, Orione herself hadn't spoken; instead she chose to stand with her viola case clasped behind her back.
“Orione.” Klaus finally said, adjusting his sombre tie. She looked up at the back of his head, before he continued “Fix up your hair.”
The girl placed her instrument case down, paused for a moment, and turned around to face the curving glass wall of the elevator to see her reflection. Her small white hands reached up to untie one of the ribbons in her red hair and she paused to look out across the cityscape of Frankfurt am Main, a see of stars brought down from the heavens to light up an almost beautiful mass of buildings. Orione ignored it and focussed on her reflection again, expertly retying the white ribbons in her hair into pretty, complex bows. She heard Klaus' muscles start to move and watched him step towards her, and place his hands on her shoulders.
“Don't hesitate, Orione.” he whispered into her ear “That's all I ask.”
There was a chime and the doors slid open. Orione spun around to grab her viola case. The sounds assaulted her ears; the lights her eyes. She picked up music playing at a fairly constant and equally hypnotic hundred and forty-eight beats per minute, melodic and free form. The bass was like a beating heart that shivered through the soles of her shoes.
They stepped out into a ballroom, its floors covered in complex mosaic said to have been made by the famous artist Craswhul, who is said to have used more than three quadrillion tesserae across the almost a hundred and eighty square kilometres of floorspace, all placed by hand (or really by manipulator, for Craswhul was a retired combat mechanoid whom took up art as an outlet after centuries as a frontline unit). Orione had a little appreciation for art though she did could not miss the sheer beauty in the smoothly flowing lines and colours.
Men and women and shells mixed; thousands and thousands and thousands of them, of different species and planetary origins, dressed in rich clothes of fine making. At perhaps another time Orione might have been enamoured by the flowing gowns worn by the socialite women. Their hair was piled in curls and studded with beautiful gems the size of golf balls and their shining jewellery fashioned from intricatly wrought metals; not as a show of wealth, but rather for the simple fact that they were indeed attractive things. The young girl in Orione may well have enjoyed looking at all this, but the girl in Orione was currently missing.
The ballroom was lined on three sides with private rooms cut of from the rest of the gathering masses reaching up to the roof three stories above. They were separated by sheets of tinted buckyglass that cycled through ever-changing patterns and snippets of the outside world like huge holo-screens; Orione suspected that the windows may have been of the much tougher permaglass; there was no real way to tell without active sensory which she was forbidden from using in order to maintain her cover.
Klaus lead the way towards a grav-shaft and they buoyed up onto a second level, transparent balcony. They strode past party-goers who had decided to escape from the writhing beast below, but did not have access to one of the prestigious rooms over looking it all. He came to a stop in front a pane showing a large hand some colour out of space stretching out towards them. Klaus paused a moment, communicating over his internal Sub-etha connection with someone on the other side of the glass. After a second or so, he stepped through the glass, and Orione followed. The instant they had done so, the steady rhythmic pulsing of the bass dropped considerably. Music was being trickled out of speakers hidden throughout the walls, instead of being pumped out at a hundred and fifty decibels from the floor itself.
Orione let her eyes flicker and passive sensors take in every little detail she could. Twenty metres across to the windows out into Frankfurt, a good forty metres from one end to the other. A semicircular lounge suite covered with rose red velvet sat in the middle of the room, with water features and exotic plants. She counted a dozen men and women in the room, noticing on those not wearing all-concealling greatcoats the vague shapes of holstered guns. Large guns, essentially useless against her. There was a gentle buzzing which she knew to be the active (and hideously primitive) sensors of people throughout the room. They looked her and her case up and down at the quantum level and found nothing, which would lead to be almost certainly fatal in the not too distant future.
Orione took all this in and found that if she really needed to she could probably just turn them into droolling idiots with the more . . . offensive parts of her sensory more or less similtaneously. She could have turned them all against each other; but that wasn't the point of the mission. She dropped the secondary train of thought and focussed entirely on the man sitting in the dead centre of the sofa. Pallid, his hair cascaded lankly off his scalp, like rope. Dressed in a crumpled, partially buttoned suit, both arms draped across the bare shoulders of a pair of tired, likely intoxicated women.
His face was more than recognisable; it had been locked into her memory.
Charles Hershin. Traitor.
The man’s face twisted into a kind of smile and he gestured at the space before him and a pair of partially translucent chairs came into existence. “Sit.” He said, and they complied with his direction, settling down into the shaped field. Orione place her case at her feet. The man shoved at the two women at his sides and did not respond until they had their internal chemical glands flush their systems of whatever brain-chemistry-altering substances they had been exposed to, but when they had they were on their feet and out without a word, passing through the glass.
Hershin considered them for a moment and snapped his fingers “Get Mister Verheim a drink.” he said, before leaning forward, eyes locked on Orione. “I'm told that you two pose a limited threat to me. A man with limited biotechnic enhancement, completely unarmed save for a knife inside your jacket; and a normal twelve year old girl with a viola. I find it odd that you brought this girl; your sister, apparently.” the infomerchant sat back into the crushed velvet of his couch. “Are you any good, little girl?”
"Pardon?"
"Your viola."
“Oh! I’m learning Anton Rubinstein at the moment. I have a friend who plays piano and we’re learning his forty ninth opus.” She replied shyly as Klaus took a glass of water-clear liquid and held it in both hands. “I can play for you, if you like,” Orione’s words came out quickly, almost as though she was embarrased to admit she had skill. However, she stood up, grabbing her case.
“That’s enough Orione.” Klaus murmured, and Orione's hand froze on the clasp “Maybe Mister Hershin will have time to listen to you play after we’re done. But first, I’d like to get to business.
“I have a story to tell, if you would hear it.” Klaus said, and Hershin nodded. His eyes flicked towards one of his men and Orione heard someone nearby shifting. “Once upon a time, over the gravity well and past the sun there is a land; a land of the free and brave. It is a nice enough place, I suppose, though it is a scared place as well, and it shakes for it could be destroyed and all the good work that had gone into making it would be lost. To this end, they have made themselves strong and fight against their enemies, and have joined in partnership with other lands, even some whose ideology does not match their own.
