They’d made love three times since the start of the evening. There’d been that frantic first time on the sofa. Then twice in the bedroom in the throes of a gentler and more sustainable passion, with a short break between locations to reheat a couple of slices of Sosoome’s homemade pizza. The mech had returned during that intermission and, thankfully without uttering a word, had immediately exited again. Presumably, his sensors had detected biological cues suggesting more sex was in the offing.
Nick carefully moved an arm that was cradling Bel’s shoulder and in danger of falling asleep. He felt her waking up.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“Too late.” She smiled and tapped her wrist fob for the time, checked the subcutaneous readout. “Damn. Almost morning.”
“Need to be anywhere?”
“Uh huh. Some early appointments. But I guess I can lie here for another ten minutes.”
“We couldn’t do as much in ten minutes as I’d like,” he said, putting on a sad face.
“Probably not as good as the way we did it last night.”
“Yeah.” He kissed her cheek. “Want some breakfast?”
“No, let’s just stay here. In fact, let’s blow off the day, the month, the whole year. Stay in this bed forever.”
“I wish.”
She stared at him, silent for a time.
“There’s something troubling you,” she said.
Marta used to be like that too, acutely attuned to his thoughts and feelings, especially after sex. It was one of the things he’d loved about her.
“There’s always something troubling me,” he said with a grin, hoping to prevent serious matters from pillaging the mood. “I could provide you with a detailed list but it would take you years to go through it.”
“Be serious.”
She wasn’t going to be diverted. He sighed. “OK. I told Sosoome before you got here last night that I was going to tell you some things. Really important things.”
“I suppose you’d better get to it then.”
“That intel I got from my CI, the stuff about the Ash Ock, about their tways being able to link and unlink?”
“Uh huh.”
“I left something out. Something big. Actually, a couple big things. You might say I buried the leads.”
She rolled onto her side, propped her head up with her arm. “Am I going to be angry with you?”
“There’s a fair chance of that.”
“I guess you’d better plunge forward and hope for the best.”
“Yeah.”
Why am I doing this, now of all times? I just had my greatest night since coming out of stasis. And now I might be taking a wrecking ball to it?
But he knew the answer even as he posed the question. It was important, both personally and professionally. From here on out, he needed to be as straight as possible with this incredible woman.
“My number one confidential informant isn’t human, he’s binary. An assassin.”
Bel sat up and pulled the sheet up toward her neck. The smart fabric sensed her need, coiled the cloth around her.
“You’re telling me that one of them is your source?”
“His name’s Ektor Fang. He’s a Du Pal. And he’s in the service of the Royals. Although he hasn’t actually confirmed this, I suspect he’s a high-ranking lieutenant with direct access to the Ash Ock.”
Her eyes widened. “How? I mean, how is something like that even possible? Our field agents have been trying to get a source among the assassins for years. The closest we’ve ever come is some low-level intel from servitors.”
Nick scowled at the name. He hated servitors, humans who, for various reasons – admiration, misanthropy, money – voluntarily served the cause of the assassins. He saw them as traitors to humanity, which in some ways made them even worse than the Paratwa.
“Trust me, it’s possible,” he said. “The problem with E-Tech agents is that they don’t look in the right places for intel. I’m not saying Pablo Dominguez isn’t a smart guy and that he doesn’t do a good job running Intelligence. But his field agents, they just don’t go where they need to go to make the right sort of connections. No offense, but too much of E-Tech is filled with well-bred, well-meaning people who have little or no street smarts. The social circles they move in aren’t where you find the richer pools of intel.”
“I know what you’re saying. Pablo’s aware of the deficiency. He’s been trying to recruit savvier agents, men and women from unsec areas.” Bel frowned. “But if this Paratwa of yours is really under the sway of the Royal Caste, how can you be sure you’re not being played?”
“A disinformation campaign? Believe me, I’ve given a lot of thought to the possibility that Ektor Fang is feeding me false intel. The thing is, I’ve come to trust him. The information I’ve gotten from him has always checked out. I admit I’m not a hundred percent sure of his motives. If I had to hazard a guess, though, I’d say that he secretly despises the Royals.”
“And what if Ektor Fang’s being played? How do you know the Royals aren’t using him without his knowledge to muddy the waters?”
“I don’t think so. But I suppose it is possible.”
“Your source doesn’t know about this Paratwa team you’re putting together, does he?”
“Hell no.”
Bel gave a slow nod, absorbing his revelations.
“Angry yet?” he asked.
“No. I mean, I understand why having a Paratwa as a CI would make someone extraordinarily cautious. You said there were a couple big things. What’s the other one?”
There was no going back now. If she was going to be pissed, the fact that he’d held back from telling her about the CI’s final revelation would do it.
“Ektor Fang made me swear that this is for the director’s ears only, that it go no further. It could get my informant killed. You can’t trust any of your own people with this intel, not even the regents.”
“Understood.”
“I wanted to tell you earlier. But you were so new on the job and with everything else going on, I didn’t want you to feel overwhelmed.”
“OK.”
