And The Data Fell Like Rain

By

Robert B. Schofield

     I was telling Redeye about Taishia again.  "I bet that if you grafted an adrenaline pump to a cobra's nervous system Taishia could still grab it, slice its head off and tie its body into knots before it even realized it was dead."

     I'd thought of that after seeing her somersault through a triple-crossed photoelectric microwave grid, yank a power supply deactivation switch, and toss three shuriken at security cameras in two seconds flat.

     Redeye glanced at me.  "You know, she's got a pre-cort amp," I continued.  "One of the new ones, Kendashi-Gao.  Blasts nerve impulses straight through, bypassing her auto-reflex controls."

     I was watching the exhaust plume from our underground rocket motor vent into the cold, early morning air.  Dawn was two hours away.  The MHD generator had been charging our bank of capacitors all night.

     "That's why we'd be perfect for each other."

     "What the hell are you talking about.  Because she's a walking speed junky?"  Redeye said.  He was scanning the horizon from our foxhole.

"It doesn't feel like a speed trip to her."

He turned to me, his thick mane dragging across the back of his flak jacket.  "How do you know?"

"It just wouldn't.  And besides, she can turn it off when she wants."

He shook his head and looked at his watch.  "Get the gun ready," he said.

It was time.

I bent over the small computer console and pressed a button.  Doors in the ground two hundred meters behind us slid away and two metal poles on a girdered frame angled up at the night sky.

"There it is," Redeye said, pointing up at one of the pinpoints of light above.

"Tracking's got it," I replied.  Redeye turned and put his hand on my shoulder.  I couldn't remember the last time he'd done that.

"When will their glory fade, Oh the wild charge they made," Redeye said.  A smile curled up over his inch long fangs.

"Out with a bang, not a whimper," I grinned, unlocking the fail-safe.

At the bottom of the rails, ten meters underground, a tungsten-epoxy cube rested in front of a bar of pure gold spanning the poles.  Seventy miles up a satellite passed overhead, a satellite with the largest computer ever put into

orbit.  At precisely the right instant our bank of rocket-charged capacitors unloaded a five hundred million watt pulse into the rails blasting the bar of gold to plasma.  Thunder roared through the chill morning air.  The ball of plasma shot up the rails like a screaming mongoose, hurling the epoxy cube toward space at four miles per second.  Twenty-two point seven times the speed of sound.

The bright orange tail from our bullet pointed back accusingly at our position.  Twenty seconds later, after the tail disappeared high in the night sky, the pinpoint of light overhead went out.

"Let's roll," Redeye said.

We climbed out of the foxhole.  Smoke rose from the pit behind us.  The earth around the hole was burned black in a ten meter ring.  Up the road our semi waited, fully packed with everything we needed to live comfortably for the rest of our lives.  As we walked toward the truck Redeye paused, and pointed in the air.  "You know, there are one hundred billion stars in our galaxy."

I glanced up.  "Yeah?  I wonder if Taishia ever looks at the stars?"

He grunted and we continued to walk.

"Take a last look," he said, as we reached the semi, a white eighteen-wheeler with pictures of cows and ice cream on the sides.

I looked out over the place.  Thirty acres shut off from the world by microwave beams and sonic mines.  I looked at the shooting range, my shooting range, next to the urban combat training grounds.  In the cold morning darkness I could just see past the hill where Redeye used to start his deer and rabbit hunts to the data center mockup site where we perfected our skills to earn title as the number one data center purge specialists in the world.  And now, as of five minutes ago, the only ones ever to hit a data center in space.

Four years.

It was hard to believe we'd been outlaws here for that long.  Time for a change.  Time to relax.  Time for a real farm, in South Dakota, with cows and chickens instead of flame throwers and liquid hydrazine in the barn.

As I climbed into the semi I thought about Taishia.  I always thought about her.  Ever since she'd joined us on a job three months ago, and I got to play boyfriend for a few short days while we were undercover.  A few short, wonderful days.  But, we both knew it would end; and it had.

Redeye slammed the rig into gear and we surged forward.

"Anything yet?" Redeye asked as we drove through the carefully marked path between the mines.

"No.  But it's only been... nine point six minutes since the impact," I said, checking the computer.  "It's definitely on its way down.  Should scatter through the Pacific.  Some debris might make it to the Australian coast.  I wonder what the aborigines will do if a diamond computer circuit falls flaming from the sky into the middle of one of their villages?"

"Slater.”

"Yeah?"

"There are no more aborigines in Australia."

"Oh."

