Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

Nathan watched as the cruiser guided itself in to a landing on the rooftop. As soon as its landing pads settled down the gull doors opened and he leaped out with Foxx as they made for the roof exit and dashed down a flight of steps. Nathan’s ocular implant presented him with a glowing map that hovered over his right eye, allowing him to maintain orientation with the target while travelling.

  Foxx jumped down the steps three at a time, lithe as a cat as she dashed for the main exit of the apartment building and then slowed. Nathan eased up behind her and was surprised when she reached out and slipped her arm through his. He may have been getting used to life in the 25th Century, but Nathan was still enough of an idiot to raise an eyebrow and smile down at her.

  ‘You getting’ fresh with me, Foxx?’

  Foxx glanced up at him with her elfin looks and her perfectly sculptured lips curled upwards.

  ‘Play the part Ironsides, ’cause that’s all this is.’

  Before he could reply she hit the door switch and it slid open before them to reveal the street outside. Foxx pulled him out of the building and onto the sidewalk, her grip on his arm like a vice as she smiled sweetly up at him.

  ‘Coffee, or something stronger?’ she asked.

  Nathan grinned back down at her. ‘I think I need something stronger after that performance. You really are a tiger between the sheets, Foxx. How do you keep going for so long?’

  He heard Vasquez snigger down the communications channel in his ear. Foxx hugged Nathan closer, the smile still wide on her features and her gaze lovingly directed upwards at him as they walked.

  ‘I was going to ask you the same question, out of boredom.’

  More muted chuckling. Nathan’s own mirth wilted but he kept his smile static as he weaved between the dense crowds clogging the sidewalk. It was almost lunchtime, businessmen and office workers flooding the streets. Clouds of steam billowed from vents in the deck where all manner of coolant pipes, sewage and ventilation systems generated heat and additional moisture that boiled up to the surface. Overhead, half of the sky above was brilliant shafts of sunlight streaming down through the hard light panels, the other enshrouded in metal illuminated by endless rows of incandescent strip lights. He could see a curling vortex of vapor rising like wispy feathers to curl over and fall back down as rain high above their heads, drifting away as it did so.

  ‘She’s heading your way, lovebirds.’

  Vasquez’s warning alerted them, and Nathan’s height gave him an advantage as he saw Doctor Schmidt’s glowing blue projection walking toward them through the crowds. His image quivered occasionally as the veils of rain falling nearby interfered with the transmission.

  ‘I see you, Ironside. She’s right in your path.’

  Nathan studied the oncoming crowds, a maze of multi–colored hair, the tall and the short, the bio enhanced and the non mechanical. In their midst he spotted a pony tail of brown hair that matched their victim’s, Erin Sanders barely five four in height.

  ‘I’ve got her,’ he replied. ‘All units, move in.’

  Nathan saw Vasquez and Allen suddenly emerge from the crowds to his right, where they had been studying the scene in the reflection from shop windows old enough to still be glazed. A pair of police cruisers crawled slowly into view at a junction behind Doctor Schmidt, ready to cut Erin off if she made them and tried to flee.

  Nathan saw Erin Sanders scanning the crowd ahead and then she looked right at him.

  There was no way that whatever entity it was looking back at him could have known who Nathan Ironside was, but in a moment of time Nathan realized that the instinct of the hunted was clearly prevalent in all species and not just humans. Sanders’ expression changed to one of concern and she changed direction even as she came within arms’ reach.

  ‘We’re made,’ Nathan said to Foxx.

  ‘Cut her off!’ Foxx ordered as she released his arm and dashed forward.

  Nathan yanked out his pistol and raised his detective’s shield as Foxx made for Sanders. ‘Erin Sanders, put your hands in the air and get down on your knees!’

  Sander’s eyes widened as Foxx reached out for her and in an instant she reacted.

  Nathan saw Foxx pull her gun and then Erin Sander’s chest suddenly bulged outward and a solid mass of material ripped through her shirt like a battering ram and slammed into Foxx. Nathan took aim and saw Sander’s face dissolve into a hateful glare as one arm pointed at him and a whiplash of gray material flickered out and snatched the pistol from his hand before he could pull the trigger.

