This time, though, she kind of wanted them to be louder. If only to drown out the voice.
Why don't you just surrender?
Sine's hacking skills were subpar, but a museum security system was little match for her extremely advanced computer; if John Conner could open sesame with his bulky, awkward laptop she could certainly do it with her wrist device. The real difficulty came with the thrice-damned voice.
"Sure, surrender. I'm sure they'll just put me in their police car equivalent without bothering to search me. How do you think they're going to react when they find out I'm ape-descended instead of bird descended? They might kill me right there, or drag me off to a government lab to dissect me, and as lovely as that sounds, imagine what they'd do with my tech! You want to dump a singularity event on this planet?"
There's no guarantee they'd be able to figure anything out about it, let alone reverse engineer it.
"I think there's a far larger guarantee that they'll both confiscate my stuff and do Bad Things when they figure out I'm not Auspex." Sine said.
And you realize why you won't have anyone riding to your rescue?
Sine bit off her reply to...herself, in the end, and re-routed the last wire, opening the metal door. That should help with the barricades throughout the museum...
It did not help with other factors. Like the fact that across the room, two more Auspex security guards stood staring at the black-garbed figure that had just opened their locked doors.
Sine ran to take them out before they could get their guns out, as she sprinted over, leapt up...and promptly got bashed in the side with a flashlight when she attempted her jumping snap kick, knocking her to the ground. Cursing her lack of bullet time, Sine rolled over and blasted the pair with another tranquilizing orb, getting up and leaving their coughing, slumping bodies behind as she fled out the door the guards had been in front of.
You could have done that to start. Why did you initially decide on violence?
"WHY DON'T YOU BE USEFUL OR BE QUIET?!" Sine snapped, as she called up her map of the museum inside her helmet and tried to find the shortest route out?
It's a good question. Here's another. Why don't you just find some place to hide in the museum? Wait until your Sifter is recharged and just jump out? Surely you're clever enough to avoid some police for a bit. Worst comes to worst, you could try and fake a negotiating situation...
A weird buzzing noise sounded, and Sine stopped, trying to figure out what it was. She quickly learned, as the hacked metal doors abruptly changed their mind and snapped close again, Sine too late to get through. An override. Someone had overridden her access and closed the doors again. Once again she was a rat, trapped, and from the secondary alarms Sine heard under the museum one, her options for cheesing it was rapidly approaching zero.
"...no." Sine said, as she popped out her tranquilizing orbs and selected a replacement.
...This is not needed.
"I'll be the judge of that."
Yes, your judgment has proven impeccable this last week. Month. Since you left the Bar. Why bother looking for another angle? You're already in freefall, and your math can't produce any new answers...
"It can tell me one thing. I don't need a conscience hanging over my shoulder and critiquing my every act. I got through my life without you, I got through Zoofights without you, and I sure as hell don't need you now. What I need is an exit." Sine said, as her helmet did calculations.
...Maybe what you need is the last thing you want.
"Fuck off, Jiminy Cricket." Sine said, and locked onto the frailest part of the wall and unleashed her explosive orbs. The blast took out the wall...
And most of the exhibit on the other side. Sine, running through the gap she'd made, spared it a brief glance.
"...I ain't got no strings to hold me down." Sine said, and then continued on, activating something on her wrist computer as she did. Despite how bad things had gotten, Sine hadn't come as far as she had without having backup plans for her backup plans. Especially when she was on her own. She might have made poor choices when she'd jumped to Orthines, but she'd done her research about it beforehand and planned accordingly.
The second wall she blew out took a fair chunk of the ceiling as well. Sine scrambled over the rubble and went on, fleeing down a hallway and finally getting to the entrance hall of the museum. The Auspex had even had metal doors close down over THAT, but their stone proved a lot more vulnerable than their metal, as Sine went off to the side and emptied three orbs into the museum wall, blasting a hole to the outside and freedom.
So to speak. Sine leapt out of the smoke to find that she may have done better if she'd turned around and gone backwards. Because despite her shortcut, the Volo had still arrived.
In force. Sine's computer immediately picked up nearly fifteen equivalents of a police car, as well as two SWAT vans, the main difference being the vehicles flew on null-gravity generators rather than drove. It rather reminded her of some cartoon series she couldn't recall, though the Volo who immediately shone a spotlight on her looked nowhere near as comical as the entities that had driven those vehicles.
Sine quickly assessed three things. One was the fact that out in the open, her tranquilizing gasses would be far less effective. The second was that she was outnumbered fifty to one, and most of the Volo were wearing rather menacing facial protection that may or may not have served as gas filters. The third was that she did not have a minigun and could not chase away these police with the fear of superior firepower.
Oh, and one last thing. The museum was near the top of this mountain-constructed city. The stairs ended in a drop that went down a good hundred feet before it hit the buildings below. The actual streets of this city were even further down. She could run left or right, but the Volo would either easily chase her down with their flying cars and their anti-gravity discs (the same ones Sine had tried to use to steal the blue ruby) or cut her to pieces. She was trapped.
Or not. Sine broke for the Volo, lowering her head and hoping they'd take a few seconds to shoot. She was also hoping that they were expecting her to fly, and make plans to intercept her as that accorded.
She got one of her wishes. Bullets, or rather the needle-like projectiles the Volo used, their ends either dull or sharp depending on whether they were shooting to wound or kill, barraged Sine, several of them smashing into her armor and nearly causing her to lose her balance. But she made it, in the end, and as the Volo moved to stop her from flying, she promptly leapt off the edge into freefall.
No new answers...
New toys would do.
The mechanical surfboard-like machine came in from the left, a tractor ray locking onto Sine and bringing it to her feet while slowing her momentum. Her ankles screamed as the board fixed her in place, the device having originally been built for a considerably larger and somewhat denser being, Sine having been unable to do much in the way of modifying the machine before she'd headed to Orthines. Anti-vertigo and bracing fields activated, and Sine thrust one foot down and rocketed back up, the specialized auras keeping her senses intact as she spun back up to face the Volo, who immediately moved to shoot her back down.
The secondary part of the machine arrived them. Its heavy weight came in from behind, snapping up at the last second and clamping down on Sine's upper body. The weight felt like it was going to crush her for a moment, and even when the gravity-dampeners (she really had a lot of devices that screwed with gravity, Sine mused for a half second) kicked in it felt far too heavy and far too hot. But it worked.
Arnold could keep his minigun. What she had had as her backup was simply...prime.
The guns unlocked, and Sine reached behind her and pulled the twin cannons on the firing platform forward, the guns arming as the laser sight sprang up between, her computers assessing her targets. There was no need to go to war with these people...but she wasn't going down either.
No.
"My turn." Sine said, and opened fire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Once there was a girl whose prison was a care
The girl had a monkey, they made the strangest pair
The monkey ruled the girl, it climbed inside her head
And now as fate would have it, one of them is dead..."
