They had no idea how many were already lost. It was conceivable that Jonathan and the alien were already the only targets of The Cell’s investigation whose whereabouts remained known.
Finally, Olivia came through the door sweeping into the command center with her usual look of detachment. Seemingly immune as she passed several agents in communication with arms all around the country, the cacophony of voices all carrying some range of growing panic.
“When did the first report come in?” she asked.
“Fifteen minutes ago,” Rivers said. “Ten men confirmed so far . . .”
Rivers paused, seeing that one of the analysts was trying to get his attention, shaking her head from across the room.
“. . . Eleven confirmed disappearances.”
Olivia’s fist tightened.
Finally, she turned to the room, her voice raised to carry over all the chatter. “Give the order, all teams are to move on their subjects effective immediately. No delays, I don’t care if the subject is standing in the middle of a packed stadium. I want them in custody now!”
The room grew quiet as they listened, but the chatter erupted the moment she was done speaking.
Olivia grabbed Rivers by the arm and led him away to a private corner.
“The subjects aren’t the only ones missing,” Rivers said.
“What?” Olivia asked.
“The other roommate, Jonathan’s mother, and Mr. Silva,” Rivers said. “The men making sure they didn’t leave the premises confirmed a few minutes ago. The house is empty.”
To Rivers, Olivia looked as though she could melt steel with her eyes. All anyone else in the room saw was her listening to him and taking longer, heavier breaths than usual. Then something took over her expression, as though she’d realized something that took her eyes to the nearest clock.
“Dammit, he knew,” Olivia said.
“Ma’am?”
“I waited too long. But the moment I’d made a decision, I was pulled away by the onset of this catastrophe,” Olivia said. “The sixth cycle just ended.”
“Sixth cycle?” Rivers asked, at a loss for what she was going on about. “Ma’am I don’t . . .”
“Later, Rivers,” Olivia said, resolve setting in her features. “Get Harrison’s team on the line, I want Tibbs brought here now.”
Bodhi was the last recruit Anthony had added to the extraction team. He was also the youngest living owner of an alien implant from Heyer’s entire roster.
He didn’t have an exceptional compatibility to his device, nor any deep wells of tactical know-how to contribute. He only had one skill set that, it had turned out, was a close approximation to what the team needed.
Why did he have that skill set? Well, Bodhi’s mother was partially to blame.
Having seen too many kids with broken bones, she’d forbidden him from owning a skateboard growing up. Like most children, outlawing a thing only made him fixate on it. His mother didn’t cave until his fifteenth birthday.
Of course, the first time she saw him ride the skateboard, he was a little too good at it. She was no fool, he wasn’t a prodigy—he’d been finding ways to practice for years and hiding it from her. When there was no point left in denying it, he confessed he’d found ways. He’d made friends at the local skate parks. Friends who were sometimes willing to let him borrow a board.
The signs had always been there. Bodhi’s obsession with the skating phenomenon of the eighties and nineties was a bit too long lived for a teenager to have sustained without a real connection to the sport.
It started with Marty McFly on a hoverboard, Josh Brolin in Thrashin’, Christian Slater in Gleaming the Cube. Eventually, he’d been a junkie for the entire subculture. The baggy clothes, the skate or die video games, and all the anti-establishment rhetoric that seemed to follow. Before long it wasn’t just skating but the entire adrenaline junkie lifestyle. A California kid, his hobbies soon included surfing and snowboarding. He couldn’t afford skydiving but . . . well, all that was before Heyer came along.
Anyhow, these were some of the reasons Bodhi blinked into existence hanging an inch and a half below the hangar’s ceiling.
“Stealth Hover Ninja deployed,” he whispered into his communicator while checking the countdown clock displayed inside his mask. “Operation commencing in T-minus 3 . . . 2 . . .”
He went silent and pushed away from a nearby rafter without ever actually touching it. This began a smooth practiced slide down the underside of the curved roof.
The agents below weren’t going to glance up over the next few seconds. Had they, Bodhi would have looked something like a square of butter sliding down the inside of a hot pan. His defiance of gravity was due to an equilibrium of opposing forces that simultaneously pulled him toward and pushed him away from the ceiling’s surface.
