ABC - Penance

Spitfield Automated Network and Distribution Warehouse, Washima District

Ghost was carrying Tubbs and I was calling for an ambulance when we arrived at the Security Office. A panicked looking man of about thirty was wringing his hands in the doorway, his face dropping when he saw the burden in my partner’s arms.

“Ohmigod!” he blurted out. “Zeus! What happened to him?”

I remembered this guy being the one who had been at the security desk when we arrived for our meeting with Tubbs. His eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and Chem I was fairly certain.

“The mechanicals went crazy” I replied. “They shot Mister Tubbs and were trying to do the same to us. I’ve called an ambulance and a team from the Washima Police Auxiliary to secure the crime scene”

Ghost pushed past the flustered guard, whom I presumed was Toni, to lay Tubbs on the break room table. I followed with Toni flapping about like a terrified bird behind me.

“Get the first aid kit, Toni” I said to his face, so he backed off to find one. I used the moment to examine the display screens, all of them showing a silent and unmoving series of loaders, pickers and trucks in various sections of the complex. All of the hounds I could spot were motionless too, the majority crowded around the aisle that Tubbs had been shot in.

Toni reappeared with a bulky red moulded case so I took that from him and went into the break room. Ghost had already ripped open Tubbs shirt to reveal the wound, a nasty looking hole where God had never intended a hole to be. Suppression rounds are not meant to seriously wound or kill the target, but at close range they can fuck you up pretty good.

Tubbs was awake and moaning with the pain, so I located a one shot hypo-injector with a local anaesthetic and fired it into his stomach, close to the neat hole where the bullet had gone in. I checked his vitals and he was definitely in trouble.

My best guess was the Suppression round had gone in deep, bouncing around his internal organs and wedged in there someplace. He was likely bleeding from internal wounds, so patching the outside was not going to help.

“We need to Foam him, Ghost” I said to my partner. He met my worried gaze and laid his own broad hands over the wound, gauging the extent of the damage. All Guard clones are loaded with basic Paramedic knowledge, even combat specialists like my partner.

“It could push the wound open more and cause additional bleeding” he responded. “The ambulance can’t be too far off”

Tubbs jerked violently on the table and blood pulsed from the gunshot wound. I gave him a hasty shot of Anti-Shock from another disposable hypo-injector then checked his eyes and respiration.

“We are out of time” I said and grabbed an air powered tube of medical Foam. It was a last ditch treatment to be used on big, hard to close wounds. It could also be used in cases like this, where internal bleeding could not readily be stopped.

“Hold him down” I warned Ghost. Even with the local pain blocker I had given Tubbs, this was going to hurt like a son of a bitch. I forced the nozzle into the wound as deeply as I could while Tubbs screamed in agony.

I triggered the device and sterile foam sprayed into the man’s guts, sealing up the internal damage with quick setting flexible plastic. Tubbs gave one last agonised groan and passed out. The guy was pale and waxy looking, but I hoped the Foam gave him enough time for the professionals to get here.

Speaking of which, I checked my phone. The ambulance signal showed it was close, nearly at the warehouse entrance.

“Ghost, I am going to guide the ambulance in” I stated. “Stay here and watch over Tubbs”

He nodded his agreement so I pushed past the watchful Toni and headed to the closest main gate. Toni scurried along in my wake, babbling something urgently I could not make out. Then we arrived at the gates and I finally registered what he had been telling me.

To stop the crazed mechanicals, he had thrown the Emergency Shut Down switch. It had forced a hard disconnection of all command signals to every machine and relay in the entire warehouse. That included the automated gates, with the one in front of me firmly closed.

I could hear the approaching sirens of the ambulance and at least one Police Auxiliary vehicle. Red and blue lights were beginning to reflect from the windows of buildings on the other side of the road.

“Toni, is there a manual opening mechanism?” I shouted to him.

“Umm, yeah, it takes about five minutes to crank the gates open” he answered.

“Too long” I replied and went and stood in front of the gates. They ran along a recessed track at the bottom and were made of a substantial mix of metal frames and woven mesh. I braced my right arm against the fence and swung my booted foot at the gate with all my might. And a damned lot of power from my Kinetic Enhancer.

While Toni moaned about how his managers were going to kill him, I kicked that gate off its tracks after my third blow. It fell down flat with a satisfying crash, just in time for me to wave in the ambulance.