“But looking back, it was probably foolish of me not to have told you–”
“Nick! Just say it, all right?”
“The Royal Caste want an apocalypse to occur. Their overall goal is for life on Earth to be wiped out and for the planet to be abandoned.”
Bel’s face registered the same astonishment Nick had experienced when Ektor Fang made the revelation in that binary safe room more than a month ago. She shook her head, unwilling to believe.
“Why would they desire something so horrible? It’s their planet too. They’d be destroying their own home.”
“Ektor Fang doesn’t know why, only that it’s definitely what they want. Among other things, they’ve been secretly promoting environmental degradation, overuse of natural resources and the extinction of species. Plus, encouraging human overpopulation in order to exacerbate all those problems.
“He claims that the Ash Ock are responsible for many of the miniwars racking the planet. Remember that tourist a couple years ago who inadvertently crossed the Angola-Zambia border and triggered a ninety-day conflict with hundreds of thousands of casualties? That was one of theirs. Behind the scenes, they worked to accentuate tensions between the two countries, made sure that only a spark was needed to ignite hostilities. They’ve arranged for dozens of such sparks.
“They’re also responsible for many of the urban nukings and the releases of plagues, maybe even that one in Boston that the lab worker took the heat for. And the biotoxin attack in Quezon City, although officially blamed on the Awasta breed, more than likely can be traced to them.”
Bel remained skeptical. “Your source can’t be right. They must have fed this Ektor Fang false intel.”
“For what reason? You think the Royals would go out of their way to invent a fake story that would give humanity even more reason to hate
them, to want to see them wiped out?”
“But it makes no sense. Unless…”
He finished her thought. “Unless they have an escape plan.”
“The Colonies? I suppose it’s possible. But E-Tech already has a testing procedure in place for immigrants to prevent that very thing, to stop binaries from entering the cylinders.”
“I know. I wrote some of the programs myself that are being used to ID infiltrators. The colonial customs system isn’t perfect, however.”
“True. And from what you’ve told me about these Ash Ock, their ability to exist as separate individuals, they might be able to sneak in.” She shook her head, doubtful of the notion even as she uttered it. “But it wouldn’t make sense that they’d only want to save themselves.”
“Definitely not. They see the other breeds as their ultimate strength. They wouldn’t put themselves in the position of being leaders without followers. It’s hard to imagine an entire army of Paratwa making it through Colonial customs.”
“Do you think they could be planning to engineer some sort of mass escape through Star-Edge?”
“That makes even less sense. Sending giant spaceships on a voyage to the stars with no guarantee of finding habitable planets is a risky proposition to begin with. Besides, it doesn’t fit with what we know about them. It would signify a retreat. The Royals wouldn’t do that. They’re conquerors. I can’t think of a single rational reason why they’d want to run off into deep space.”
“So what then?” she wondered.
“There is a third possibility. Going underground. Literally. We already suspect that the Ash Ock have been building secret facilities around the world. What if their plan is to go into stasis and ride out the apocalypse? Awaken in some future era when they might have the whole planet to themselves?”
“That’s one giant leap of faith. Most estimates are that if an apocalypse does occur, presumably biological, ecological or nuclear, or some combination thereof, it would take hundreds of years for the planet to be made livable again. And if all goes well for the Colonies, the Paratwa would still have a powerful human civilization to deal with when they came out of stasis.”
“Good points,” Nick admitted. “But two things we already know about the Royals. They’re not afraid of bold initiatives and they’re partial to long-term planning.”
“We need more intel from your source. If this Ektor Fang doesn’t have the answers, he must be in a position to uncover them.”
“I have no way of contacting him. It’s one-way com only. He’s more than a bit paranoid about security. He transmits a message when he wants to set up a meeting but the message takes a convoluted path to protect it from being traced. It’s sent to a coded net address, rendered into a physical note, then delivered to a private mailbox. Sosoome picks up the mail and brings it to me.” Nick paused. “Anyway, next time we meet I’ll try to dig more out of him.”
Bel went silent for a time. When she finally spoke it was to ask the question that had been challenging Nick since Ektor Fang had made the revelation.
“So what do we do with this information?”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“It doesn’t seem right just sitting on it.”
“Yeah. But here’s the thing. We have no way to prove that the Ash Ock are trying to bring on Armageddon. I’m convinced Ektor Fang is right, but without persuasive evidence, releasing it would only cause a lot of public turmoil. And even if there was a way of doing it that wouldn’t potentially boomerang on my CI, putting it out there might actually serve to accelerate the Ash Ock’s plans.”
She nodded. “People would be even more outraged, more hateful of the Paratwa.”
“Which could translate into escalated violence and increased conflicts in the world, the exact conditions the Royals seek. Under that scenario, an apocalypse could occur even faster. I think Ektor Fang realized all this when he said that it wasn’t actionable intelligence. ‘For your background edification only’ were his exact words.”
Bel seemed to consider his conclusion for a moment. “OK, so I guess we keep it between us, at least for now.”
She hopped from the bed and headed for the bathroom. He admired the sway of her naked buttocks in retreat.