Bodhi called it, gleaming.
The necessary hardware was built into his gear. The gleamers consisted of a network of rings, most of them small and no more exciting to look at than a metal washer. Some were sewn into the fingertips and knuckles of his gloves, the majority ran along his back, arms, and legs in rows. The rest of the rings were larger, similar in size to MiniDVDs, and placed in tactical locations like his suit’s elbows and knee guards, his shoulder blades, the palms of his gloves and the soles of his shoes. Lastly, they were stitched into his mask at his forehead and over the back of his skull.
Mr. Clean had adapted the tech from the Borealis’ libraries into wearable equipment. Initially, Bodhi had been given a far more modest prototype, only meant to allow him to slide quickly across a surface. Around the same time, Mr. Clean had also given him a basic tutorial of the science involved.
Bodhi had humored the bald cartoon, politely nodding at all the right moments, but luckily, Anthony hadn’t brought him in because he needed to comprehend advanced theoretical physics. While Bodhi left Mr. Clean’s tutorial without the foggiest clue how the rings worked, he had an intimate grasp of what they were capable of—and a lot of ideas about what else he could do with them.
During the lecture Mr. Clean kept referring to the rings as Polarity Modification Stabilizers. This was a mouthful to say, but Bodhi only had to hear Mr. Clean utter the phrase ‘get into your PMS gear’ once before renaming them. After a few long hours of practice, and the addition of Bodhi’s creative input, the two found that the gear could be the solution to a few other obstacles.
At first Bodhi and Mr. Clean both had a steep learning curve.
Bodhi having to adapt his body to a new reality in terms of balance while mastering the subtle art of the throttle and brake rings, which were the functional equivalent of the gleamers’ push and pull. Meanwhile, Mr. Clean monitored his movements and reprogrammed the smaller rings to adapt to whatever he threw at them. Over the course of two days, Bodhi and Mr. Clean had tuned the gear via a process mostly composed of watching Bodhi repeatedly ‘eating it big time,’ re-calibrating, and trying again.
Looking down on the hangar, Bodhi gleamed silently to the floor unnoticed by The Cell’s operatives. Luck had nothing to do with this. After enough practice runs in The Never, he knew exactly where to be and what choreographed route to follow.
A moment before his foot came to hover over the floor, he glanced at the Heads-up Display inside his mask. The HUD showed a list of countdowns on the left side of his vision. This was how he knew, in exactly a minute and a half, Beo would finish disabling the exterior guards. In a minute and forty-three seconds, Mr. Clean would cut the hangar’s primary power. Then, in two minutes and thirty seconds, Mito would start an epically distracting ruckus amongst the agents.
But, at the top of the list of countdowns was the one most important to Bodhi. The one that said he would be in position in precisely one minute and thirty seconds. The remainder of the night’s festivities would rapidly deteriorate for the rest of the extraction team if he weren’t.
That was fine, everyone loves being the first real point of failure in a critical mission. No pres
sure at all.
Bodhi flicked his hand at a metal beam lining the wall, turned his palm just so, and sent himself gleaming sideways. A second later, he dropped flat to the floor, as he hovered past the strange lady who looked up from her monitor to crack her neck before starting a conversation with her rubber duck. Bodhi pushed himself back up into a crouch before he coasted to his next stop beside a stack of supply pallets.
The pallets were right off the side of the one hallway opening. A short distance down that hallway was the door to the hangar’s surface level surveillance hub.
Using the pallets for cover, Bodhi watched the seconds tick. Right on schedule, he heard a beep, followed by the click of a lock disengaging down the hall as Agent Kenmore slid his security badge past the reader.
Bodhi had long ago stopped thinking of this man as Agent Kenmore. With a rather begrudging respect, he’d come to think of Kenmore as Captain Paranoia, which he later shortened to el’ Capitán.
At the moment, el’ Capitán was carrying a hot cup of coffee in one hand and swiping his badge with the other. This forced him into elbowing the handle and shouldering his way through the door into the hub.