“However, even after all their works, they are still in danger. They have been an antagonist of a far greater power for a very long time, and it is only by luck and careful political manoeuvrings that they have not been lost to history; however, they also maintain themselves by dealing within their foe, both openly and secretly. To deal secretly with this land would be an act of treason.” Klaus finished, taking a sip of his drink.
Hershin was still leaning forward as Jules finished and he leaned backwards into his sofa, placing his arms across the back of it. His mouth quirked briefly “I get your point, but I have to ask;” as he spoke one of his men came forward, one hand inside his coat, the other coming down on Orione’s shoulder heavily “What can you do?”
Hershin didn't catch what Klaus could do; he wasn't nearly quick enough. When he had finished his last four words, he heard a small explosion and found that Orione was on his lap, the blocky shape of a handgun pushed into the flesh beneath his chin. She was smiling, thin lips parted. Past her head, Hershin could see Klaus sipping at his drink, the legs of somebody to his right. Out of the corner of his vision could see the other half of the torso-less legs imbedded into the roof, blood coating the roof as rays of ejecta. His liquified remains dripped from his vaguely recognisable, cratered form.
Her foot sychthed cleanly through his torso, and her momentum carried her round in a pivot that brough her other foot into contact with him. He was launched into the roof with explosive force and stayed there; dead before his brain could even register her movement.
There was an arm next to Orione's viola case; the owner was on the other side of the room, coming slowly down the window. His impact and sliding path to the floor left part of the view of the city obscured by blood.
She received her order and in the same instant she felt the hand come down on her shoulder, she had a hold of it. Flesh tore like wet tissue paper, bones snapped like brittle twigs and his dripping arm came free of his sleeve as she twisted and pulled. She flicked him across the room. He hit the far window with freight train like force; the collision splitting him open like an overstuffed garbage bag.
All around the room lay the bodies of his employees; skulls scooped clean, brain matter splashed across the walls and floor.
With mechanical precision she swept her submachine gun across the room, putting individual slugs into the heads of her targets.
“Do you see, Mister Hershin? There is much I can do.” Klaus finished his drink. He placed down the glass by his field-chair and stood up, stepping closer, so he was within five metres of Orione and her prisoner.
“You're going to kill me.” Hershin stated flatly.
“Not at all.” Klaus replied, and Orione climbed down from Hershin, removing the barrel of the gun from his throat. The little girl walked over to her handler and Hershin sighed with relief “You see, I want you to deliver a message to your American friends.”
“Message? You're going to let me live?” Hershin said it slowly, going over it in his head.
Klaus and Orione turn back to look at the sweating lump on the couch. “Not at all,” says Klaus, and Orione raised her gun, levelling it at the criminal's head. Hershin opened his mouth to draw breath for a scream, but is cut off by a hollowpoint bullet shattering through his teeth; hydroshock turning his brains into an even mush. It flowed down the sides of his mouth in a grey stream as Hershin twitched one last time.
Blue gun-smoke rose up from the barrel of Orione's outstretched pistol, and she looked up at Klaus, who smiled at her. He watched her eyes flick to the ballroom and looked out himself, towards an elevator. A party of men were stepping out onto the dance floor, the tails of their coats flapping around near their ankles. “The CIA,” he muttered, and he noticed at Orione was already about to out into the ballroom, her classic heavy handgun at her side.
“Orione! Wait!” he shouted, but she was already on the other side, and no sound passed through the glass.
*
The office is lined with tall bookcases, the carpet is thick and dark. The window is a solid pane of white, leaving Borgio in his high-backed, leather chair a darkly shadowed blot; partially lit up by the object in his hand. He tosses the semi-rigid, self-lit material across his desk to sit within eye reach of both Klaus and Pascal. It’s a newspaper with the words ‘MASSACRE AT ICB FUNCTION – intersolar politics as possible cause’ emblazoned across it; below sits a moving picture showing heavily clad police officers sifting through the wreckage.
The two agents only look at it briefly, before again returning their gazes to the space above Borgio’s head. The sub-director’s face is a mask, his anger almost palpable as waves of heat radiating away from him.
“A hundred and twenty thousand people dead.” He snaps, and Klaus flinches visibly as though struck. “A complete failure of control. You possess under your command forces of nature and you utterly failed to keep that power contained.” His fist slams into his desk as a blur; books drop from the nearby shelves like a sporadic rain. The wooden panelling of the desk splinters.
“I should have you both removed from this organization.” He settles back into his chair “Or better yet; shot.”
*
The bullet, if you could call it that, hit the head of the first CIA agent at almost lightspeed. Rather than obliterating his head and most of his body above the waist, it impacted the immaterial barrier protecting him and drove him back into the elevator. The other five agents reacted almost; guns appearing in their hands with no sense of movement; their feet tossing them into the crowd. Blue fire belched from the barrels of their weapons and dense slugs flew across the room towards Orione; far too slow for her to be bothered. The agents switched weapons
She herself was running, keeping her gun aimed down below. She squeezed the trigger and another pinched pocket of space/time rippled down through the air; it’s marvellous force-field technology displacing away the air around as it went. People became clouds of steam instantaneously and the agent tripped. Orione stepped into a grav-lift and increased it’s pull by nearly a thousand-fold. She hurtled into the crowd of statues.
Across the way, on top of the roof of the Grange Holborn, Rachel was peering through the sight of her rifle. “I can’t make any contacts.” She said “The angle is too steep.”
“Klaus is unable to support Orione.” Pascal said through gritted teeth “This has gotten well out of hand. Rachel; move up into combat.” She pulled away from the Walther and nodded, seizing a hold of her plasma cannon and putting it across her back. She leapt up onto the edge of the hotel; toes poised over the mile drop. She watched the airborne cars zip back and forth, then pushed away, wind pulling at her hair and clothes. The sheer black wall of the bank grew huge before her, ready to crush her like a fly against a hovercar’s windscreen.
There was no impact as Rachel phase-shifted through the solid buckyglass, skidding to a halt in Herhin’s private room; her feet ploughed through someone’s chest. Pushing against the floor she sprang lightly over the couch and Klaus himself, bringing her DeLamenter up and ready as she came back down. Rachel looked out through the window and let her passive sensors pick up the buzzes that were the equipment of the Americans. There was screaming among the people on the dancefloor; other among them had been exploding for what appeared to be no reason at all.
