Out of the Black - Lee Doty [58]
She bolted across the aisle and slid on her butt between two shelves on the other side of the walkway. She rolled over into a prone shooting stance and the moving shelves bumped into her sides and moved away.
There was an oily tendril winding through her guts that she could not ignore. She'd just killed two people. Her mind kept trying to drag her focus to the possibility that they had families- children. She made a small involuntary sound as her heart rebelled at where her will had taken her. In her five years on the force, some of it spent in Chicago's worst neighborhoods, she had never needed to fire her weapon outside the training range.
She gritted her teeth and forced herself back into the moment. Harsh reality was that if she was very lucky, those two were only the first of many. Fury rolled through her, there had been plenty of times when people had tried to kill her, but this was the first time she'd been forced to kill someone else. She used the fury to crowd the guilt off of her mind's stage.
Her ragged scream ripped out of her, seeming to pulse though her clenched hands as she fired through a row of shelves, hitting a partially hidden gunman in the knee, then in the head as he fell. Now was the time for ruthlessness, for death. Later she could curl into a ball of doubt and self-loathing- if she was lucky.
If she killed enough to live.
***
Squinting in the new light, Ping rounded the corner. He braced his right arm against the shelves and steadied it with his left arm, the pistol in his left hand pointing cross-body. He rounded another corner as he shot the agent with the scanner first. Logic would have told him this was the wrong order, but he wasn't thinking. Times like this were made only for reflexes. Some people in the martial arts community insisted that fighting was like chess. Of course, if the round timer in chess were set to fifteen milliseconds, chess wouldn't really be chess either. Ping believed what his parents had taught him: fighting was reflexes, resolve and geometry.
The woman with the gun was the next to fall. Behind them, Good Cop and Bad Cop were struggling to get their seers off. He hit Bad Cop in the shoulder before Good Cop tackled him out of the way. Ping managed to hit Good Cop in the calf as they fell into an aisle and the shelving closed around them.
Behind them, Ping saw four more agents. As their guns came up, Ping snapped off three ineffective shots then retreated back around the corner.
Automatic gunfire erupted from everywhere. The air about him filled with dust and fragments of books, shelves, and wall. Keeping low, he scrambled back toward the center of the aisle, away from the storm.
"Now would be a good time, Alex!"
***
Alex touched the I-Candy icon on the screen. The screen's contents melted away, a reflection blurring then fading in a disturbed pool. All resolved to blackness, then a play list appeared. He made a selection and hit the start button. The air around him seemed to fill with a resonant Gregorian chant.
He tried to relax, but the tension wouldn't go... nothing like a little mortal peril to really frazzle the nerves. "Calm down baby, you can calm down, hey?" He muttered as the chant broke out into polyphony. The choir sang in harmony, each part of the harmony pulling the mind toward its distinctive melody. As he had been trained, he wrapped his mind around the music, letting it expand.
Training wheels. Ivo liked to call this "Pattern Stretching". If he lived long enough, he'd learn to Cast without it someday.
The active compensation built into the phones in his ears canceled out maybe ninety percent of the gunfire, but it was still a distraction. He increased the volume as the beat started. First it was a simple drone punctuating the chant. Then the synths moved in and the chant