  ‘She’s armed!’ Nathan yelled as Foxx crashed down into the crowd.

  Sanders pulled the trigger on the weapon even as it was recoiling back toward her in the grasp of her grotesque, tentacle like arm and the crowd erupted into screams as panic took hold.

  ***

  XVII

  Erin Sanders glanced at the pistol in confusion as it failed to fire, the weapon uniquely linked to Nathan’s DNA and his ID chip. Sanders hurled the weapon at Nathan before she suddenly took off at a tremendous pace that was far beyond what any human could achieve.

  ‘All units, suspect heading clockwise on Clifton!’

  Nathan sprinted in pursuit as the crowds split for the fleeing woman. It was good fortune that she had been intercepted in the southern quadrant and not North Four, where the crowds would likely have actively impeded Nathan’s pursuit.

  ‘We’re with you!’ Vasquez yelled in response from over Nathan’s shoulder.

  Sanders cut left onto 45th Street, her legs moving with inhuman speed as though she were bio enhanced like many of the street ‘hoods on North Four. There was no way Nathan could keep pace with her but for the crowds who struggled to get out of her way quickly enough.

  Sirens wailed in the sky above as Nathan saw cruisers sweeping in at the far end of 44th Street, their metallic hulls flashing in the rays of sunlight beaming down a hundred meters away.

  Sanders saw them and cut left again, heading for an apartment door that Nathan knew would be locked, accessible only to those who lived there.

  ‘She’s cut off at the Lacy’s Building on 45th!’ Nathan yelled as he ran. ‘Clear the street!’

  Sanders ran straight at the door, an older style construction of reinforced plastics designed to be shatterproof. Nathan followed her close behind, waiting for the moment when she stopped and was forced to confront the police.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run to!’ Nathan yelled. ‘Give yourself up!’

  Erin Sanders’s legs pounded the street with inhuman speed and she suddenly leaped at the door. Her body transformed shape into a bizarre boulder like form that ripped her clothes into shreds and she crashed into the door. The door quivered under the blow and the hinges were torn from their mounts as the entire door crashed into the building.

  Erin Sander’s form resolved itself again into that of her victim and she vanished up a flight of stairs inside, trailing bits of clothing behind her.

  ‘Damn it,’ Nathan cursed as he reached the door. ‘All units, she’s inside Lacy’s. Surround the building and cut off all escape routes.’

  Nathan stepped inside as he heard Vasquez and Allen thunder up behind him. Vasquez crept in and shoved something into his hand.

  ‘Hope you look after your weapon better than you treat the ladies, Ironside.’

  Nathan felt his pistol in his hand as Allen peered at him.

  ‘Yeah, and since when do you get to talk to Foxx like that? A tiger in bed?’

  ‘Where is Foxx?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Paramedics are with her,’ Vasquez said, ‘she took a bad hit there.’

  Nathan grit his teeth and gestured up the stairwell. ‘It went up there.’

  Vasquez checked his pistol with a severe expression. ‘Good. What goes up…’

  Nathan led the way and crept up the stairwell, his eyes fixed on the route above. The stairwell doubled back on itself five or six times, each time revealing a new floor in the apartment building. Unlike those in North Four this build
ing was well maintained, clean and devoid of noxious odors.

  ‘It could have gone anywhere,’ Allen whispered. ‘Damned thing can change shape, right?’

  ‘It’s able to mimic other things,’ Nathan confirmed, ‘but we don’t know how it does it yet.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Vasquez snapped. ‘Let’s corner it and get the hell out of here.’

  Nathan eased up to the first floor, the corridors either side of him devoid of life. Outside, in the peculiar fusion of sunlight and shadow, he could see the reflection of flashing hazard lights as more squad cruisers and emergency vehicles arrived. Nathan spoke softly into his microphone.

  ‘Comms, do you have a location for the suspect?’

  A moment of silence, then a reply from the clerk back at the precinct.

  ‘Two floors above you, moving north.’

  Nathan hit the stairs at a run as he climbed upward, Vasquez and Allen right behind him as they headed upward for the third floor.

