Geargirl
by Mercy Loomis
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 by Mercy Loomis
Originally published in Sex Toy Stories: Erotic Tales of Naughty Play. Beverly, MA: Ravenous Romance, 2010.
Cover design by Mercy Loomis. Photos by Haywiremedia and Eugene Bobrikov.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form. This ebook may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others.
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead (or undead), is entirely coincidental.
“Beck, get on the guns, I need those flyers down in half a mile!” I didn’t listen for his answer, my attention taken up with the vehicles around me and the distance tick-tick-ticking by on the city’s traffic grid. I dodged past the sleek limos and the whirring subcompacts and sped toward a stretch of downtown that was full of side streets, alleys, and off ramps.
Our mark stuck his head into the driver’s compartment. Never a smart move. I ignored his frantic shouting, only paying enough attention to hear Sam’s calming voice as he pulled the idiot back into the cargo hold. “Don’t bother her right now. She’ll get us through.”
Damn right I will. No corporate monkey is going to tell me how to save his ass.
This is why I hate extractions. They never go quite right, and then it’s always down to me.
I wove through a clutch of cargo vans and tried to hang in the middle, but their drivers knew better and peeled away in any direction they could. On the outside I looked like any of the fifty thousand other cargo vans in the city—and thanks to the electrified polymer paint job, I could match any number of corporate logos and coloring. But first Beck had to get these damned surveillance drones off my tail.
Before I could yell at him again, I felt the shiver in my wiring that meant he had jacked into the exterior remote armaments. The autopilot program was a little quirky that way—it didn’t always want to give up control of the guns, and it seemed to dislike Beck in particular. I let the guns fade from my awareness, although Beck’s link-up remained like a hotspot in the back of my head. Instead I directed the autopilot to ready Burst-mode and loaded the new specs.
The gears of the launcher fairly quivered in their tracks. I whipped us around a corner and into the afternoon rush of oblivious commuters.
I felt a surge of elation in Beck’s hotspot. The Burst initiated even before he yelled forward, “We’re clear!”
A smoke grenade fired from the forward launcher, detonating twenty feet above the street and filling the area with a thick oily cloud of electrically charged particles. As we fled into cover, hundreds of my tiny Burst drones deployed. Zipping madly in all directions, their only purpose in life was to broadcast every vehicle identifier currently registered to the grid for two minutes before self-destructing. The autopilot had already disconnected us from the grid. I jogged down a side street, then linked back up with the main road a few seconds later with an entirely different paint job and perfectly legit grid ID that was totally different from the perfectly legit grid ID I’d been running before. I followed half a dozen other fleeing commercial vehicles onto the freeway and let the autopilot take over while I concentrated on the scanners.
No pursuit.
With a sigh of relief and a thrill of pride, I carried us toward our rendezvous.
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