Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,93
AI’s just going to flood the area with more co-opted passengers. When I cut through, there’s going to be a fucking army. Maybe with the boys and girls on the shuttle we can cut our way through them, but just the two of us? I get that choppy here,” I gestured at Korben, though there was no way for Shay to see it, “can probably hold the door like a Spartan at Thermopylae, but I doubt we’ll be able to force our way through the hole in the first place.”
“Never fear, Mr. Langston,” Korben replied, his voice cool and untroubled on the speakers of my helmet. “Genetechnic foresaw the potential difficulty. I have a… let’s call it a party favor…” I couldn’t see his face, but I heard the insufferable, patronizing smile in his voice. “I’m confident I’ll be able to clear us a bridgehead long enough to secure a choke point.” I heard that damn smile again. “Though, if you do not mind, I will likely use my firearms and not the kukris to hold it.”
“Yeah. Sounds great,” I muttered. “And how the hell did you get over here and do your ninja routine, anyway?” I asked. “I’ve never seen anyone move like that. Why did you need me at all?” It was maybe not the best question to be asking an assassin who’d already had one set of orders to take me out.
“Talk as we walk, Mr. Langston,” Korben said as he put action to his words, spinning with a grace that defied the magnetic locks of his boots. I had no idea how he accomplished it, and I made no effort to try and duplicate it. My legs were in bad enough shape already. “As to how I made it here and why I needed you to go first…” He trailed off and I could make out the barest shrug from beneath his form-fitting vacc suit. “Well, it’s simple enough, I suppose. My own agent is more… sophisticated than most. It’s also more directly interfaced into my nervous system.” I suppressed a shudder at that. It sounded far too close to what the Bliss nano-virus was doing to the coils we’d left pegged to the deck. “Its heuristic capabilities are also… considerable.”
“Damn,” Shay whispered in my ear. I’d kept her on the channel and she was clearly paying attention to our conversation. “He used his agent to learn how to EVA just by watching you.” There was a note of awe in her voice, and well there should be. Motor skill transference had been possible for quite a while, but it required direct neural interface with computers far more sophisticated than agents, not to mention weeks of time investment. And even then, you only developed the muscle memory. You still had to hone those abilities to actually obtain the fine edge of the practiced professional. To truly understand what, and why, you were doing what you were doing. Or so I’d thought.
“Not quite, Ms. Chan,” Korben replied. “But close. More accurate to say that by watching Mr. Langston make his transition my agent was able to analyze his strategy and apply it. Allowing my agent direct control of not just my thrusters but also my muscular response gave me enough of an edge to make the crossing safely. And, to be fair, the ship’s maneuvers had significantly decreased in volatility by the time I made my own swim.”
I resisted the urge to shake my head, not wanting to give the assassin a visual cue as to just how creeped out I was by his calm acceptance of allowing his agent to take full control. I’d given Sarah reign over my thrusters, but my actual body? I wasn’t entirely sure if Sarah had that capability, and I damn sure wasn’t eager to experiment. Wasn’t that exactly what we were trying to stop Bliss from doing?
We made the rest of the journey in silence, shuffling along the hull until we once again neared the bridge at the bow of the vessel. I ignored the airlock doors—it would have been much easier to cut through them, but there would be a second set of doors for the interior airlock. Opening the outer doors to a tightly packed group of cyber-zombies, no matter what surprises Korben might have in store, with a second door to cut through seemed like a bad play.
“Here,” I said at last, stopping at a point about three meters below the front viewport.
“Not the window itself?” Korben