Where Legal Eagles Dare: An Opco Boone Adventure: Difference between revisions

Bugsy called them into to [[Chief double-oh|C double-oh]] on the encrypted two-way comlink. He rocked the sing-song ham radio chit-chat idiom: “Capcom, this is KPI-Delta-One-Niner filing our hourly [[stakeholder]] check-in, do you copy, over?”  

The hounds of hell descended in Lissingdown.

Boone barked into his wrist-comm. “All right, [[Genevieve “Chip” Carpenter|Chip]], I’m going in.”

Boone looked up from the wrist-comm. He regarded the great expanse beneath him, yawning away to the horizon. A curlicue of smoke, tainted pink in the dying sunset, rose above Lissingdown. For a moment, he smiled at the brilliantine recollections of his life in that wonderful settlement. He drank in the beauty. These were his kin. His people. His ''life''. His ''home''.  These were ''his'' tranquil traditions. The ancient solemnity. The august institutions. The whole gamut of ''[[precedent]]''. Imponderable. ''Indispensable''. All of it was ''his''. And they were surrendering. They were lying down and taking it. As these death machines advanced, he saw their collective futures dangling above the abyss, hanging by a single [[golden thread]]. He knew it: ''he was that golden thread''.  

Boone exhaled. ''Could she not see what was coming?'' From up here, as this convoy of wreckers drilled relentlessly across the badlands at the settlement, like some crazed Taliban, propelled by demented organisational theory, it was crystal clear: unless they did something, ''[[Lissingdown]] was doomed''. This was a mobile apocalypse, on a direct vector for the heart of the settlement, thundering across the desert. It would destroy the civilisation — everything it stood for — down to every last goddamn ''brick''.   

Kurzweil flipped through the payload. He primed the [[risk taxonomy]]. He unclipped the spend ratio metrics. He flooded the Gantt generator. The HUD registered the [[Lissingdown]] outer perimeter defence systems, a thousand metres yonder. Convolution fields were arcing and humming, muffling the signals across the frequency spectrum.  

Boone looked down and cursed: he’d left the comlink channel open.

Chip was still babbling in his comlink. ''Dammit''. He cursed his own error: he  left the link back to GCHQ open when he jumped. It was too late to do anything about that: at one-seventy knots he could hardly flip it to silent now: any arm-shift would bugger his trajectory and put him into an aerodynamic stall or some kind of flat spin. He had to let the GC run. But she wouldn’t let it go. The old girl was really busting his balls.

Boone snarled into his wristcom, “We’re not home yet, Algy. Any sign of George?”

Boone’s comlink crackled. “Heads up Boone: you got company.”

As his air-flow constricted, Boone became light-headed. He scanned the windshield: ''where on Earth were the dirt-bikes?'' He reached for his wristcom, but Kurzweil’s span was too great. Kurzweil rabbit-punched him again and hooked a boot on the door-latch. The door swung wide, with Kurzweil on it. He hauled out Boone out by the throat and dangled him over the road.

Algy clicked into his wrist comm, “Georgie, this is bad. There must be 40,000 [[KPI]]s here. More, probably. They’re all armed. We’ve got three minutes. I couldn’t switch that many off in that time even if they weren’t encrypted. But they are blockchain hashed.”