“So, girl,” he called after her. “You mad I didn’t tell you all this stuff sooner?”
She vanished into the bathroom but peeked around the door frame. “No, Nick, I’m not mad. I will say, however, that this isn’t the sort of pillow talk to which I’m accustomed.”
She closed the door. He smiled and looked forward to seeing her again.
Eighteen
Anyone could make a Cohe wand work. In theory, it was a simple device to operate. Squeezing the egg-shaped weapon sent the deadly black beam coursing from its needle. The amount of hand pressure dictated intensity and distance. The beam’s direction was controlled by flicking the wrist.
In practice, however, the Cohe was the most notoriously challenging weapon ever created, which was why the deadlier Paratwa breeds were given toy wands to play with even before they learned to crawl.
By the age of five, a budding assassin was upgraded to a stinger, an operating Cohe that, although nonlethal, could nevertheless give a painful bite. By age ten, most trainees had gained enough respect for the weapon’s potential to be given the real thing. And by their teen years, most tways could use their Cohes to devastating effect, either singularly or in tandem.
Humans, by contrast, weren’t trained with such ruthless efficiency and were rarely allowed access to weapons at such early ages. It was unusual to find a human who’d even handled a Cohe prior to the typical military service years. And by then, many weapons experts believed it was too late to develop the subtle motor coordination and muscle memory of the assassins.
Possession of a wand by civilians was illegal in most countries, although the enforcement of such laws was generally lax. And because it required such a long and complex training period, most of the world’s policing authorities and armies, including special forces, considered the Cohe more trouble than it was worth.
Another negative factor was production cost. Due to a complex manufacturing process, Cohes cost on average fifteen times as much as a conventional projectile or energy sidearm, primarily due to the intricate wetware batteries needed to power them. Consequently, the weapon, originally made by Nagasaki-based Coherence-Kushiro Corp, remained almost exclusively the province of the assassins.
Almost.
Nick stood in the control room, a hastily constructed steel and concrete bunker in the corner of the abandoned warehouse, his attention on an array of video screens and test monitors. Basher and Stone Face stood behind him. Sosoome was sprawled atop an old filing cabinet in the corner. The building wasn’t far from the Zilch where Nick had recruited the EPF men. He’d bought it months ago in preparation for converting it into a training facility.
He tabbed the mic switch. “Slag, send him in.”
“On his way,” the Brit replied on speaker from the adjacent anteroom.
Nick’s camera array showed a door opening and a man entering the largest area of the partitioned warehouse, a makeshift gymnasium twenty meters long and half that in width. The walls and ceiling had been reinforced and were further protected with overlapping, high-powered energy shields.
The monthly electric bill could have bankrupted a small nation but the alternative was worse. Although the population in this region of Philly-sec was fairly light, a stray Cohe beam piercing the walls might hit a passing vehicle or pedestrian or, equally bad, result in someone sighting the beam and reporting it to the authorities. Marine or EPF battalions descending on the warehouse in search of a Paratwa assassin were not part of Nick’s game plan.
The candidate took his place on the marked spot in the center of the gym. He was of medium height with a slim build. His bio indicated he’d seen action with the US 168th Airborne, which had fought in the bloody Alaska-Yukon border wars.
/> Nick had begun the process of recruiting the fourth and pivotal member of his Paratwa-fighting team by placing discreet ads on GAN, the Global Arms Net. Concealing his intentions so as not to alarm the authorities or risk attracting a real Paratwa, he’d passed himself off as a scientist needing paid volunteers for a research study. Ostensibly, the study was meant to test the physiological side effects of handheld energy weapons, including the Cohe wand.
Nearly eight hundred men and women had answered the ads. Ninety percent of them had no experience with the Cohe and were eliminated immediately. Almost a quarter of the remainder turned out to be biwannabes, the most extreme version of servitors.
Biwannabes were disturbed individuals who claimed to have been born into the wrong species and glorified all things binary. They believed that by pledging loyalty to the Paratwa, some mystical metamorphosis would occur after they died. Rebirth comes, two not one! was their motto and rallying cry. They were convinced that they would be reborn into two bodies, become genuine twofers.
Further computerized psych profiling had reduced the list of potential candidates to seventeen. A deeper set of evaluations and a complex vetting process had whittled that group down to five.
Three of the finalists had been tested yesterday. All had proved unsuitable. One had been a total bust, with reaction times far too slow for combat. The others had been reasonably fast but wildly inaccurate. The final pair of candidates was being tested today.
“Are you ready?” Nick asked.
The man nodded and launched the Cohe into his hand from the slip-wrist holster. Nick triggered the targeting program and carefully observed his monitors.
Three animated training holos shaped like soldiers erupted into existence, two in front of the man and the third behind him. The man nailed the front pair of moving figures with straight Cohe shots to the heart, then whirled to take out the third. His speed and accuracy were impressive.
“Not bad,” Basher offered.
Nick shook his head. “You or I could make those kind of head-on shots with a little training. Let’s see what he can do with a curved beam.”
Binary Storm Page 14