“I’m clocked in if you want to take fifteen,” el’ Capitán said to the woman inside, Bodhi mouthing along the words as he listened.
He took a few quick breaths to center himself as the man and woman exchanged pleasantries he’d heard a hundred times. Then came the moment when el’ Capitán held open the door for the woman as she left on her break.
Bodhi put his back to the pallet. And . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .
He shot up and over, back flipping over the pallet to land silently in a crouch, an inch off the floor in the hallway opening. This occurred just as the woman turned down the hallway in the opposite direction and el’ Capitán released the door.
He launched out of his crouch toward the hallway’s ceiling. This was followed by a series of forward thrusts and careful pivots that ricocheted him from wall to wall, then ceiling back to floor as he raced to beat the door. Inside the hub, el’ Capitán had his back to the hallway as he took his first look at the security monitors for the evening.
Bodhi shot in from the hallway—well, he cartwheeled in. The careful manipulation of the gleamers and a last second sucking in of his gut kept the door’s handle from clipping him as he swept past. As such, he successfully entered the room while el’ Capitán was still facing the opposite direction.
All that said, there was a reason Bodhi called him Captain Paranoia. Without fail, the security officer noticed something off when Bodhi gleamed inside. Maybe it was the draft he brought with him, or maybe the Captain’s subconscious told him he wasn’t alone, maybe he felt a disturbance in the force. Whatever the reason, Bodhi had never made it into the hub without setting off the man’s Spidey-sense.
The problem was that el’ Capitán never just let it go.
The man turned, staring suspiciously at the closed door. Then to the spot where Bodhi passed on his way in. By this point Bodhi was gleaming two inches under the ceiling, but el’ Capitán wasn’t going to shrug and walked away. No, for the next twelve and a half seconds, Bodhi was forced to perform a series of acrobatic maneuvers around a very modestly sized security room to keep the man’s stubborn paranoia from laying eyes on him.
El’ Capitán’s commitment to his gut instincts had given Bodhi new respect for just how long twelve seconds could feel. It was this begrudging respect that led Bodhi to put in a little extra effort, nudging el’ Capitán’s coffee cup an inch to the left on his desk as he passed by. If he didn’t, el’ Capitán would spill coffee all over his keyboard in a little less than a minute—and the man just didn’t deserve that on top of everything else that was going to happen to him tonight.
On the twelfth second, just as el’ Capitán turned to face the ceiling corner where Bodhi was balled into the smallest shape he could manage, Mr. Clean cut the hangar’s main power. The lights went out just in time to turn Bodhi into an indiscernible part of the darkness.
Startled, el’ Capitán stopped chasing ghosts around the office and ran back to the monitors. In his haste, his hip knocked into his chair, which in turn sent the chair into the desk. But due to Bodhi’s heroics a moment earlier, the coffee and keyboard were saved.
While the security got far more treacherous the farther they got into the Facility, the hangar’s surface was no simple obstacle.
Each of the systems had a fail-safe, and none could be brought down by something as trivial as a severed power line. While the lights went out temporarily, the cameras and the monitoring stations inside the hub remained functional via short-term battery power. This meant that visibility was never lost, inside or outside the facility, during the delay between a power outage and the generators kicking in.
When the generators kicked in and the backup lights came on, Bodhi kneeled upside down off the ceiling to watch the monitors over el’ Capitán’s shoulder. While the security officer was busy searching for what had caused the power outage, Bodhi was watching the feeds from the corridors far beneath the surface. A quick study showed Jonathan being escorted out of the prisoner containment shell and taken to Olivia’s control room.
This put a smile on his face. That this was happening told Bodhi that Jonathan had put all his pieces in motion successfully so far. It also meant that Bodhi and the rest of the team were heading down his preferred branch of possibilities for the rest of the evening.
A communication garbled by Mr. Clean’s interference came over el’ Capitán’s radio. Bodhi’s eyes turned to a monitor watching a guard standing beneath an awning outside.