Rachel slipped through the glass wall and pulled the firing stud on her plasannon. For a dreadful moment a vision-searingly bright cord connected the barrel of the DeLamenter and the body of the CIA agent. It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind clouds of ash for dozens of metres all around the American agent and multicoloured swirls of liquefied glass. The second blast cut through his combat screens and reduced him to a tangled mess of metal.
Away from the nuclear firestorms caused by Rachel and her plasgun, Orione was trading shots with one of the agents. They were all fast, well equipped and very well trained, but they faced their better. Orione was faster then they were by a considerable margin. She emptied her mauser into her opponent at close range, his fields coming down with a pop. Her foot punched through his tough synthetic skin and artificial musculature, crumpled the buckysteel of his bones and took away his face, as well as half the metal box that was his brain.
Orione came down into a crouch as the agent’s ruined body was frozen back on his heels impossibly, as though gravity had ceased to have effect. Around her were slowly expanding clouds of vapour, remains shattered and smouldering. A beam of light cut across the room, clearing it of life and sending one the American’s sprawling. Orione pushed a new clip down into her weapon, raised it and tore the man apart. She looked across the carpet of flesh and oily ashes as Rachel touched the ground, air around the barrel of her weapon distorted like water.
“Maker of Man and Mercy.” Klaus said from above them, as the two walked across what used to be a piece of artwork but was now melted and stained. They looked up him, his knuckles white against the edge of the force field used for a railing. They stood ankle deep in what had once been people. Around them pulsed the beats of the music; the bass thumping heavily enough that the residue moved in a hideous parody of life.
Get It By Your Hands
“She’s only a child.”
The voice was soft, but urgent none the less. The comment was not hissed, for the speaker seemed to in control to let that happen. Through his words one could hear the gentle pulsing from smooth white machines, soothing and frightening at the same time. In response, eyebrows were raised.
“A child? Yes, yes she is.” Was the reply, not as quiet as the first man’s voice, and with not nearly the same level of emotion “But what does that matter? She, like all of us, owes her status and the body she was born with to the Imperial Commonwealth. She is simply performing her civic duty.
“Klaus, we can rebuild her. We have the technology. We have the capability to make one of the galaxy’s finest cyborgs. She will be that cyborg. Better than she could have been before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster.”
A hand, marked by a ring mounted with a small green stone on his second to last finger. It laid itself against a slopping pane of buckyglass before forming itself into a fist. “It’s not right.” Shook the first voice gently, almost imperceptibly. “I know the concept; I’ve read the papers. But just building her a mechanical body won’t change the fact that she’s a human being.”
The other waved his hand, dismissing Klaus’ objections as easily as he would brush away an insect “We can easily deal with that, or more specifically, you can deal with that. Through your tutoring, she will be capable of being a perfect little assassin, though she will retain her humanity to the extent that people would not be disturbed by her presence.”
“Mori’s work on human-like robots? I thought that was considered too old for today’s galaxy, Borgio. We can easily create mecha which appear perfectly human – you’re going to do it now.”
“You’ve met combat AIs before; you know that it feels strange, even when they’re hidden inside bodies which you couldn’t tell weren’t human.” Borgio paused “It isn’t about what they look like, but rather about how they seem. A hyperturing synthetic intelligence could easily fool a person into believing that they are a little girl, but they are so intelligent that they become problematic to work with. A low-class drone intelligence like we use in missiles and limpets are very intelligent, but they would never pass themselves off well enough as children – though they are as cruel and as innocent as one. Constructing an artificial intelligence which will not ‘creep out’ an orga is difficult, to say the least; which is the concept that Masahiro Mori explored in his more recent piece on AI.”
Borgio looked down on the body of the girl upon what would have been a cold, hard slab of metal “On the other hand, she already has a psychology which would not disturb another organic, including a waveform which would not immediately raise the attention of a Psyker without probing. With conditioning she can be made into a relentless, dangerous killing machine whom would not hesitate to murder or maim if ordered to, but can remain as innocuous as any normal girl.” He looked over at Jules, pushing his fingers through grey hair “Seems strange doesn’t it?”
There was a long pause, and a smile touched the lips of the other.
“I knew you’d understand. You always did.”
*
Click goes the slide on Orione’s handgun, locking back behind her wrist. She turns it over in her hands, before passing her hand over it. The slide comes away easily, and with the ease of a machine, she takes the gun apart, laying each piece down in a parts map. She pauses for a moment, before taking up the barrel and slowly begins to clean it.
“‘Rione, what are you doing?” asks a girl’s voice, thick with sleep.
“Hmm?” she replies, looking over her shoulder at the speaker “Did I wake you Leona?”
The other girl, Leona, raises herself up on one elbow. Her hair is mussed; looking so much like a blonde briar patch. She sighs and runs her fingers across her scalp. “You did,” she says “Why are you cleaning your seven at one o’clock in the morning?”
Orione places down the barrel in her hand, turning herself around in her chair. She pulls one leg up underneath herself and looks down at the floor. Strands of red hair fall lazily in front of her face and her arms wrap around carved wood of the chair’s backrest. A frown touches her lips, and the geometry of her face changes, as though she doesn’t quite know the answer. “I just think I should.” She bites her bottom lip and lets herself follow the grain of the wooden floor with eyes.
“But you had already cleaned it today.” Leona says, pushing back the covers and pulling herself barefooted onto the floor. She slapped over to Orione, placing her hands on the smaller girl’s shoulders. “More than once. And I bet you’ve been cleaning it almost continuously since you left Frankfurt. Did the mission go badly? I haven’t had a chance to talk to Rachel yet; and really, that girl thinks too much in terms of success and failure.”
“Badly?” Orione raises her eyebrows “I wouldn’t say that.”
*
“Hershin’s an information broker by trade. He’s got ties to the Commonwealth’s criminal underground; but also to the URSS and American Empire through their own Omertàs.” The speaker’s voice was terse. He gestured towards a large picture floating nearby, showing a man with an ashen face with sunken eyes “We can infer that the recent conflict across Tyr, Reims and the fall of Belgrade was at the end result of his selling of secrets. He’s grown fat on our loses.”
