Izzy
If you ignore the guy hanging outside, probably supported by maglev if the rest of the tower that Circuit built was any indication, the room looked pretty straightforward. There were half a dozen guards of a type I was getting pretty familiar with – burly looking men and women with compact, carbine weapons – in a room that took up a forty foot by fifty foot chunk of building space with office furniture scattered generously all over the place like an Ikea shipment had blown up in the middle of the room.
And I mean “blown up” in a pretty literal sense. There was a black depression something like a crater in the middle of the room that had a rat’s nest of cables and junk hooked into it. Davis was standing by that when he ordered his goons to start shooting and I ran out of time to look around. The door was off to my right and I jumped that way – I didn’t want to duck back through the new entrance I’d made in the wall because Circuit and Helix were, in theory, coming along behind me. That left the door in the wall to my right as the logical place to go.
I ducked behind a row of desks as the first handful of bullets came my way, slipping my fingers under one of them and flipping it towards my antagonists as I went. Throwing the desk far enough to block off the incoming guards without crushing any of them was probably beyond what I was capable of but papa likes to say when there’s no way to do it without hurting anything, property damage is always better than people damage. So I just heaved that desk, and the one next to it, through the ceiling entirely and the thugs scattered under the rain of debris. For good measure I yanked the door off its hinges as I got to it, intending to send it into the cascading debris as well, but I got distracted by the squad of four additional guards who were hustling into the room to see what all the noise was about.
The first man gave a surprised yell but was fast enough to get his gun up and around before I could get the door out of the way and give myself room to move. I settled for the tried and true approach of just flinging it into the nearest wall, where it stuck about halfway through, and pushed up against my opponent’s gun arm, keeping him from pointing his weapon at me just by standing next to him. I got one hand on the SMG’s carrying strap and changed the thing it carried from the weapon to the weapon’s owner, twisting my hand once to draw the strap tight around his chest and then using it to lever him up over one shoulder. The woman behind him looked like she wanted to surrender which was too bad, I would have liked to have had the time to play nice but it just wasn’t there. I flung the guy I was carrying into her and sent the two of them clattering down with the third guy in line beneath them.
The fourth guy got points for trying something different since he came at me with a knife, one of those big, serrated things you see in tactical gear. Al has said many times in practice that a well trained knife user in hand to hand combat is a real threat, even to vector shifts like him. There’s no talent that makes you immune to getting cut, or if there is we don’t know it yet. This guy’s problem was that he wasn’t a very good knife fighter, holding the weapon like an icepick and trying to grab me with his free hand so he could drag me into a grapple.
I just grabbed that free hand and gave it a yank, using what Al calls the “dislocation twist”, twisting and yanking so as to pull the arm out of socket and leave it’s owner in extreme pain. It was one of the first moves Massif taught me and he’d made me practice it until my eyes crossed from exhaustion. I don’t have confidence in pulling many moves without hurting someone but that one is the exception. Thug number four went down screaming.
That part I wasn’t used to.
All of that took about six seconds and left me with four down but not out opponents in front of me plus six or seven more behind me, depending on whether Davis wanted in on the action, and the guy on the maglev throne who was still something of a wildcard. Everyone agreed that he was the stand in for Circuit but how big a part he was supposed to play in this mess, whether Davis was in charge, partners with him or what, wasn’t something anyone had really addressed at all. That turned out to be a bit of an oversight.
I was in the process of making sure the weapons I’d taken from my prisoners were useless, which for me consists of stomping on them until they’re mangled junk, when the outside wall blew out and a bolt of lightning hit me from one side. For most people that would be a real problem, since electrocution is bad, but this is one of those areas where being a taxman kind of lets you cheat. See, electrical energy still involves entropy which means I still take a cut of it and I can push back against it using the entropy reserves I’ve built up. Not even the brainiacs like Doctor Higgins have figured out how that works, in case you were wondering. But it does, and it’s enough that tasers and similar weapons aren’t much good against me and even lightning just kind of slows me down. Although it still really hurts.
Of course this high energy attack came from the man on the throne, who’s seat could apparently hover anywhere outside the building. If this was a part of Circuit’s original modifications for the building he’d never mentioned it and he seemed like the type who wouldn’t forget to mention details like the opposition having total, unrestricted mobility around the outside of the building. The hall I was in looked right out of the side of the tower, giving what would normally be a breathtaking view of the skyline but right now just let me see the tall, black throne and the man who was seated on it. He had his hands up with all ten fingers pointed at me, as I watched he clenched them into fists and flicked his fingers towards me again, giving me another fun experience with electricity.
The hallway was about forty feet long and offered no cover. Plus there was no way to know if there were any other hostiles lurking behind the doors so that left me with the options of going clear to the end of the hall and finding out what was there or doubling back the way I’d come. Since the whole point of coming here was to break whatever device Davis and his partner were using to control the building, and that was either in the throne or behind me, I did the sensible thing and doubled back into the room full of armed men.
Okay, it’s sensible from a certain point of view.
As I climbed over the four downed guards in the hall the air suddenly took on an almost breathless quality and suddenly it was like I was standing in a wind tunnel with increasingly cold air rushing by me and into the room beyond. So it was no surprise to come through the doorway and find that Helix had made it into the room, an orb of burning plasma pushing in front of him and Circuit a few steps behind, his wheelchair easily navigating the smooth path Helix had literally trailblazed for him. If the mess I’d made of the room when I smashed through thirty seconds ago wasn’t bad enough it looked like things were about to get really ugly indeed.
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