It rolled over the fallen gate, bouncing a little on its rubber tyres, then followed me as I jogged at its side to the Security Office.

=====

Ghost and I sat on our bikes in the Visitor parking lot, watching as the last Police Auxiliary van bumped over the fallen gate and turned onto the road. The driver nodded to us briefly then accelerated away, leaving the warehouse under the control of its owners once more.

“Think Tubbs will make it?” I asked my partner. He sipped his coffee from the recyclable cup, freshly stolen from the Security Office. I drank from mine as well, the cheap instant coffee making me grimace but I swallowed it anyway.

“Yes, the paramedics thought he had a good chance” Ghost replied. “You made the right call on the Foam”

“Yep” I agreed smugly. Both of us nodded to the maintenance crew who had arrived a half hour ago, who were now examining the downed and crushed gate. They had the unenviable task of trying to clean up the mess inside as well as fix the busted gate.

One of them glanced in our direction, a sour look on his Smart Goggled face. I guess he was the supervisor and probably knew it was me who had caused the damage to the heavy barrier.

“Do you think the Net Diving strike was a coincidence?” I asked Ghost.

“No” he replied. “The question is, were they after Tubbs or us?”

“Hard to say” I said thoughtfully. “There is a third option too. Our presence made somebody decide they needed to wipe some of the data files at the site. They won’t let us examine their core files, but I bet you there are corrupted or missing files in their stacks right now”

“So the attack on Tubbs and us was just a distraction?” Ghost pondered aloud.

“Maybe” I agreed. “Or killing two birds with one stone” I had paused and taken another long swig of the awful coffee, emptying the cup. I crushed it in my hand and walked to a nearby recycling bin.

“Hey Ghost, I was just thinking about something Tubbs told us earlier” I continued, lifting my eyes to the looming warehouse in front of me. “There was another security guard on patrol tonight, out on the grounds with the mechanicals. What happened to him?”

“The guy at the desk, Toni, didn’t mention him. Didn’t seem to be worried about him at all” Ghost responded, finishing his own coffee. He joined me at the bin and tossed his empty cup away, eyes roaming over the warehouse complex.

A whole fresh team of Security had arrived just before the maintenance team, filing into the warehouses and office, politely but firmly ushering the Police team out. A pair of the helmeted and armoured guards watched us now from inside the mesh fence, keeping a wary eye on us and the still open gateway.

My phone rang and I answered it, then stiffened to attention when I registered who the caller was.

“Good morning, Commissioner Lincoln” I said into my phone. “Yes, this is Inspector Alvarez”

“Alvarez, are you still at the SAND warehouses?” he asked gruffly. It was close to three in the morning and I bet he had not been happy about being woken up at such an hour.

“Err, yes sir” I responded. “We were just about to return to Headquarters”

“Good” the Commissioner said. “We have been told to let the incident at SAND get handled by their own internal team. You can close off any files that got raised in association with the Hacking attack tonight, is that clear?”

“Sure, sir” I agreed. “What about the assault on the security guard and ourselves?”

“You are unharmed I am told, so there is no need to pursue it from a Police Auxiliary perspective” he told me smoothly. “As for the SAND employee, he has not died so it will be treated as an industrial accident”

“May I ask who has ordered my team to stand down, sir?”

“People very high up, Inspector” he told me. “As high as they go”

“I see, sir. I understand and will head back now”

“Thank you, Inspector” Commissioner Lincoln replied and ended the call.

Ghost looked at me enquiringly. He had heard my side of the conversation so he knew what the deal was.

“So who ordered us to leave this mess alone?” he asked.

“The Commissioner said the highest people, so that has to be someone from the Board of Governors”

I looked over at the warehouses, the SAND logo emblazoned across the high sided buildings.

“I bet if you dug deep enough, this company is owned by Board members. They have their sticky fingers in all the major businesses here in the Zone”

“So what do we do, Alvarez?”

“We do as we are told for once” I conceded. “We have too many suspects we are chasing already with too few leads. Let’s concentrate on our original target, Jacob Tan”

“Agreed” Ghost said evenly. “So where do we look next?”

“We know Tan was looking for Pony, whomever this guy is. If we find Pony, maybe we can find Tan”

“That seems logical” my partner said. “So how exactly do we find this mysterious Pony?”

I looked over at our two bikes, contemplating.

“How about a road trip?”