“He’s a traitor then, Pascal.” Asked someone further down the table, who was adjusting a hideously green tie.
“Indeed Klaus. We fully intend to kill him.” Pascal paused for a moment, and the picture changed, no longer showing the man, but instead the light side of a beringed planet floating in space, huge dark splotches of cities pock marking its surface. The words ‘real time’ sat smugly in one corner. “Hershin is on Hesse; in Frankfurt am Main, to be precise. He’s there under the pretence of visiting the Wertpapierbörse, however we know that he’s attending a function being held by the Imperial Central Bank in nine hours, and is planning on meeting with confederates with the Cellestial Intelligence Agency there.”
“The CIA?” the screen flickered, showing not the planet, but instead a sweeping room of marble litered with floating numbers and letters and people in sharp suits. The camera focussed on a man standing looking up at one of the lists constructed out of light, Hersin in the process of some afternoon banking. The area around him was devoid of people and robots; most probably disconcerted about his dangerous looking bodyguards.
Pascal smiled grimly “We’ve had SGN3 feed Hershin false information that our Yank friends would find . . . palatable, to say the least. However, it’s just a lure to get some of their agents within striking distance.”
A woman with short blonde curls and a lined face brought up her eyebrows “Why has SGN4 been chosen? Considering the pangalactic nature of this, I would expect the Number Threes to deal with this. And the deal with Hershin seems appropriate for SGN1; the Thoughtpolice deal with infrmation crime as well.” Pascal opened his mouth to answer, but another, older, man raised his hand.
“We intend to send a message, Litcria.” He said, gently adjusted a pair of slim, plain glasses before he continued “The SIS does not allow intrusions into the Imperial Commonwealth to go unpunished. SGN4 sends these messages. We are good at making them heard.”
“Thank you Borgio.” Litcria replied as a man with neat black hair and an air of efficiency about him raised his hand.
“Hubbard?”
Acknowledged, Hubbard continued, “Whom will you be sending out on this mission? How many girls?”
Pascal answered this time at a nod from Borgio “We’ll be sending two teams; a sniper and an infiltrator. I myself will be travelling to Hesse with Rachel as the sniper. Any one to volunteer.”
Klaus and his green tie sat further upright “Orione would be good to go.”
After exchanging a brief look (and a rapid tightbeamed conversation) with Pascal, Borgio turned to Klaus “I can’t see anything wron-” his words were suddenly cut off by a strangely reverberating and impossibly deep voice, and Borgio pulled his glasses down his nose to look at the speaker: a ten foot tall, humanoid machine.
“With all due respect Borgio, Klaus, but I have to protest Orione’s selection.” The mechanoid said from the far end of the table “I honestly do not believe she is suitable for this mission.”
“You have concerns that she is not skilled enough for it, Chamli?” Pascal questioned, steepling his fingers. “I have only exemplary reports regarding her training.”
“That is correct.” Chamli replied, artificial light glinting from the edges of his artificial frame. Pascal frowned and rubbed his chin, while Borgio scratched at one grey sideburn. Those sitting at the table all turned to look at the machine.
“So what’s the problem?” Pascal sighed.
Chamli uncrossed his legs and took his enormous weight off the wall, which bent back till it was straight again. “Orione is the newest addition to our little part of Ragazze. Despite her relatively recent addition, she has shown to be skilled in a close support capacity and a dead shot at sixteen kilometres. However, she has shown a fatal flaw outside of her martial skills.
“She hesitates.”
There was a slow silence that was broken suddenly by the hump of Klaus chair against the wall. He stood facing Chamli with both feet spread and one arm bent; his tense hand hovering level with the small of his back. “Are you suggesting that Orione has been badly conditioned? That she would be unable to perform her duties?” he snapped.
“My job is psychological profiling as well as assessment of the girls’ training, Klaus.” The mechanoid replied, ignoring Klaus stance.
“Perhaps then we should use someone else,” Borgio noted, looking towards the window “Handler as well as cyborg.”
Klaus almost melted as he heard that. He lowered his hand and turned towards the head of the table “I have to apologise Borgio. It’s just that Orione is continually passed up for missions like these. It bothers her, since her training was completed months ago.” The chair rolled up behind him and he sat back down. “Trust me Borgio. Orione can do this.”
*
“I don’t quite understand it.” Says a tired voice over the squeak of leather “She went crazy.”
He watches the level of amber liquid rising in the squat cylindrical glass sitting on the desk in front of him. She twists the lid back onto the bottle, places it down next to the glass and drops something into the glass. As she hands it over, it starts to glow. Klaus takes it and sips.
“Thanks Teo.” He sighs.
She sits down opposite him, flicks back her wavy brunette hair and rests chin on her hands. “She was supposed to kill them though. I mean, you can’t of gone there expecting anything different.”
Klaus taps the rim of his glass and shrugs “Teodora, this was mad. You saw her before she left. The change was frightening.”
“The change is always frightening.” The woman called Teodora says, quietly “I don’t know how you can stand it; watching them turn from sweet little girls into almost mindless killing machines. It’s not right.”
“No,” Klaus agrees, looking up at the ceiling “It isn’t.”
*
“You won’t need an anti-material rifle or needle missile launcher.” Pascal said as he looked over a navi-file. Behind him, a girl with black hair took her hand away from a bulky rifle taller than her by more than a foot. She looked over her shoulder. “Take your Walther.”
“Yes Pascal.” Replied the girl, stepping away from a rack of extremely large guns; some which wouldn’t have looked small in the hands of big machine like Chamli “The mission profile mentions that I could very well be shooting at CIA agents. I’ll need something more powerful.” Internally, Pascal noted her tactical sense and nodded.
“Take a plascannon then.” He said sharply “In future do not just note what may happen in an operation; actively plan for it.”
“Yes Pascal.” Rachel replied passively, moving further down the gun-rack. Further away, amidst the spiralling racks of weaponry stood Orione, almost dancing from foot-to-foot with excitement. Loose strands of hair whipped around her face chaotically as she touched the cold metal casings of various weapons as she circled one rack. She snatched up one weapon and pulled it up to her shoulder.
