Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,60

open. She decloaked a few paces beyond the door and signaled me to follow, her attention and weapon trained on the corridor ahead the whole time. I stepped through the doorway and tapped on her shoulder. She then walked forward at a measured pace and I followed, turning to walk backward every few seconds to check for movement behind us.

Ten meters down the hallway, we encountered a lone proxy. It’s back was to us and it seemed to be standing idle, but it was doing so over a body—a technician, judging from the uniform. Andrea gestured for me to hold my position. I took aim, expecting her to engage from where she stood, ready to provide overlapping fire. Instead, she cloaked.

The android’s chest burst open moments later and its feet dangled as it was lifted from the ground. Andrea shimmered into view with her arm plunged through the proxy’s body to the elbow. Her hand was wrapped around its graphene spine, detached synthetic muscle dangling from the broken vertebrae. She placed her free hand on the android’s shoulder and wretched her arm back. Its head twisted free as the body fell to the floor, dangling from the broken spine in Andrea’s hand.

I approached the technician’s body. “Looks like they were ordered to kill everyone they could.”

“I wouldn’t expect any of Section 9’s enemies to have discretion. Would you?”

I caught the oblique reference to Tower 7. “Do you think we rely on these things too much?” I asked her.

“They’re just tools,” she replied. She raised the android’s head and looked into its lightless eyes. “A human is what caused this. Once this is over, she’ll answer for it.”

We soon came upon another group of three proxies close to the west elevators. I looked to Andrea for how we’d handle them. Her silent approach was all well and good for a single android, but I couldn’t see leaving guns out of play when outnumbered.

The androids perked up and moved as a group around a blind corner. We heard a burst of gunshots a moment later. Andrea leveled her weapon and pressed against the adjacent wall. She gestured for me to take a position on the opposite side.

I settled against the right wall and cautiously moved up toward the corner. Something moved up ahead, and I crouched instinctively. Gunfire scored the black metal above my head, and Andrea returned fire. For brief moments—when stepping too hard or bumping against the wall—I could see our attackers. A faint ripple trailed in the air with their movements as they sought cover behind the corner.

“Active camo!” I called out, falling back the way we’d come.

“We need to—grenade!”

She threw herself back down the corridor as a fist-sized white cube struck the right wall and clung. I was already flattening myself against the floor before the thought had occurred to me to do so. Years of training expressed in a single, lifesaving action.

The Arbiter Academy referred to it as Maximal Life Affirmation—the greatest survivability possible in a shitty situation. At a good distance from the grenade, with a minimized cross-section, we’d have a 99% chance of escaping without injury if we did everything we were trained to do.

Open your mouth to prevent burst eardrums, exhale as much as possible to keep your lungs in place when the pressure wave hits. Keep your eyes shut tight.

The adhesive grenade exploded in a bright green flash, and my world became all heat and light. If I’d had a bit more time to act, I would have turned and flattened out with my feet toward the explosive instead of my head. Still, I was alive, and grenades usually traveled in pairs. I needed to get up and counterattack.

In the moments after the blast, everything in my left eye was a white negative of the hallway, swimming with shadows and fireflies. I tasted sulfur on my tongue, and my lungs burned.

I tried to blink my vision clear as I stood and slotted my weapon. I could see clearly through my right eye, so I closed my left and trusted the augment as I pressed forward. The corner at the end of the hall seemed clear, but that only meant our attackers were either taking cover or weren’t bumping into anything hard enough to disrupt their thermoptic fields. For all I knew, someone could be standing out in the open with a gun to my head.

I fired short bursts blindly into the area, deciding that at best I’d kill someone and at worst I’d