“I was born in a test tube, but I echo that sentiment,” I said. “Do you want to go in hard or stealthy?”
Claire looked at me. “You’re up for just shooting our way in?”
“What part of professional assassin did you not get on my resume?”
Claire smirked. “I’m starting to like you, Case.”
“I’ve counted only six guards,” I said, shrugging. “How bad could it be?”
Why, oh why, did I say that?
Chapter Eight
I regretted my decision to not be stealthier as soon as I ended up being smashed through a plaster wall by the military-grade cyborg whose dog I’d just killed.
To be fair, the animal wasn’t a real dog—it was leaking oil and had sparking electric wires coming out of the hole I’d created on its side. It was also possible the man was more upset that three of his comrades had been sniped while they were watching TV. It had been a rather bloodthirsty plan, eliminating the artificial dogs kenneled behind the house first with my Red Desert-17 silenced pistol while Claire sniped his companions.
I was supposed to eliminate the sole remaining guard and his companion in the kitchen, but much to my consternation, his animal sensed my presence as I prepared to silence him, and his owner was now kicking my ass.
“Murderer!” the tall buzz-cut-sporting Caucasian man shouted. He looked like a parody of a human being with a body that Arnold would have envied in his heyday, barely covered up by military fatigues and a vest with a biohazard sign pin prominently displayed on its left side.
A quick scan of his enhancements told me he was sporting thirty-million-dollar equipment—which was less impressive than it sounded since the dollar was worth a quarter of what it used to be—but still, top of the line. He had an artificial skeleton, arms, limbs, and synth-muscle but wasn’t a full shell. It was still stuff designed in the past year and better than my fifteen-year-old machinery in force if not quality.
“This doesn’t have to—” I tried to grab his arm to throw him, only to have him grab me by the head and shove it into the kitchen sink. I managed to brace myself before I hit the counter, then elbowed him in the face before jabbing my thumbs into his eyes. They were real, and he screamed as they were crushed.
That was when I spun around him with the garrote hidden in my wristwatch and electrified him at maximum charge. It was enough to kill a normal human being but only caused a faint sizzling sound before I used the garrote to throw him over my shoulder. The cyborg howled as his head smashed through the cheap checkerboard tile on the ground. I grabbed the Red Desert-17 pistol I’d dropped on the ground and fired three silenced shots into his brain case.
The military-grade cyborg stopped moving.
Claire entered the back door, holding a Sidewinder-7 sniper rifle that had been assembled from the parts I kept in my trunk. The gun was almost as big as her but had a targeting computer, the ability to shoot through solid steel, and velocity controls. Few people could handle a weapon like that, and she’d used it to take down four targets.
“Thanks for the help,” I said, taking a deep breath.
Claire stared at me. “Did you really want me using this thing while you were in close-quarters combat?”
She had a point.
Claire looked down at the sparking canine on the ground as well as his dead master. “Did you have to kill the dog?”
“That’s a drone, not a dog,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the thought of harming an animal. Like many people. “It’s about as much a real dog as my car.”
“It acted pretty dog-like,” Claire said, sparing no comments for the dead humans. “So, did the others outside. Maybe artificial animality is catching up with artificial people.”
“Animality is not a word outside of Mortal Kombat,” I said, shaking my head. “Also, any stealth we might have had is ruined.”
I gestured up to a security camera hidden behind the obsolete 2015 fridge with one door blasted open. The contents of the fridge were mostly beer, red beef, and plain yogurt, perpetually popular with cyborgs.
“Fuck,” Claire said, covering her face. “Can they transmit that?”
“No,” I said, lifting a small black box from my jacket. “I’m jamming anything being sent via infowave. They’ll still be able to see it downstairs, though.”
“Are we sure the lab’s downstairs?” Claire said. “I mean, it could be in the attic or something.”
“Not for the number of people you’ve said have gone missing. What was it, like thirty?” I asked, heading over to a nearby door between the entrance to the kitchen and the TV room. That was traditionally where the door to the basement was kept in houses like this. Through the doorway, I could see three headless bodies in front of a gore-splattered flat screen showing a football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New Kansas Raiders.
Claire was a good shot.
“Yeah,” Claire said. “Do you think they’re just dumping them in the river?”
“No,” I said, trying to open the door to the basement and finding it locked. “Then they’d be popping up everywhere. I suspect your researcher friend got dumped in the river because it was an unplanned execution. The people who killed him panicked and didn’t use whatever method they’re using to dispose of the bodies here. Assuming there are any bodies.”
“There are,” Claire said. “The report—”
“You have the word of a dead researcher who sounded like a crank to the government,” I said. “It could just be they’re experimenting on the homeless and letting them go. Tales grow in the telling.”
“That’s not what happened,” Claire said, looking for a key to the basement.
I proceeded to kick the door down, and it revealed a long concrete staircase down to a reinforced metal door with a biometric lock. There was another security camera down there. There was also an eye scanner there. “I really regret gouging that guy’s eyes out now.”
