Protocol

Listen to the blast.  Two, three, four, boom.  Way down the street behind a few corners, still going at a semi-steady pace.  It's like a microwave with popcorn in it, just more intense.  Honestly, it's about as everyday as a microwave.  Hard to see tech like that coming into being without being used.  Especially when the only people who can't afford a jammer are too poor to really get a voice.  Just enough time to get a scream out before they pop.  Sickening if you see it the first time.  Second time you think you've seen it, then you really watch, really take in the details of how the blood seeps out through the eyeholes.  You never get over it, just learn how to stifle the reflex once it starts, faster, earlier, more firmly.

  In some sense I'm even glad the perp is leaving a trail like this.  makes it easy to track if they leave a dotted trail right to them.  He's not even getting picked up and put down for this, it was for something trivial, poaching might be, I don't care enough to check.  All I need to know he's heading deeper in, down to the darker parts of the crater-city.  down to the parts where electricity starts becoming a commodity again.  Maybe he lives, or lived down there.  Made a break and got a little power, but still thinks of it as home.  Too bad for me I have to follow in.  Even without some of the sensors picking up the heat signatures I can see, I know there are a few watching, more coming.  Still, I've got enough stuff on me to wipe out a city block, so it's not as if it's dangerous for me.  Just painful to go in there and see it all, see the dotted line he's leaving.  A jog then, more than the stealthy stroll that I''d been making up to the edges of the place.  Catching him off guard would be fast, but if I had to spend two hours sneaking up on him before a three second kill, it would still be longer than a ten minute match-off after a thirty minute chase.

The explosions peter off.  A bit in and the house walls started loosing their siding, revealing the pipes and wires underneath.  Half of them were dry and empty, but the splatters were harder to pick up on the uneven surfaces, especially with the grime.  Then they stopped.  Maybe the guy got tipped off, maybe he got bored.  Now I had to switch to real tracking.  Flip a switch on the visor, moving it from visible light and heat to x-ray and auto-scan.  Too many and it got a bit hard to visualize what was going on unless you were really good with them.  Some people ran with all eleven filters running, but I liked to keep it simple.

Tracks led left, through a back alley and up a roof-access.  Gave me a little warning before my jammer beeped in my ear.  Rooftops, right.  He was making it easy on me then.  No cat an mouse once he realized.  When I got a fix on his skeleton up at the top, three floors up, I could see his mouth move, likely to swear by the body posture.  I grinned a bit; swearers were entertaining, especially if it were only from his stolen tech not working.  I could hear him as I hurtled upwards toward the roof, relying on the strength of the tech snuggled around my legs and arms to get me a safe landing.  I hadn't practiced anything like this much, but I'd seen some of the more veteran jump and draw taking down four or five people with a few shots in the air before landing, but I figured that would be just a bit too showy.  Plus I wasn't so great at the quick-draw that I'd risk dropping my gun three stories.

His face was crumpled into that angry expression people get when they know that somebody is about to do them a wrong turn.  Blames it on me.  He knows he's not living through this.  Tries to fire off the device at me again, hear him pull the trigger with a click at the same time my jammer beeps again.  I sigh as I draw, watching him drop the piece and rush me.  He bowls me off the rooftop, out into the open air, but I get the gun dug in where his heart is and pet out a shot, straight up.  Gonna have blood on the suit;  gonna get yelled at and have to clean it when I get back.  Hitting the ground barely registers as I go over in my head what I have to file this as.  Easy to push him up and off me as I stand.

In one of my pockets there's the standard issue marble.  Small, no external sources of propulsion, runs entirely on gravity.  It sticks when I drop it on his torso, then raises him up like some brutal marionette of a ballerina  arching her, his, back.  I took the stairs this time, letting the body float in the street until I went to get it.  It lay where he dropped it, a long sleek chrome wand.  interfaced directly with the nerves, no buttons on the surface.  It went in a pocket and I hopped down, landing on my feet this time.  Now all that was left was the slow walk back to the base.  The easy part was done, now he had to figure out how to talk his way out of being the research team on this guys motives.  Damn shame protocol demanded instant execution if possible.