“A Heckler and Koch MP779!” she cried in a singsong voice, pulling back on the action “Chambered for five-point-five-six millimetre ICE,” she squeezed the trigger and the empty weapon clicked loudly “With a muzzle velocity of twelve-point-eight kilometres a second; it is one of the preferred weapons for-”
“Dealing with lightly armoured posthumans.” Klaus interrupted, smiling. Orione bounced around to face him, so quickly that he didn’t catch the movement. “You’re very excited.”
“Yes Klaus!” she beamed, clutching the submachine gun close to her “I’ve wanted to take part in a mission. Every time Leona or Elysia or one of the other girls went out on a job I envied them. Now it’s my turn.” Klaus placed a hand down Orione’s shoulder; in the other he held an instrument case.
“In any case, you’ll need a larger calibre then that. Something to put a person down quickly, not penetrate a LPCV.” He held up the instrument – Orione guessed from the size it was for a viola – case “It needs to be able to fit into this, along with your five-seven and,” he paused briefly to open the case and pull something out and Orione squealed briefly. Both Pascal and Rachel looked up from whatever it was they were doing and glanced down at the small figures, ignored them, and went back to their own business.
To anyone who wasn’t a ballistophile, it would have looked like an archaic and rather large handgun. Technically it was an archaic and rather large handgun, but for Orione it was something more than that.
“A Bolo Mauser!” she breathed “I didn’t think we even had a classic weapon like this in this entire star system.”
“Think of it as gift, for your first mission.”
The little girl assassin took the gun in her hands and sighted down the barrel, finger off the trigger. She held it up to her face and ran her fingertips over the polished wood of the grip. “Oh wow.” Orione gushed, and looked up at the sound of feet against the ferrocrete floor. Orione ran to the woman, instantly disappearing from Klaus’ vision and appearing a metre and a half in front of the newcomer. The woman gave a little scream and grasped at her chest.
“Look Teodora! Look what Klaus got for me!” Orione held the weapon up in the air “An R96; one of the classic weapons of the past thousand years. Chambered for spatial defects instead of-”
Klaus’ hand came on Orione’s shoulder and the girl stopped speaking suddenly “Don’t bore Teo with the technicals of the gun, Orione. She doesn’t like them, remember.”
Orione pulled the handgun to her chest “Sorry ma’am.” She said, and meant it too.
Teodora sat down and swept some hair over her ear and smiled; lifting the girl’s chin up “That’s alright. It’s a nice gift if you like it. Now run along and finish preparing; I have to talk to Klaus.” Orione nodded rapidly before dashing away, grabbing a hold of the viola case from her handler. Teodora stood up straight and smiled after the young girl, before her face visibly drooped. Klaus noticed from the corner of his eye and raised his eyebrows.
“Not pleased, Teo?” he asked conversationally, in a tone out of place in a room with filled enough weaponry to run a moderately large war. In reply, she shrugged.
“You couldn't have gotten her a nicer present?”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Klaus asked and Teodora replied by twitching one eyebrow. He sighed “Don't give me that; she needed a heavy handgun. And besides, Orione likes guns; she's a ballistophile.”
Teodora snorted shortly, looking after Orione as she sighted down another rifle. “She was written like that, and you know it. No twelve year old girl could be this enthused about guns.”
“Well, I have a cousin who-”
“Enthused about guns with which to kill people.”
Klaus opened his mouth to speak, but shut it again. He physically slumped, as though some one had draped a heavy cloak across his shoulders. “You have a message for me?”
“I do.” she reached into her jacket and pulled out a shiny red rectangle smaller than a pocket notebook. Klaus took it, grabbed one corner and yanked, whipping it around to the back of his neck. He disconnected the little computer almost instantly, handing it back to its owner.
“Thanks Teodora.” Klaus said, walking away.
“I'll see you in a few days then.” she said and he waved vaguely over his shoulder.
*
“Klaus seemed distant after Teo came to see him.” Orione notes, a breeze slowly blowing up and stroking her hair back. She looks over at the other girls lying back against the crest of the hill; each one staring up at the sky and the clouds sailing across the cerulean expanse.
“Distant?” asks a girl wearing unnecessary glasses, fingers lost in her dark brown hair. “Seems a little different for Klaus; of all the handlers in the whole of SGN4, he could probably be said to be the closest to his charge.” She says it in a way that suggests she has put research into the statement.
“Hubbard’s pretty good in his own way though.” Leona says, chewing absentmindedly on one thumbnail “And what about your handler Elysia? Benoit – he always seemed rather close to you.”
Elysia turns her head sideways to look at the blonde girl “Benoit? Oh, I suppose he’s not as detached as someone like Pascal. But he treats me less as a child and more as what I am.”
“Like that cute investigator from SGN1?” Leona muses.
“Agent Bramwell?” Elysia asks, sitting up “You can’t honestly still have a crush on him.”
“There was something there, I know it.” Leona replies, propping one booted foot on her bent knee. The bespectacled girl pulls off her glasses and starts to clean a lens with the hem of her blouse.
“Honestly Leona; you’re fifteen and a half. He’s over two hundred and thirty.”
Leona smiles, foot bouncing in time to some internal tune. Her eyes are closed “Age means nothing in today’s society. Besides, he doesn’t look two hundred thirty.”
Elysia leans away from the now humming girl and rolls her eyes at Orione, tightbeaming She’s a very strange girl. Orione giggles, putting her hand over her mouth. Leona frowns, but says nothing, rather choosing to open her eyes and watch the cloud formations soaring overhead. There was an extended silence before Elysia asks:
“What about you, Rachel? What did you think of the mission?” she says, and Orione leans forward to look around at the other girl. Leona pushed herself up to look as well.
Rachel lays back unblinking, starring up at the sky; her hair spreads around her like a halo of black silk. She waits and then opens her mouth.
“It went well.”
*
Three hours and twenty eight thousand lightyears worth of travel had the SGN4 strike team in orbit around Hesse, specifically, aboard the Hesse Equatorial Ring. The construct had a diameter of several hundred thousand kilometres, but even that was tiny compared to the object that Orione and Rachel were looking at.
From where they stood, they could see the system’s star, and the thin cord of black sliced out of it. “A Niven class orbital.” Klaus said from behind them “It’s pretty big; care to guess just how big?”