Claire grimaced. “You don’t think we can threaten them into opening the door, do you?”
“Nope,” I said, heading down to the door. “However, we have one advantage over these security measures.”
“Which is?”
“Brute force,” I said, pulling out a pen and some chewing gum before applying both to the door’s hinges. I then clicked the top of the pen three times before starting to run up the stairs. Claire, who’d been following me, did a double take before running up the stairs behind me. Both of us covered our ears before an explosion filled the stairwell with smoke.
Claire looked over at me. “Do you have the entire James Bond collection of gadgets in that coat of yours?”
I shrugged. “Blame Atlas’ new quartermaster. Naoko Brown loves the classics.”
“Stay the hell away from us!” a scared female voice shouted from the staircase below. “We’ve called in reinforcements, and this place will be surrounded any minute now.”
“Do you have a landline?” I shouted down.
“What do you think this is, 1958? No!”
“Then you haven’t called shit. Now we’re coming down there, and you’re going to cooperate, or this is going to get even bloodier.”
“We’re armed!” the woman shouted back.
“Lady, do you think that makes a difference now?” I called back. “Besides, this is corporate espionage.”
“What!?” the woman called back.
Claire shot me a confused look.
I mouthed, “Just go with it.”
Claire shrugged.
I shouted down. “We had to murder the Rent-A-Corps to get at what you have, but we’re totally just here to steal information. None of you are on our list of targets. If you cooperate, then none of you will be harmed.”
The woman paused. “All right.”
“What’s your name?”
“Myra!”
“Nice name,” I said. “Just a warning. If any of you are armed and take a shot at us, I’ll kill you all. Understood?”
There was a pause.
“Understood.”
“Throw out any weapons you have,” I said, peering down the doorway to the basement. The smoke had cleared, showing that the metal door had fallen on the ground. Three Glock knock-offs were thrown through the door, not even enough to pierce my skin but enough to sting.
“Good,” I said. “We’re coming down now, and do not piss us off because if this goes south, I’m going to resolve this Dirty Dozen style. For those of you unfamiliar with the classic film, that means my friends are going to pour barrels of gasoline down there and then burn you alive.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Myra shouted back. “We’re cooperating.”
“See that it stays that way,” I said, lifting my pistol and slowly descending the stairs.
“Nice job.” Claire unloaded the Sidewinder of its ammo clip and popped the round in the chamber before pulling her own Red Desert-17 and following me below. The two of us walked, single file, over the ruined door and into the Karma Corp facility.
What we found was disappointing.
Given the expense of the hardware they had to protect the place, I’d been expecting something more elaborate, but the place looked less like a high-tech research lab and more like a small-town emergency room. The chamber was a large rectangular basement, obviously widened from the plantation’s original cellar and filled with a dozen hermetically sealed chambers. Each of them contained a man or woman on life support. They all sported lesions, tumors, and other signs of having had something seriously fucked-up happen to them. All of them were unconscious and hooked up to morphine drips and IVs.
In the center of the chamber, huddled around a tiny administrator’s desk, were four men in nurse’s scrubs, two women wearing doctors’ attire, and a plastic, bubble-topped, tread-milled PharmaBot drone—the kind that distributed whatever you needed. If this was the entire facility, it was a small operation.
One of the doctors, an African American woman in her mid-fifties, raised her hand. “We have all of our research here. Listen, despite what it looks like, we’re helping—”
Claire took one look at one of the patients, an Indian man in his mid-twenties, then shot Myra in the head before shooting every single one of the staff in the chest and emptying her pistols’ clip into their corpses.
I looked over at the man she’d looked at. “He your missing HOPE member?”
Claire went over to check the bodies and kicked one of them for good measure. “His name is Arav Vijun. Yeah, he’s my friend.”
I did a quick once-over of the place and found an incinerator in the back with large trash bags full of human ash stored in a dumpster. It was some Nazi-level shit going on, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. Whatever Karma Corp was testing here, they were clearly not worried about it getting back to them, or it was valuable enough to take these kinds of risks.
After finishing my sweep of the place, I found Claire typing away at one of the dead staff’s computers. She’d moved the bodies of the dead away from the administrator’s cubicle and tossed a tarp over them.
“You’ve already got access?” I asked, impressed.
“They opened it all up for us,” Claire said, taking a deep breath. “It seems they really did believe your bullshit about letting them live.”
“It wasn’t bullshit,” I said, shrugging. “I would have happily let them all go if it meant we could use them against Karma Corp. Monsters go free every day. As long it takes a bite out of the institution. At least you got them, though. This is enough to bury anyone.”
Claire didn’t respond.
“Let me guess, I was being overly optimistic,” I said. “There’s nothing relating to Karma Corp, is there?”
“I’m not looking for that right now,” Claire said. “I was trying to see what was wrong with the people here in hopes of seeing how we could get them cured. Artificial organs, Shell bodies, or just plain ordinary surgery.”
