The difficulty with travelling faster than sound is that you have time to think.
A fist, which was feeling its way through the molasses-slide of the air with a relative crawl, had my head in view. I previously counted seventeen ways of evading it, twelve ways of disarming the man, and three jokes, which should fall with more or less success. I selected the twelfh and a variant of quip three.
I held back, and the punch went through my shaky jaw. The eyes of the thug shot open, and his brain could not work out the impossible. My flesh became hard, and I touched him on the shoulder.
"Hey. Three seconds late you are, my dear fools. The voice I made was some perverse hum, superimposed by the chronal gluttering of my motion.
Left hook incoming. Predictable. Kinetic energy: 2.3 kilojoules. Not enough to violate the suit integrity. My mental talk possessed another line of communication, a cool series of information under the hot hustle of the Speed-Weave. I crouched beneath the swing, and the air disarrangement was playing with my hair. I miss the surprise here and there. The mere anarchy, the what-the-hell-is-happening of it all. Now? It's just... arithmetic.
The thug--in his frumpy, whizzing chrono-rigs which allowed him to jump a few milliseconds--blundered forward. "Eat static, Velocity!" he grumbled, and threw a temporal grenade.
And a circle of twisted time opened, and was about to swallow anyone in a two-second cycle during the next hour. Amateur hour. It was an untidy tangle in the air to me. I put my hand into the Speed-Weave, and grabbed the thread of the process of opening the grenade, and pulled. The world had disappeared.
You see, you are as bad as guys who rob time, you know, said I, and I struck him a jab in the jaw. The chrono-gauntlet on my fist shot a micro-second of frozen time and froze the nerve-endings of his face. He fell like a heap of potatoes. Target neutralized. Temporal anomaly contained. There is another decimal point another day.
I was in the ruins of the Chrono-Bank vestibule, where the neon lights of the lower levels of Nueva Central were shining on my black and cobalt suit. There would be four potential thieves, frozen, looped or simply frozen unconscious. Standard procedure. I exhaled a breath I had not been consciously keeping and the red hourglass on my chest was beating in time with my fainting heart. Just another Tuesday.
That's when the silence hit.
It wasn't the absence of sound. It was the lack of... everything. The buzz of the anti grav runs above did disappear. The hysterical beat of holographic adverts stalled and fell. The very air stopped moving. I turned, and my blood ran cold.
The whole block that was behind me was frozen. Those are not in ice, but in some ideal, horrible stasis. There was a drone delivery hanging in the air almost stationary with half of the cargo lights blinking. A ripple of digital petals down a sign near at hand was suspended, a water-fall of glitter changed to glass. People were statues, with their mouths half-open, half-running, half-life.
My suit scanners malfunctioned, and then stopped. None of the temporal energy signatures. No kinetic readings. Nothing. It was like somebody had merely erased time in that sector.
"What in the seven hells...?" Mumbling slowly, I moved up to the limit. The air at the edge was bad, heavy and dense, as though it had to move the reality itself.
My chrono-senses, which are normally a symphony of echoes of the past and possibilities of the future, shouted in an empty space. There was nothing to hear. No vibration. No thread. I put out my hand, and my fingers ached with a cellular ill. This wasn't a loop. It wasn't a slowdown. This was erasure.
I struggled to keep a panic attack at bay, straining my Web-Sync capabilities to find a loose thread, a loose thread that I could tug. There. Faint. Like a drop of ink in an ocean. One of the signs of an energy that is corrosive, hungry and hanging on the event horizon. It felt... alive. And it was devouring time itself. I tagged it in my suit's log. ANOMALY: CHRONO-VENOM.
And a strange, unfamiliar voice broke my comm, smooth as synth-silk and with an enticing lilt. "Yare yare, Flashboy. Thou art letting them paint the town Jing Zhi. Got some work to do, or is it you are admiring the scene?
Instinctively I turned round, and took a defensive position. "Who is this? This is a secured channel."
"Secured is a relative term. Like it is on time with you, it appears. It was a female voice, a young one and completely unimpressed. I am staring at the same dead zone as you are. They were quite smart in the way they distracted me. But the source isn't there."
My HUD flashed and another data window nuclear forced its way open. There was a schematic of the city, and a throbbing marker just over the Alchemax Temporal Division, miles away. How did she--?
"Who are you?" I insisted, the list of familiar hackers and technomancers going through my head. None fit the profile.
I heard a laugh in my ear, which was a ghost. "Call me Static Trouble. And now shall you stand there gawing, or shall we go--?"
My primary receiver was broken off as an emergency alarm sounded all over the city, silencing every other station. My face, strained and grim with the digital, filled my visor, as did that of Director Vaughn Tyrex.
"Allen. Abort all operations. There is a direct attack on the Alchemax Temporal Division by a biomechanical army on the signature of Dr. Onyx. This is not a drill. Return to base immediately. The whole Chrono-Web is perhaps in danger.
The transmission ended.
Its frozen block, its unknown hacker, its Chrono-Venom... it was all linked up. And it was all a prelude.
One more glance at the horrible calm proved to be the monument of some power which I did not comprehend. Then I swiveled round and the world was a streak of light as the Speed-Weave responded to my beck and call.
Dr. Onyx. Of course it was him.
The chase was over. The war had just begun.