  ‘Suspect now on upper floor, moving fast.’

  Nathan’s chested heaved and his thighs burned as he powered ever upward, pumping his arms and breathing hard. The quiet of the apartment block was broken by the sound of something crashing to the ground and a piercing scream soared through the building.

  ‘Armed police!’ Nathan yelled as he reached the fourth floor, hoping to prevent whatever horror was coming next. ‘Stay still!’

  He burst out onto the top floor main corridor and saw an apartment door smashed inward and swinging from its hinges. He hurried forward with his pistol pointing ahead of him, then rushed into the open doorway.

  The apartment was larger than those on North Four. The walls were a pale white, one of them a vast moving image of a forest at dawn, birds singing in the glittering sunshine and the scent of fresh grass and cool, clean air filling the room. A holo screen was broadcasting the news, the presenter standing in the room and appearing as solid as a real person but for the glowing halo around him designed to prevent people from mistaking the presenter for an intruder.

  In the center of the room was a young blonde woman of maybe forty years, her head trickling blood from a gash where she had fallen. Her stricken, concussed features looked up at Nathan in horror.

  ‘My baby,’ she gasped.

  Nathan saw the nearby empty playpen a moment later.

  ‘She took my baby,’ the woman cried with more force.

  ‘Stay with her,’ Nathan said to Allen.

  Detective Allen holstered his weapon without argument as Nathan dashed out of the apartment and sprinted down the corridor toward the roof exit. Vasquez ran out behind him, calling into his microphone as they went.

  ‘Suspect has a hostage! Repeat, suspect has an infant hostage!’

  Nathan hit the last flight of steps at a sprint and saw the roof exit was already open. He dashed up onto the roof and turned in time to see two squad cruisers hovering nearby, their hazard lights flashing. Behind them was a staggering backdrop of city streets, blazing sunbeams and falling veils of rain before a canvas of deep space and the limb of the earth, and in front of it was Erin Sanders.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Nathan snapped as he aimed his pistol at her.

  Sanders was standing near the edge of the building, her bare skin draped in the remains of her clothing as she cradled the child she had abducted from the apartment. The child was maybe three years old, a little boy with blond locks and a confused expression on his face.

  Sanders looked at Nathan as she stroked the boy’s hair. ‘It’s you who will stay where you are.’

  The voice was female but it sounded odd, in that it didn’t fit Erin Sander’s appearance and was somewhat husky and low. Nathan briefly wondered if it was a recording of some kind, a default voice adopted by these creatures, whatever the hell they were. Nathan kept his pistol aimed at Sanders but double checked that the safety catch was on before he spoke. There was no way he wanted to hit the kid with superheated plasma, and at this range and with the child pressed close to Sanders, collateral would be inevitable.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run,’ he said quietly as he extended one hand palm out to Sanders. ‘Nobody wants to get hurt here, okay? We just want the child back.’

  Sander’s face was touched with a smile, as though the whole charade was faintly amusing to her. Nathan had to remind himself again that Erin Sanders was dead and that this was merely a caricature of her, a machine masquerading as a human being.

  ‘The child is not afraid,’ Sanders replied. ‘Are you afraid, Detective Ironside?’

  ‘How did you know my name?’

  Sanders shrugged and looked pityingly at the child in her arms. ‘They’re not so clever, are they?’

  ‘Just let the kid go,’ Vasquez said, ‘that’s all we care about right now.’

  ‘And then you’ll let me go?’ Sanders sneered at him, her smile vanishing in an instant. ‘You think that’s a reason to do anything you say?’

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you,’ Nathan pressed. ‘We can work this out, okay?’

  Sanders peered at him again. ‘Hurt me? You cannot hurt me.’

  ‘Then why’d you run?’

  ‘I have my own reasons.’

  ‘Then share them,’ Nathan said. ‘We can talk about this.’

  ‘There is no time, because our time is done.’

  Nathan saw her step back toward the four story drop behind them, still cradling the child.

  ‘No, don’t do it!’