“And?” I asked.
“They’re brain dead, all of them, including Arav. They chemically destroyed their minds before they started their procedure. We can’t take the bodies with us, either. The bodies are full of medical nano-machines. They’ve infected all them with dozens of diseases to see how long the people can be kept alive until they fall apart. The nano-machines are designed to break the bodies down unless they’re given a daily recall code.”
I stared at her. “Fuck.”
Claire shook her head. “This batch has been kept alive for almost three months on diseases which should have killed them in minutes. Their nanotherapy doesn’t work perfectly, as the bodies all break down with the machines degrading in their programming, but it’s an actual medical advance.”
I surveyed the people around me. “It’s not worth this.”
“No,” Claire said, sounding on the verge of tears. “The numbering on this document makes me realize we’re not going to be able to beat Karma Corp, though.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The memos I’m reading say this is Facility Number 118. They have little outposts like this all over the country.”
The implications sunk in. I tried to think of things to say. Instead, I walked over to her and gave her a hug. It was with that uncharacteristic gesture, I remembered, how all of this began.
Chapter Nine
I remembered lying next to Claire’s naked body underneath the sheets of the Mississippi hotel we were holed up in. It had been five days since we’d gone on our assault against Karma Corp’s body shop, and we were waiting out the consequences of our actions. I’d used my contacts to get the FBI sent in, the corporate sovereignty act not having been enacted yet, and there was national news about the event on television.
The sex between us had happened our first night together and hadn’t been planned as being anything special. Just a release between two people who had just gone through a harrowing experience together. However, the next few days had been spent enjoying each other’s company, and I felt it was in danger of becoming something more. I was strongly attracted to Claire and her to me, which made the fact that we were destined to part all the more painful. Not to mention she was working with my ex-lover.
“I can’t sleep,” Claire said, turning to look over at me. “How about you?”
“No,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.
“Do you sleep?” Claire asked.
“I was programmed to imitate being a human man in virtually all respects. That included sleeping for up to eight hours a day. Truth be told, I don’t need to. My brain compresses and files information during sleep, though. So, I try to get around four or five hours every night just, so I don’t suffer glitches.”
“Glitches?”
“Memory loss, flashbacks, and more,” I said, wishing we could discuss something else. “I was meant to exist for a decade of continuous use, and I’m already past that. Lucita has the people in the lab working on patching our programming so we can function for a normal human being’s lifespan, but it’s a complicated process.”
“Huh,” Claire said. “Well, at least you imitate a human man in other ways without any issue.”
I gave a half-smile. “I haven’t had any complaints so far.”
Claire smiled. “Do want to turn on the television and see if there’s any more news on our little escapade?”
“It’s three a.m., so I doubt it’s on INN,” I said, sitting up. “This isn’t a story that has much national attention.”
“Which is bullshit,” Claire said, her expression frowning. “Those bastards should be all arrested and heading toward a firing squad right now.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said, immediately regretting my word choice. “Even though the bodies have dissolved, they have left behind trace evidence. The fact that Karma Corp tried to blow the facility remotely also paints them in a bad light. I’m glad we disabled that before we left. And the fact that there’s ten murders also means the FBI is going to keep this an open investigation far longer than I think the executives will want.”
<
br /> Truth be told, I already knew this wasn’t going to go any further than it already had. Karma Corp shares had taken a serious hit, but they’d successfully covered up most of their connection to the facility. It was an “outside contractor” they’d been working with, and they had no idea about the horrible conditions there. We’d left a trail for the FBI to find the other facilities mentioned in the outpost’s computer records, but there was no sign they’d followed up on them. HOPE would have to do the legwork themselves if they were going deeper into this. As I suspected, someone had been bribed or threatened into shelving this. It was almost like the world hadn’t ended and human civilization had recovered. But it hadn’t.
The United States was functioning again, but it was utterly dependent on the corporations, which owned everything the same way China had before the Big Smokey eruption. Most of the Corporate Council’s executives had diplomatic immunity, and there was no way for their facilities to be raided by the government since they were sovereign territory. It was ludicrous, but with Black Technology “secrets” able to destroy the world the way the atomic bomb had, legislation had been passed by an exhausted legislature desperate for companies to promise imported food and medicine from countries less devastated. Now the companies were claiming sovereignty in the European Union, Russian Federation, Africa, and the former Democratic People’s Republic of China.
“Fuck,” Claire said, getting out of bed. I took a moment to admire her scar-covered backside, which I’d explored with my hands many times. “This should have been a game changer.”
“It’s the same game as ever,” I said. “The only rule is the house always wins.”
Claire chuckled as she slipped on her bra, panties, and jeans. “I’m going to go for a cigarette. Do you want anything?”
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Watch yourself. You don’t know who could be looking for you.”
“You’re a bit paranoid,” Claire said. “We did a good job of getting rid of all trace evidence.”
Agent G: Assassin Page 9