At impact plus twenty-two point four I picked up the scramjets.  There were two of them coming out of the north.  They blew by in seconds.  Just recon.  The choppers followed, low and slow, five minutes later.  They made a pass then turned, climbing.

"Redeye, you might want to see this."  He pulled the semi over to the shoulder and we stepped out just as napalm lit up the night.  The choppers swung around again, then unloaded on our farm with miniguns and rockets.

“Damn, they're pissed."

"A hundred billion in hardware plus two decades of corporate data.  Yeah, I'd say."

If they didn't glass the place, when they sent in ground mop-up as they surely would, they'd find two bodies, burnt beyond recognition, but with skeletons matching all our known medical records.  We'd constructed the skeletons carefully from bodies we'd collected during previous jobs.  Attention to detail was another of our specialties.  A five foot nine male with a missing left pinky, a plastic knee, and three previously broken ribs,

and a six eight male with a reinforced skeletal subframe and lion-hunter special mods.

     We were dead.  Retired.

The drive was long.  We took the coast up to Oregon then headed east through Idaho and Wyoming.  We were both quiet for the most part, reflective.  It had been one helluva career.  I thought about Taishia a lot, of course.  I thought about the last time we were together.

"You know this can't last," she said.

"Why?"

"Because, we're headed in different directions.  I have plans.  Obligations."

"Break them."

"Slater, what do you think this is?"

"I don't know.  But I like it."

"Friends, that's all we can be."

"Okay.  Then stay with me and be my friend."

"Goodbye Slater."

Goodbye Taishia.

Redeye never talked about women.  He'd had girlfriends, or just friends that happened to be women.  He went out with them.  He spent the night.  But it didn't seem like a big thing for him.  He could take them or leave them.  I wondered about that.

"Redeye, what do you think about women?"

"I like them."

"And?"

"And nothing."  Redeye down-shifted twice as we began to head up an incline.  The semi jerked slightly as I looked at him.

"They're not the end goal of life," he said.  Then he glanced at me.  "What about you?  Why is that all you ever talk about?"

"I talk about guns."

"Okay, guns and women."

I wondered, as I looked out the window at the low rolling hills.  Why was that?  There was something there, some reason at the corner of my mind, but I couldn't find it.  When I tried to grab at it, it slipped away.

"Well, Tai--"

"Not her, women.  I know what you think about Taishia.  You love her.  She's wonderful.  I've heard it."

I was silent.

Her face sprang into my mind.  Long, silky black hair and dark, dark eyes.  I thought about the way she was, how much we had in common.  The things I admired about her.

"We'd be good for each other," I said.  "We'd have a strong relationship.  She acted like she cared, really cared, then said we would only be friends."

Redeye looked at me.  "Slater, being friends is a relationship."

*

The hills of South Dakota were lush, and green, and smelled odd.  No smoke.  No exhaust.  Our first night on the new farm I walked through a field with Redeye, a field surrounded by a single strand of barbed wire.  There wasn't a radar dish in sight.  It was isolation undreamed of in the city.

We were no farmers, but we had plenty of time to learn.  We only kept enough livestock to stay mildly busy, and put on the appearance of a very small-time dairy farm, a specialty farm.  We made ice cream.  Actually, Redeye produced it in vats in his chemistry lab.  It was good.

The rest of the time Redeye spent reading or hunting, and I spent at my weapons bench or at the computer console, clandestinely scanning mail servers.  The equipment was good.  The best money could buy.  No one could tell I was keeping an electronic eye on the world from our farm.  I set up searches to scan mail and sites in the hope of finding some mention of Taishia.  It was foolish.  Although she had an IPLoc, I knew she almost never used the Net.  She talked to people, because she knew about people.  I knew about weapons.

Redeye started a small vegetable garden.  I built the scarecrow.  I put Nikon-Benz teletargeting cameras behind the eyes, and a flechette pistol in one straw hand.  The other arm cradled a thirty-eight caliber Gatling gun.  I was endlessly adjusting the target selection software.  Redeye wisely suggested I put the scarecrow in the corner of the garden facing away from our house.  One day a swarm of bees flew through the garden, and I had the targeting selector set too small.  It ruined the vegetable crop.  Redeye was pissed.  But, at least the belt-fed grenade launcher mounted in the scarecrow's chest hadn't been set off.

Once, not long after that I was walking with Redeye to the barn.  "You know you never did answer the question that day," Redeye said.  "What do you think about women?  Why do you always search for the next relationship?"  I was quiet the rest of the way, looking at the ground and the bucket I was carrying.  When we reached the barn Redeye stood with his arms folded, staring

at me.  Now I knew the answer.  There was no one else in the world I would ever tell.  I looked at him, searching for any signs of sarcasm or laughter.  There were none.  So I told him.  "I just want someone to care," I said.

