The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 64

They moved to the next corner. Ellie looked around it, and saw no-one.

“All right,” Sameh said. “I’ve got an image.”

Ellie stopped, and took out her e-glasses, and put them on. She should already have contact lenses in, but she didn’t like using the lenses. She didn’t like trying to put them in, poking herself in the eye, and she didn’t like the way her eyes felt dry once she had succeeded. She preferred the glasses, even though they could get broken, or fall off. She put the glasses on, and as she did, they activated, realizing they were being worn, and synced themselves to the video feed from Sameh’s tablet. As Ellie looked around, the glasses tracked her head movements, and worked out the direction she was facing, and pulled data from the map app on Sameh’s tablet to overlay onto Ellie’s field of view.

Suddenly, with the glasses, Ellie saw a lot of useful information. She saw moving blips in the far distance showing where people were. She saw fuzzy-sided thermal outlines of people who were closer, giving a sense of perspective and scale, and anyone who was very close she saw outlined in red or green, depending whether the millimetre radar could see a metal shape that it identified as a weapon in their hands or in their clothing. The intensity of the red grew deeper as the weapon became more dangerous, too. A sheathed boot-knife was barely pink, an assault rifle was a rich crimson.

Ellie could also choose see a great deal of other data, too. All sorts of data, as she wished, most of it selectable and operation-dependent. At the moment she was seeing green outlines around the doors and windows of rooms which were empty of people, so she didn’t need to pay as much attention to those rooms, moving around, and she was also seeing thin red lines superimposed over doors which were locked. She could pick other tactical data to display, if she wished, blue lines for linked enemy comm nets, or numerical overlays estimating an enemy’s ammunition reserves or the rounds left in their current clip. There was also a mechanism to indicate an enemy’s state of mind, showing whether their pulse and skin-temperature and the rapidity of their movement implied they were high and hyped, or scared and ready to run away. Ellie usually kept the psych profiling off, because it was guesswork as much as data and could be unreliable, but it was there if she needed it, and sometimes it was useful.

It was a good system, Ellie thought. It was quick to lean to use and intuitive, and fairly unadventurous about its warnings. Most of the information it gave was trustworthy, and easy to understand, and it didn’t get in the way of the actual fighting like some of the more complicated tactical overlay systems did.

“You have a map?” Ellie said.

Sameh touched her tablet. “I do now.”

Ellie stopped, and looked at Sameh’s tablet. It had a more complete picture of the same data as Ellie’s glasses were showing. The tablet’s display was a top-down line-outline map of the compound, which Ellie found gave her a better overview. She looked at it quickly. There were thicker, darker lines marking the more substantial walls inside buildings, and coloured dots moving around, marking all the people the sensors could find. The software had tagged those people with lists of the weapons they were holding and whether they were moving a lot, or were mostly still. It had tagged them with everything it could work out about each of them, and especially, whether any were in enclosed, locked spaces.

None of them were.

None of them seemed to fit the pattern of a hostage.

There was no-one who was both unarmed and in a thick-walled room.

There was also no-one who matched the biometric profile they had on file for the kid, which had been sent from Shanghai.

It was what Ellie had expected. She didn’t think the kid was still here, but it was still useful to have the confirmation.

“He’s not here,” Ellie said.

“No,” Sameh said.

“Could you check again?” Ellie said. She wasn’t as confident with the tablet’s tactical battlefield software as Sameh was.

“Yep,” Sameh said. “I already did.”

“A complete second sweep? In case it missed something?”

“I know,” Sameh said. “I am. It did. It keeps scanning after the first pass. It’s still scanning and it’s still saying no.”

“Oh,” Ellie said, and looked at the tablet. There were thick walls, but none which completely enclosed a room, not the way a cell ought to be completely enclosed. And all of those rooms were empty.

“Could it be underground?” Ellie said.

Sameh shook her head. She reached over, reached past Ellie, and tapped the screen. It changed to a mottled grey overlaid with coloured lines. “That’s underground,” she said. “Those are pipes.”

“There’s no bunker?”

“Nope. Not even a stairway down to a bunker. Not even an arms cache under a house.”

“Oh,” Ellie said, resigned.