  The squad cruisers shifted position, their paintwork gleaming in the bright moving sunlight as the station revolved, heat haze shimmering beneath them in billowing clouds of distorted light. Nathan dashed for the edge of the building as Sanders laughed out loud and hurled herself backward off the edge.

  ‘No!’

  Nathan scrambled to a stop and almost toppled as he saw Sanders spiral downward, the child screaming in her arms as they fell, Sanders smiling up at him without a care as they plummeted toward the unforgiving street below. Nathan cried out helplessly as Vasquez joined him on the edge of the building, and then the street below was hit by a vivid, amber colored stream of fluid that burst from hoses being hauled into the street by police officers from the apartment’s rear exit below. The fluid formed a gelatinous mound as Sanders slammed into it, the gel cushioning the blow and swallowing Sanders whole.

  Nathan leaned further out and saw Foxx spraying the amber fluid all over Sanders as Doctor Schmidt flickered into existence alongside her and watched. The child in her arms clambered free of her as Sanders struggled to move, consumed by the thick, syrupy gel until it froze in place and Foxx shut off the hose. Doctor Schmidt looked up at Nathan and smiled smugly as he tapped his own skull, his finger accidentally moving in and out of his projection.

  ‘Brains over brawn,’ he called up to Ironside. ‘It’s tough to move and change shape when you’re wrapped up in super glue.’

  Foxx stepped out into the street and picked up the child, cradling him in her arms as she looked up at Nathan, clearly uncomfortable.

  ‘You wanna get down here and take this thing back to its rightful owner?’

  ***

  XVIII

  4th Precinct Building, North Four

  ‘How much do we know?’

  Nathan walked with Vasquez and Allen into the precinct interrogations rooms to see Foxx already there and talking to Doctor Schmidt, the physician’s concise tones as irritating to Nathan as ever.

  ‘It’s constructed of the same crystallized biogenic material that we found on Titan several months ago,’ he said. ‘Right now we have it contained inside the hard light pen in room four. I’ve taken the liberty of dousing the form with a solution which will break down the hemostatic agent we used to contain it.’

  ‘The what?’ Vasquez echoed as he joined them.

  ‘A hemostatic agent,’ Schmidt replied. ‘It’s a flashy name for glue.’

  Nathan blinked. ‘You glued it to the sidewalk?’

  Schmidt nodded.

&n
bsp; ‘We learned on Titan how they combine and maintain structural cohesion, how they stick together. In medicine we have plant based polymers that we use to clog wounds. I mixed up a larger quantity and combined it with an adhesive gel that we used to stem the flow of the entity when it infiltrated Titan.’

  ‘So it doesn’t have muscles and bones and stuff?’ Detective Allen asked.

  ‘No,’ Schmidt said. ‘It’s built entirely of crystalline cells and replicates movement via a coordinated internal rippling motion, somewhat similar to the way a snake travels along the ground by alternately contracting and relaxing muscle groups. The gel we used prevents these things from moving by stimulating a clotting process by holding pressure in the cells and activates the accumulation of platelets, which bind to the cells to create a platelet mesh. The hemostasis accelerates the binding of the clotting protein, fibrin, to the platelet mesh, resulting in blood coagulation and a stable clot.’

  ‘Just what I thought,’ Nathan murmured. ‘Has it communicated with us yet?’

  ‘It can’t while it’s stuck in the gel,’ Schmidt replied, ‘but it should be able to release itself by now. Shall we?’

  The doctor gestured to the nearby interrogation room and promptly vanished, transporting his hologram there in the blink of an eye.

  ‘After you,’ Nathan uttered to the thin air left behind.

  Foxx led the way down a corridor to the interrogation room and opened it to reveal Schmidt standing before a hard light containment unit, the borders of which were illuminated in bright blue–white light to denote the edges.

  Nathan walked in with Vasquez and Allen, the hard light door closing behind them. Schmidt gestured cheerfully to a slowly rippling mass on the floor inside the cubicle.

  ‘It would appear our guest is reconstituting itself,’ he said.

  As Nathan watched, he saw the bizarre form slowly rise up from a shapeless mass into the recognizable form of a human being. However, this time it was not Erin Sanders but a taller, muscular young man whom Nathan recognized instantly.