“It’s a hundred and eighty million miles across, as far as I can tell from here. Which is smaller than ours.” Rachel said, hands clasped in front of her. Orione had her hands tightly against the small of her back, and was rolling from her toes to her heels.
“That’s still huge; though not as big as a Dyson sphere.” she whistled “Klaus, how built up is it?”
“I haven’t been to Hesse in about fifteen years. When I moved away they had city across about seventy six percent of its surface. Come on girls.” They picked up their bags and started moving towards where Pascal was standing.
Orione looked up at Klaus as they walked “You used to live here?” he nodded in reply.
“I didn’t live in Frankfurt am Main though. I lived in a smaller city called Giessen, which is roughly on the other side of the world.”
“How are we getting down to our location?” They came up onto Pascal, who broke into the conversation.
SGN2 has a car ready for us, he tightbeamed Be aware that in all likelyhood the CIA has their claws into this system. Do not give any indication that we are with the SIS.
There were acknowledgements from the other three and Pascal smiled broadly. Orione found it remarkably inconsistent with the man himself, but it looked perfect. From the outside, she supposed they looked like any other travelling musical family; instrument cases in the hands of three of them. No one would know from looking, however, that these cases contained no instruments and instead weapons and ammunition. Not even the highest gain sensory or most powerful quantum magician could tell either; for each case, and the girls themselves, were constructed to move easily through checkpoints and security. In the hands of someone so inconspicuous as a young girl, they went unnoticed.
The descent down to Frankfurt am Main took close to half an hour, due to traffic. Orione gathered if it had not been for the clouds of tens of millions of craft running back and forth between the planet and its ring, they could have made it to the surface in about thirty seconds. As it was, the relative length of the trip didn't bother her overly much; it allowed her to take a look over the ships swooping around it in a hazy veil. She followed ships that looked like pinpricks and picked out things painted on them all over the visible spectrum.
“Swing around the Imperial Central Bank.” Pascal ordered and Klaus complied, peeling away from the coordinate-locked river of aerial traffic. The car swept over the roofs of buildings that reached up for hundreds of stories, coming upon a building taller than the others. It stood tall with one thousand, one hundred and eleven floors; the number of floors was also its adress.
“The function is being held on the six hundredth and forty eighth floor.” Pascal noted as they all peered down upon its green glass gleaming in the sunlight.”Hershin has a private room booked; we have altered his booking so that he is facing our hotel. Rachel will be able to cover the assault from the roof. This location also allows for Rachel to get into a close support position should the need arise.” The car rotated and zipped back almost three hundred metres, over a building about three quarters the height of the Imperial Central Bank. “Our operation will begin in five hours.”
*
“Going somewhere Klaus?” asks the deep voice of Chamli as Klaus steps out into the courtyard of the section building. The mechanoid is sitting out on the grass, playing with a chain of flowers, using his fields to manipulate the delicate petals; his hands too large to work with the little plants. Klaus pauses and looks over the machine.
“I was planning on going to see Orione before I meet with Borgio.” he replies.
“She's not in her room. Some of the girls went out cloud-gazing,” the chain of flowers floats over to Klaus and the Knight takes it “Orione included.” the dark machine stands up and turns to face Klaus. “Are you pleased with her performance during the course of your mission?”
Klaus narrows his eyebrows at the teardrop shape of Chamli's face; his brow wiggles like archaic television interference. “You're dieing to say 'I told you so' aren't you.”
“Not at all.” Chamli replies, his voice more airy than the weak breeze crossing between them “I'm not nearly petty enough for that. And really, was I right? After all, she did not hesitate, not for a subjective second. If you'll excuse me, I have some business regarding muscle upgrades I should attend to.” Chamli turns fluidly and walks away; movements perfect as when he had been first designed. Klaus watches the mechanoid go, crushing the flowers within his fist.
He twists on one heel, dropping Chamli's gift; looking for all the world like they had been subjected to a hydraulic press.
*
For Orione, the five hours between their landing at the Grange Holborn Hotel and the beginning of the operation were some of the longest in her life. She was anxious to leave for the Imperial Central Bank and wished more than once that she had Rachel's patience. The other cyborg had spent her time patiently going over her DeLamenter plascannon and her WA-24000. Orione had seen her pull apart the latter and put it back together again more than a dozen times.
It hadn't helped that Klaus hadn't been paying her much attention; and really, you couldn't expect Pascal to be any better. Even now, as their elevator crawled scenically up the side of the bank building, he had not stop to offer any words of encouragement. Not wanting to bother him, Orione herself hadn't spoken; instead she chose to stand with her viola case clasped behind her back.
“Orione.” Klaus finally said, adjusting his sombre tie. She looked up at the back of his head, before he continued “Fix up your hair.”
The girl placed her instrument case down, paused for a moment, and turned around to face the curving glass wall of the elevator to see her reflection. Her small white hands reached up to untie one of the ribbons in her red hair and she paused to look out across the cityscape of Frankfurt am Main, a see of stars brought down from the heavens to light up an almost beautiful mass of buildings. Orione ignored it and focussed on her reflection again, expertly retying the white ribbons in her hair into pretty, complex bows. She heard Klaus' muscles start to move and watched him step towards her, and place his hands on her shoulders.
“Don't hesitate, Orione.” he whispered into her ear “That's all I ask.”
There was a chime and the doors slid open. Orione spun around to grab her viola case. The sounds assaulted her ears; the lights her eyes. She picked up music playing at a fairly constant and equally hypnotic hundred and forty-eight beats per minute, melodic and free form. The bass was like a beating heart that shivered through the soles of her shoes.
They stepped out into a ballroom, its floors covered in complex mosaic said to have been made by the famous artist Craswhul, who is said to have used more than three quadrillion tesserae across the almost a hundred and eighty square kilometres of floorspace, all placed by hand (or really by manipulator, for Craswhul was a retired combat mechanoid whom took up art as an outlet after centuries as a frontline unit). Orione had a little appreciation for art though she did could not miss the sheer beauty in the smoothly flowing lines and colours.