Redeye nodded and walked into the barn.

*

It was about a month later that I OD'ed on Hydro.  Hydro; the street name for cranked up Dehydroepiandrosterone, an adrenaline based hormone derivative.  I was sitting at the computer scanning for anything to do with Taishia and not having any luck, as usual.  I just started cracking test tubes of

Hydro and drinking them, one after another, until, finally, I slipped away...

...I was lost in a blissful haze of euphoria.  I was with her.  Taishia.  Tai.  We were holding each other, not talking, just touching.  There was no sense of urgency, nothing planned, no expectations.  We were just... together.  And I traced the delicate lines of her face with my fingertips and cradled her

head, running my fingers through her soft hair.  She kissed one of my fingers, then another, bit them lightly and licked them.  I felt her warmth next to me, her body pressed up against mine.  And we were kissing.  Gentle, tender kissing.  We tasted each others lips, then grabbed each other tightly and held on, and I never wanted it to end.  The embrace became stronger, more feverish.

  I held her to me.  I buried my face in the soft warmth of her neck.  Sighs of contentment.  I had never felt so close to anyone in my life.

Then I was yanked away.  Redeye was stabbing a needle into my jugular.  At that instant I hated Redeye, hated him for making it end.

"... overloaded the sense data center of your brain, you idiot," I heard him say.  Sense data.  We destroyed data for a living.  I was pulled back to reality by whatever juice Redeye shot into my neck.

"No.  I want to go back," I said.

"Sure," he replied.  Then he pulled me out of the chair where I'd been sitting, catatonic in front of the computer, and put me on the couch.

"You get flashbacks from that shit, you know," he said.

"Good," I replied.

The next day Redeye dumped all the Hydro.

After that, we agreed to try the original plan.  We would try real farming.  We emptied the vats of ice cream in the lab and agreed to make it ourselves from scratch.  It was terrible.

Three months and four days after we arrived on the farm, I said to Redeye, "We should make a really big gun."

"Oh, something bigger than a surface-to-space railgun?  Any suggestions?"

"Well, if we took an atomic demolition charge--"

"I don't want to hear it."

"I know I kind of talked you into this," I said.  "But isn't retirement getting a little... boring?"

Redeye looked me square in the eyes, his jaw locked, the muscles in his neck twitching.  "Yes," he said.

We started making arrangements immediately.  I put the livestock up for sale on the Net.  While I was there I checked the news.  It was still the hot topic.  "Private citizens, not with any known corporation, shoot down satellite from their backyard."  We didn't do it right, of course, as the story went, and blew up our house and land in the process.  The Moral Citizens Awareness group was still talking about it.  NASA was still talking about it.  The Space Weapons Research group was still talking about it, even though we'd lifted most of our plans from them.  And big business was scared of copycats.

Everyone knew who did it.  While checking the mail servers I came across a message from the Youngbloods to the Western Warriors.  "We're coming over to pull an S&R on your sat-link, you sacks of shit.  Then we'll do a number on your bald-ass, low-tech, chrome plated heads."  S&R.  Slater and Redeye.  Our names meant destruction.

"Any rumors we might still be alive?" Redeye asked, pulling his huge duffel bag down from the front closet.

"Didn't see any."

"So, no one knows," he said, dragging the bag out the front door.  He was out before I could reply.

Twenty minutes later I was still skimming the Net when the power went out.  I was on the floor instantly, rolling toward our couch.  I covered my head with my arms as the computer monitor where I'd been seated exploded in a shower of flaming sparks.  It was a shot through the front window.  I reached for my ankle holster and drew my snub-nose, rolling onto my back and coming up behind the couch.  The front door was open.  I reached under the couch and pulled out one of my armor shirts, fumbling it on in the dark, switching the snub-nose from hand to hand as I did.

Then I shivered, a shock of horror at my realization.  No one knew we were here.  No one except Tai.  I’d left her RSA encrypted email.  Had she betrayed us?  Sold us out?  I didn't want to believe it.

A figure appeared in the doorway, a small man, all in black.  I leveled the snub-nose over the couch and he threw something.  It hit, and my gun flew from my hand.

I waited.  He stood there.  I stood up, and walked forward.  I hated hand-to-hand.

