Kestrel

KESTREL

Stinging rain spattered Priscilla that moonless night, but she didn’t want to even flicker an eyelid, just yet. Her prey lounged casually in a loveseat, watching some pornographic vid-feed, blissfully unaware his death hovered a mere fifteen feet outside the window. A single pane of glass separated them, but only she saw through it.

The acidic shower was all about her, certainly not ideal for the servos that stabilized her hovering wheelchair – hoverchair – now about 25 feet above the ground. The good news was that the mechanical whirring and chirruping – an ever-present reminder of Priscilla’s condition – was drowned out by the rain. Priscilla peered through the window and licked her lips. Though drenched by the rain, she could still taste the salt of her own sweat.

This was it. Finally. Over ten years of reliving. Then came the imagining, visualizing, researching, design, the exhausting experimentation and testing, all coming to fruition. Priscilla paused for a moment, teetering on the edge of success. Well… If not success, then at least a conclusion.

She had never forgotten that fucker. Long ago, she made peace with the notion that she was just one of many. Guys like him never stopped after just one, and after his conquest of Pris, there really was no reason for him to stop. Probably the only thing he hadn’t planned for was that she was still alive afterward. But even that didn’t make the news.

Squinting one eye and edging the joystick forward, Priscilla’s floating ride edged just a bit closer to the man’s window. I wanna do this by hand, she decided. With a press of the thumbstick, autopilot was engaged. Priscilla eased her hands off the controls and reached for her pistol, guided expertly by over a hundred hours of obsessive practice.

Though lighter than it looked, the home-made silencer added an awkwardness to the unmarked, tech-wiped firearm. With both hands, she steadied it, aiming for his head. He tilted back in the loveseat, blatantly pleasuring himself as his eyes were cemented to the vid-screen. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the fact that, in two seconds, everything from his neck up would be reduced to a pulpy, red mist. An involuntarily snort of laughter escaped, but she quickly quelled it.

Priscilla clenched her teeth, held her breath, and pulled the trigger. The *POP* of the suppressed gunshot was further muffled by the rain assailing the treetops.

Priscilla gasped. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even touched. A flickering of teevee snow, errant bands of colour and video interference, a glitched 3D model for an instant. Then the video display froze on him reaching for a sweatsock.

A damn hologram. She had assassinated a VR diorama.

Another gunshot pierced through the staccato raindrops. Priscilla’s hoverchair lurched starboard, and rapidly sank ground-ward. She wrested the controls as quickly as she could manage, forgetting about the gun. Priscilla and her hoverchair careened and spun, suddenly landing in the mud with an unceremonious splat.

Priscilla darted her eyes frantically: left, right, up. She knew the servos were fucked. Mud covered her goggles.

Hoarse laughter assailed her ears. “Not so happy now, are ya?” She remembered that voice. She would never forget that laugh.

Priscilla strained – as she always did for the last ten years – to turn her head to either side, trying to draw a bead on the man. Her hands were empty and her gun was nowhere to be found. “Who are you, anyway?”

His voice was somewhere behind her. She didn’t know the direction she faced anymore. The rain had suddenly picked up, ruining visibility. The goggles weren’t helping at the moment. Where was his house?

“Who the fuck are you?” He spoke again, audible over the rain. He was closer. As she regained her senses she realized she must have been quite a sight: modded hoverchair with a skinny black girl strapped in, a bulb-like skater’s helmet atop her head, moon-eyed reflective goggles shielding her eyes. “You the one, been following me?” He asked, incredulous.

She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Electrodes connected, and bursts of strobe light stuttered their piercing brilliance. The man shouted in protest, his menacing form taking shape every-other-quarter-second in Priscilla’s filmy goggle-lenses.

Priscilla watched him lunge forward. With a warbled howl, the man gripped her chair, and heaved. It lurched sideways, then leaned, then tipped over in the muck. Had she not been strapped in, Priscilla would have been flung at least ten feet.

With a burst of electrical flatulence, the strobes stopped and dimmed out. Priscilla engaged her goggle in-view display with a quick flit of her left eyelid. The feed from her night-vision cameras blinked to life.

“What are you doing here?” he stammered. “Why you? You trying to kill me? You… You ain’t shit!”

Through the night vision video feed, Priscilla watched him slosh in front of the sideways-thrown hoverchair, holding some kind of hand-cannon.

Now or never, she thought.

With a complex – but well-rehearsed – batting of eyelids and eye movements, Priscilla activated what she nicknamed her “Butterfly Knife.” A half-dozen compartments concealed in her hoverchair sprang open, each revealing the barrel of a silenced semi-automatic firearm. It was Priscilla’s own engineering skills and “tinkering” that allowed her to override the smartgun locks and fire the six unregistered pistols simultaneously.

The sound of corn popping in the midst of the thunderstorm, and the man was full of holes. Through her night vision goggles, Priscilla watched him tumble into a swirling mud pool, unmoving.

With a click of her tongue in a mouth suddenly gone bone-dry, Priscilla called out: “Tiger, take me home.”

The dispatcher replied, “Kestrel, this is Tiger. Copy that. ETA one five minutes.”