The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 65

Ellie sighed. The kid wasn’t here, so now this just became an everyday prisoner grab, her and Sameh moving around erratically, causing trouble, until the militia gave up fighting and Ellie could starting asking them questions.

“We can stop being so careful what we shoot at,” Ellie said.

Sameh grinned. “Good.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said, and grinned back. “I thought you might think so.”

“Can I?” Sameh said, and held up her submachine gun, sounding almost hopeful. Could she swap her ammo around and stop using the hostage-rescue rounds, Ellie assumed she meant.

“Go on,” Ellie said. “But remember we still need some of them alive…”

Sameh didn’t answer, almost as if she was ignoring Ellie. Gleefully ignoring her, Ellie thought, on purpose, but it had probably still been worth saying. Sameh unloaded the magazine from her submachine gun, and put in another. Things were about to start catching on fire, Ellie assumed.

Sameh turned, and looked toward a building. Through a building, really. She had contact lenses in, and saw the same data as Ellie did through her e-glasses. There was a man with a rifle on the other side of the building. Sameh aimed, and fired a short burst, and the man fell over. Sameh must have some kind of exotic armour-piercing ammunition in that magazine, Ellie assumed, something with depleted reactor-fuel alloys on the bullet tips.

Sameh glanced around, checking there was no-one else nearby, and then changed the magazine she had just used for a different one. She was often like this, carefully conserving her more interesting bullets, picking her ammo carefully, using her quirky rounds when they were each most useful, like then, to shoot someone through a house.

Ellie glanced around too. They had been standing in one place for a while, probably for too long, but no-one had come close to them, and none of the militia were nearby, so they were probably fine.

The situation was less urgent now. The kid wasn’t here. They didn’t need to break down any doors inside the first sixty seconds to save him from an executioner. And more importantly, now their sensor net was up and operational, the militia’s outgoing communications were being blocked, so the compound was on its own and couldn’t send out a panic signal to other militia, elsewhere, saying they had been attacked and to kill hostages being held off-site.

Now, Ellie had time to think about what to do next.

She did. She thought. She decided she needed to see the map again, to study it more carefully, and work out what their best target was.

She wanted to see the map, and could have just displayed it on the inside of her glasses, but she didn’t like to do that. She preferred to hold an actual tablet and look down at the display, so she could drop the tablet if she was surprised. She preferred to look down onto maps too. Looking downwards seemed to help her understand what she was seeing. As well, she didn’t like flipping her glasses from one display mode to another. It disorientated her for a second, seeing the overlays change, which wasn’t a good thing in the middle of combat. She was better off just looking at Sameh’s tablet.

Ellie glanced around, making sure she and Sameh were alone. Making sure there were no militia nearby. She decided to be careful anyway. She took a couple of flash-drones from her thigh pocket and threw them into the air. She had them set already, programmed to float above her, and if someone who wasn’t Sameh came too close, to start pulsing their disorientating strobe-lights and emitting high-pitched sounds. Ellie and Sameh’s ears would be protected by the comm earpieces they were wearing. The earpieces only passed mid-volume and mid-frequency sounds, and no others, so they could talk easily and hear approaching footsteps while not being deafened by loud noises like gunshots. Their glasses and lenses were synched with the flash-drones too, and would darken in series of microsecond pulses as the drone’s strobes fired, so they ought not actually see the flashes, even while everyone else nearby was being blinded. The drones were a little extra cover, a little extra protection, to keep them safe while they both stood there looking at the map.

First, though, Ellie glanced around again, making sure they were alone with her actual eyes, not completely trusting all the technology.

Only then did she look at the tablet.