Free Ultraviolet by Yvonne Navarro

gyroscope activated. The security forces realized she was right there at the same time she sprang to her feet and charged directly at them. By now her overcoat was a deep burnt orange and she looked like a ball of flame headed right for the group of Commandos. Their leader bellowed out an order and they raised their weapons on cue and opened fire. The roar of gunfire filled the corridor and Violet dove—
    —straight up.
    There was an astonished pause as the soldiers blinked at the empty spot where she’d stood only a second before, and that moment of hesitation was enough to seal their doom. Before they could change tactics, she spun two machine pistols from flat-space holsters sewn against the fabric of her slacks on both hips; a millisecond later the barrels of both her guns belched fire and death down on their heads.
    From the safety of the compound’s surveillance room, the Chief of Research and several Commando supervisors and security technicians stood frozen in front of a bank of surveillance screens. The Chief could feel the stress and anxiety building inside his skull like a massive migraine headache, the kind he’d gotten as a child before Beltane Pharmaceuticals had come up with the medication, an inoculation much like the smallpox shots of the old centuries that had ended migraines forever. His stomach churned with sudden nausea and little yellow lights sparkled at the edges of his vision. Yep, just like a migraine.
    Gripping the edge of the counter, the Chief finally found his voice. It came out raspy and low, almost a whisper. “Christ—how did she
do
that?”
    “She must have some kind of gravity leveler,” offered one of the techs nervously. He slapped his fingers against his face and wiped roughly at the corners of his mouth, the movement betraying his own fear. “Or—”
    The Chief waved him away impatiently; he’d neither expected nor wanted an answer right now—explanations could wait for later. Right now, they had to think
forward
. “Well, whatever it is, it’s ours now.” He glared at the monitor that showed Violet scuttling along the ceiling of a corridor like some sort of oversized spider. God, how he wished he could reach right through the screen and pluck her through it. He’d throttle the bitch himself. “Because she is
not
going to make it out of this complex alive.”
    Violet found the door to the emergency exit staircase almost immediately, but when she tugged it open she could already hear the security forces rushing up from the lower floors. Their boots clapped against the rubberized metal stairs, giving her a decent idea of their numbers. Clearly they weren’t concerned that she could hear them—they had plenty of confidence that they could best her by sheer numbers. It didn’t matter. Her gyroscope was still engaged and she saw them long before they saw her. The ignorant soldiers were, of course, looking forward and up—that was how the world in which they had been trained operated. Violet, on the other hand, was looking
down
at them from the rear, at an almost negative, Escher-like image of the staircase. Once you knew how this dimension worked, it was absurdly easy to walk across the ceiling over their heads and mow them down with machine-gun fire like the images in the old twenty-first-century video games.
    She left the bodies behind with barely a glance, and the next corridor she stepped into was empty . . . but of course, it wouldn’t be for long. She kept her pace brisk and her gaze darted in every direction as she reloaded her guns from magazines stored in flat-space reservoirs on the inside of her coat, all the while never loosening her iron-tight hold on that priceless white briefcase. Even so, she damn near dropped it when the familiar voice of the Chief of Research came thundering out of a set of speakers hidden in the wall almost directly above her head.
    “Violet Song jat Sharif! Tell me I’m wrong!”
    Without looking up from her task, Violet snapped