Men and women and shells mixed; thousands and thousands and thousands of them, of different species and planetary origins, dressed in rich clothes of fine making. At perhaps another time Orione might have been enamoured by the flowing gowns worn by the socialite women. Their hair was piled in curls and studded with beautiful gems the size of golf balls and their shining jewellery fashioned from intricatly wrought metals; not as a show of wealth, but rather for the simple fact that they were indeed attractive things. The young girl in Orione may well have enjoyed looking at all this, but the girl in Orione was currently missing.
The ballroom was lined on three sides with private rooms cut of from the rest of the gathering masses reaching up to the roof three stories above. They were separated by sheets of tinted buckyglass that cycled through ever-changing patterns and snippets of the outside world like huge holo-screens; Orione suspected that the windows may have been of the much tougher permaglass; there was no real way to tell without active sensory which she was forbidden from using in order to maintain her cover.
Klaus lead the way towards a grav-shaft and they buoyed up onto a second level, transparent balcony. They strode past party-goers who had decided to escape from the writhing beast below, but did not have access to one of the prestigious rooms over looking it all. He came to a stop in front a pane showing a large hand some colour out of space stretching out towards them. Klaus paused a moment, communicating over his internal Sub-etha connection with someone on the other side of the glass. After a second or so, he stepped through the glass, and Orione followed. The instant they had done so, the steady rhythmic pulsing of the bass dropped considerably. Music was being trickled out of speakers hidden throughout the walls, instead of being pumped out at a hundred and fifty decibels from the floor itself.
Orione let her eyes flicker and passive sensors take in every little detail she could. Twenty metres across to the windows out into Frankfurt, a good forty metres from one end to the other. A semicircular lounge suite covered with rose red velvet sat in the middle of the room, with water features and exotic plants. She counted a dozen men and women in the room, noticing on those not wearing all-concealling greatcoats the vague shapes of holstered guns. Large guns, essentially useless against her. There was a gentle buzzing which she knew to be the active (and hideously primitive) sensors of people throughout the room. They looked her and her case up and down at the quantum level and found nothing, which would lead to be almost certainly fatal in the not too distant future.
Orione took all this in and found that if she really needed to she could probably just turn them into droolling idiots with the more . . . offensive parts of her sensory more or less similtaneously. She could have turned them all against each other; but that wasn't the point of the mission. She dropped the secondary train of thought and focussed entirely on the man sitting in the dead centre of the sofa. Pallid, his hair cascaded lankly off his scalp, like rope. Dressed in a crumpled, partially buttoned suit, both arms draped across the bare shoulders of a pair of tired, likely intoxicated women.
His face was more than recognisable; it had been locked into her memory.
Charles Hershin. Traitor.
The man’s face twisted into a kind of smile and he gestured at the space before him and a pair of partially translucent chairs came into existence. “Sit.” He said, and they complied with his direction, settling down into the shaped field. Orione place her case at her feet. The man shoved at the two women at his sides and did not respond until they had their internal chemical glands flush their systems of whatever brain-chemistry-altering substances they had been exposed to, but when they had they were on their feet and out without a word, passing through the glass.
Hershin considered them for a moment and snapped his fingers “Get Mister Verheim a drink.” he said, before leaning forward, eyes locked on Orione. “I'm told that you two pose a limited threat to me. A man with limited biotechnic enhancement, completely unarmed save for a knife inside your jacket; and a normal twelve year old girl with a viola. I find it odd that you brought this girl; your sister, apparently.” the infomerchant sat back into the crushed velvet of his couch. “Are you any good, little girl?”
"Pardon?"
"Your viola."
“Oh! I’m learning Anton Rubinstein at the moment. I have a friend who plays piano and we’re learning his forty ninth opus.” She replied shyly as Klaus took a glass of water-clear liquid and held it in both hands. “I can play for you, if you like,” Orione’s words came out quickly, almost as though she was embarrased to admit she had skill. However, she stood up, grabbing her case.
“That’s enough Orione.” Klaus murmured, and Orione's hand froze on the clasp “Maybe Mister Hershin will have time to listen to you play after we’re done. But first, I’d like to get to business.
“I have a story to tell, if you would hear it.” Klaus said, and Hershin nodded. His eyes flicked towards one of his men and Orione heard someone nearby shifting. “Once upon a time, over the gravity well and past the sun there is a land; a land of the free and brave. It is a nice enough place, I suppose, though it is a scared place as well, and it shakes for it could be destroyed and all the good work that had gone into making it would be lost. To this end, they have made themselves strong and fight against their enemies, and have joined in partnership with other lands, even some whose ideology does not match their own.
“However, even after all their works, they are still in danger. They have been an antagonist of a far greater power for a very long time, and it is only by luck and careful political manoeuvrings that they have not been lost to history; however, they also maintain themselves by dealing within their foe, both openly and secretly. To deal secretly with this land would be an act of treason.” Klaus finished, taking a sip of his drink.
Hershin was still leaning forward as Jules finished and he leaned backwards into his sofa, placing his arms across the back of it. His mouth quirked briefly “I get your point, but I have to ask;” as he spoke one of his men came forward, one hand inside his coat, the other coming down on Orione’s shoulder heavily “What can you do?”
Hershin didn't catch what Klaus could do; he wasn't nearly quick enough. When he had finished his last four words, he heard a small explosion and found that Orione was on his lap, the blocky shape of a handgun pushed into the flesh beneath his chin. She was smiling, thin lips parted. Past her head, Hershin could see Klaus sipping at his drink, the legs of somebody to his right. Out of the corner of his vision could see the other half of the torso-less legs imbedded into the roof, blood coating the roof as rays of ejecta. His liquified remains dripped from his vaguely recognisable, cratered form.
Her foot sychthed cleanly through his torso, and her momentum carried her round in a pivot that brough her other foot into contact with him. He was launched into the roof with explosive force and stayed there; dead before his brain could even register her movement.
There was an arm next to Orione's viola case; the owner was on the other side of the room, coming slowly down the window. His impact and sliding path to the floor left part of the view of the city obscured by blood.
She received her order and in the same instant she felt the hand come down on her shoulder, she had a hold of it. Flesh tore like wet tissue paper, bones snapped like brittle twigs and his dripping arm came free of his sleeve as she twisted and pulled. She flicked him across the room. He hit the far window with freight train like force; the collision splitting him open like an overstuffed garbage bag.