He walked forward and grabbed at me and I let him take my left fist.  My pinky was extended.  I twisted it and it came off in his hand.  He stopped, and stared at the prosthetic digit, and I counted.  Two.  One.  The false finger unleashed its lethal spray of pure nicotine and accelerated carbon tet into his palm.  I backed up as his arm began to convulse, then his entire body.  He fell, shaking violently, like a dying fish flopping on the deck of a ship.

I went outside.  Redeye's duffel bag was dumped out on the path leading to the barn.  Redeye was nowhere in sight.  Another shot from up on the hill.  I dropped and low-crawled around the side of the building to my bedroom.  I swept away loose soil under my window and yanked the handle on one of my weapon caches.  The lock-slide .44 and Browning should work, for now.  I grabbed them, along with a web belt loaded with cluster grenades, and some night-vision glasses.  Then I started fast crawling beside

the path to the barn.  As I approached I saw the chicken coop door was open and hens were running around in the yard, clucking and fluttering their wings.  The scene reminded me of the city, of looting during a blackout.

The main barn door slid open and I saw something black on the ground just inside.  A shot fired from inside the barn.  The shape on the ground jumped, and was still.  The sound was unmistakable.  It was from Redeye's fifty cal Apache Warrior.  I scanned the area for other black clothed assassins and saw none.  There was still at least one sniper out on the hill by the east

pasture.  I crept closer to the door and glanced inside.  The body was lying there with its head split open and brains seeping into the straw covered dirt floor.  From the angle of the shot I could tell Redeye was up to my left, in the loft.  I looked up at the loft door, above the stables, and saw the tip of a silencer.

  I got to one knee, then sprinted and dove through the barn door, rolled through bloody, brain soaked straw, and ended up in the middle of the floor, prone, facing the loft.  My night vision glasses fell off somewhere during the maneuver and I found myself staring at darkness as solid as the hole we'd left in the sky three months ago.  Slowly, as my eyes adjusted, the light filtering in from the open barn door revealed the gray lines of the loft floor and horse stables below.  The stables were empty.  Neither Redeye or I knew how to ride.

  There was a tiny flash from above.  I could tell it was the muzzle flash from Redeye's silenced HK rifle.  He was shooting out the loft door.  He was shooting at the sniper.  I stood, and took a step forward.  As I did, a figure in black stepped out of the shadows from the stables.  The person was holding a crossbow.  Before I could react, they fired.

  The arrow hit hard, and penetrated, through my protective armor into my chest, slamming me backwards.  I caught my balance.  Then I unloaded my Browning into the black figure.  It hurled the person back crashing into the stable doors.

"Redeye, any more in here," I gasped, holding the arrow in my chest.

"No.  And I got the sniper."

I dropped to the ground.  "I'm hit," I said, gritting my teeth.  As I watched, two red eyes appeared out of the darkness of the loft, and Redeye jumped down.  He ran over to me.

"How bad?" Redeye said.

"I'll be okay."

"Let's get you back to the house."

"Wait.  I have to know.  I... told Taishia," I said.  "Sent her mail on the Net.  She knew we were here."

Redeye nodded.

"Is one of them her?"

Redeye gathered the bodies while I patched my wound using the first aid kit from my web belt.  The arrow hadn't gone deep, thanks to my armor.  No real damage done.

There were five bodies.  Redeye had taken out two that were waiting in ambush along the path to the barn.  And there was the sniper, the one I had poisoned, and the one in the stables.  They all had black hoods.  Three of them were Taishia's size.

I sat up, holding the field dressing to my chest, as Redeye pulled off the hoods one by one.

None of them were her.  I took a deep breath.

"Back to the house," Redeye said.  I let him help me along the way.  When we got there I asked, "Can you get me the palmtop from my room?"  He did.  I let Redeye patch my wound first, apply a regen-antibiotic, and bandage it properly.  Then I logged on to the Net.

There was mail waiting, from Taishia.

"Slater, I've been underground.  Just now got your message.  Someone hacked my email.  You might be in danger.  As soon as you get this, move.

I never told you this.  I want to now.

The time we spent together was real.  It's just, this is how it's got to be.  But I will never forget."

I stumbled over the next line, not daring to believe it.  The letters were fading into each other.

"Slater, I love you."

I sat there staring at the words.  Somehow I knew she meant them.  I didn't know what to do.  I started flashing back to the drug-euphoric moment when I'd OD'ed.  Remembering events that had never happened.  I was awash once again in the feelings of wonder, the haze of contentment.  Sensations fell across my face and body, penetrated, soaking me fully.  Sense data.  I sat there, looking at the words on the screen.  And the data fell like rain.

THE END