All around the room lay the bodies of his employees; skulls scooped clean, brain matter splashed across the walls and floor.
With mechanical precision she swept her submachine gun across the room, putting individual slugs into the heads of her targets.
“Do you see, Mister Hershin? There is much I can do.” Klaus finished his drink. He placed down the glass by his field-chair and stood up, stepping closer, so he was within five metres of Orione and her prisoner.
“You're going to kill me.” Hershin stated flatly.
“Not at all.” Klaus replied, and Orione climbed down from Hershin, removing the barrel of the gun from his throat. The little girl walked over to her handler and Hershin sighed with relief “You see, I want you to deliver a message to your American friends.”
“Message? You're going to let me live?” Hershin said it slowly, going over it in his head.
Klaus and Orione turn back to look at the sweating lump on the couch. “Not at all,” says Klaus, and Orione raised her gun, levelling it at the criminal's head. Hershin opened his mouth to draw breath for a scream, but is cut off by a hollowpoint bullet shattering through his teeth; hydroshock turning his brains into an even mush. It flowed down the sides of his mouth in a grey stream as Hershin twitched one last time.
Blue gun-smoke rose up from the barrel of Orione's outstretched pistol, and she looked up at Klaus, who smiled at her. He watched her eyes flick to the ballroom and looked out himself, towards an elevator. A party of men were stepping out onto the dance floor, the tails of their coats flapping around near their ankles. “The CIA,” he muttered, and he noticed at Orione was already about to out into the ballroom, her classic heavy handgun at her side.
“Orione! Wait!” he shouted, but she was already on the other side, and no sound passed through the glass.
*
The office is lined with tall bookcases, the carpet is thick and dark. The window is a solid pane of white, leaving Borgio in his high-backed, leather chair a darkly shadowed blot; partially lit up by the object in his hand. He tosses the semi-rigid, self-lit material across his desk to sit within eye reach of both Klaus and Pascal. It’s a newspaper with the words ‘MASSACRE AT ICB FUNCTION – intersolar politics as possible cause’ emblazoned across it; below sits a moving picture showing heavily clad police officers sifting through the wreckage.
The two agents only look at it briefly, before again returning their gazes to the space above Borgio’s head. The sub-director’s face is a mask, his anger almost palpable as waves of heat radiating away from him.
“A hundred and twenty thousand people dead.” He snaps, and Klaus flinches visibly as though struck. “A complete failure of control. You possess under your command forces of nature and you utterly failed to keep that power contained.” His fist slams into his desk as a blur; books drop from the nearby shelves like a sporadic rain. The wooden panelling of the desk splinters.
“I should have you both removed from this organization.” He settles back into his chair “Or better yet; shot.”
*
The bullet, if you could call it that, hit the head of the first CIA agent at almost lightspeed. Rather than obliterating his head and most of his body above the waist, it impacted the immaterial barrier protecting him and drove him back into the elevator. The other five agents reacted almost; guns appearing in their hands with no sense of movement; their feet tossing them into the crowd. Blue fire belched from the barrels of their weapons and dense slugs flew across the room towards Orione; far too slow for her to be bothered. The agents switched weapons
She herself was running, keeping her gun aimed down below. She squeezed the trigger and another pinched pocket of space/time rippled down through the air; it’s marvellous force-field technology displacing away the air around as it went. People became clouds of steam instantaneously and the agent tripped. Orione stepped into a grav-lift and increased it’s pull by nearly a thousand-fold. She hurtled into the crowd of statues.
Across the way, on top of the roof of the Grange Holborn, Rachel was peering through the sight of her rifle. “I can’t make any contacts.” She said “The angle is too steep.”
“Klaus is unable to support Orione.” Pascal said through gritted teeth “This has gotten well out of hand. Rachel; move up into combat.” She pulled away from the Walther and nodded, seizing a hold of her plasma cannon and putting it across her back. She leapt up onto the edge of the hotel; toes poised over the mile drop. She watched the airborne cars zip back and forth, then pushed away, wind pulling at her hair and clothes. The sheer black wall of the bank grew huge before her, ready to crush her like a fly against a hovercar’s windscreen.
There was no impact as Rachel phase-shifted through the solid buckyglass, skidding to a halt in Herhin’s private room; her feet ploughed through someone’s chest. Pushing against the floor she sprang lightly over the couch and Klaus himself, bringing her DeLamenter up and ready as she came back down. Rachel looked out through the window and let her passive sensors pick up the buzzes that were the equipment of the Americans. There was screaming among the people on the dancefloor; other among them had been exploding for what appeared to be no reason at all.
Rachel slipped through the glass wall and pulled the firing stud on her plasannon. For a dreadful moment a vision-searingly bright cord connected the barrel of the DeLamenter and the body of the CIA agent. It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind clouds of ash for dozens of metres all around the American agent and multicoloured swirls of liquefied glass. The second blast cut through his combat screens and reduced him to a tangled mess of metal.
Away from the nuclear firestorms caused by Rachel and her plasgun, Orione was trading shots with one of the agents. They were all fast, well equipped and very well trained, but they faced their better. Orione was faster then they were by a considerable margin. She emptied her mauser into her opponent at close range, his fields coming down with a pop. Her foot punched through his tough synthetic skin and artificial musculature, crumpled the buckysteel of his bones and took away his face, as well as half the metal box that was his brain.
Orione came down into a crouch as the agent’s ruined body was frozen back on his heels impossibly, as though gravity had ceased to have effect. Around her were slowly expanding clouds of vapour, remains shattered and smouldering. A beam of light cut across the room, clearing it of life and sending one the American’s sprawling. Orione pushed a new clip down into her weapon, raised it and tore the man apart. She looked across the carpet of flesh and oily ashes as Rachel touched the ground, air around the barrel of her weapon distorted like water.
“Maker of Man and Mercy.” Klaus said from above them, as the two walked across what used to be a piece of artwork but was now melted and stained. They looked up him, his knuckles white against the edge of the force field used for a railing. They stood ankle deep in what had once been people. Around them pulsed the beats of the music; the bass thumping heavily enough that the residue moved in a hideous parody of life.
. Not say there's anything wrong with your dialouge either; it's very crisp and fresh. I love it! Thanks for sharing! 
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