“Fisher. Repeat. Did not receive,” el’ Capitán attempted to respond. “Fisher, where is Cooper? Not seeing him on the monitor . . . Fisher?”
A second later, el’ Capitán and Bodhi watched Fisher, aka Mr. Clown Shoes, disappear on the monitor. El’ Capitán never reacted to this as quickly as he should. Bodhi was sympathetic. He figured that if it were his first time seeing a giant hand appear out of thin air to drag Clown Shoes out of existence—he might need a few seconds to process it as well.
Patiently, Bodhi checked his HUD clock and waited for el’ Capitán’s hand to inch its way toward the alarm button. Meanwhile a slight glimmer, unnoticed by el’ Capitán, caught the light of the monitors as a translucent liquid thread of Mr. Clean snaked its way down the wall from a ventilation shaft.
Finally, el’ Capitán’ got a grip and slammed his palm down on the alarm. Half a second later everyone in the hangar jumped as the sound of a walrus barking blared from security sirens all over the facility. As that was happening, el’ Capitán’ licked his lips and reached for a rotary phone that looked like it had been installed before Bodhi was born. As he pulled the receiver to his ear, Bodhi heard the click of someone picking up the line on the other end.
Meanwhile, el’ Capitán’ reached for a device held onto his belt by a small carabiner. It was the size of a thumb drive and consisted of little more than one button and a display.
“Kenmore,” he said into the receiver as he peered down at the device to read a randomly generated passcode off the display, “7-C-9-F . . .”
With the barking alarm, Bodhi hadn’t been able to make out what the call’s recipient said the first seven times he got this far in The Never. Now he knew the whole conversation by heart.
“Voice confirmed, code confirmed,” said a computerized voice. Followed a second later by a human disguising himself with a modulator. “Report.”
“Sir, I think it is here. Command—”
That was as far as Bodhi let el’ Capitán get. It was one of the most curious and strangely time-specific items on his to-do list for the evening. He didn’t know who the man on the other end of the call was, all he knew was that if the man didn’t get to hear that much of the phone message, events further down the line didn’t go the way they’d have liked.
Bodhi’s hand grabbed el’ Capitán under the chin, ending the dialog, while his opposi
te wrist came into alignment with the surprised man’s neck. With a flick of his fist, a small-needled cartridge discharged from an apparatus strapped to the underside of Bodhi’s forearm and delivered a fast-acting dose of anesthesia. As soon as it was administered, a capsule dropped out of the chamber like a spent bullet casing and was quickly replaced with a fresh dose.
Now, television would have led Bodhi to believe that a hard knock to the back of el’ Capitán’s skull would render him conveniently unconscious with little more to fear than waking up with a headache. Anthony’s team had disillusioned him—the best-case scenario for most people after being knocked unconscious was to wake up with a minor concussion. The worst case was a tie between being left a vegetable and . . . well . . . dying.
So, they were taking down their targets with the tranqs. Mr. Clean had formulated a faster acting version of the same anesthesia that many of Heyer’s soon-to-be allies became familiar with the first time they made the alien’s acquaintance—Jonathan included.
As el’ Capitán’ went limp, Bodhi caught him by the collar and gently lowered him down into his chair. He flipped off the ceiling to the floor, picked up the phone and heard the modulated voice on the other end.
“Kenmore! Message incomplete. Repeat. What is happe—”
As Bodhi crushed the receiver in his palm, he watched Mr. Clean’s tentacle slither down the wall from an air vent and plug into the security system’s computers. Within seconds, a seamless change occurred on the monitors. Each screen showing a version of what it had been a moment earlier, only now it also contained—well, additional information.
Bodhi checked his timers, and took hold of the door handle to wait.
Perth and Tam’s voice came over the comm, one before the other, three seconds before their current clocks reached zero.
“Mark.”
“Mark.”
3 . . . 2 . . . 1
Explosions shook the hangar. Synced, they came from both sides of the building and left a hole to the outside in each wall. While the rubber duck lady hit the floor, the agents in the middle jumped to their feet as though they expected to find themselves standing between two tanks that had just simultaneously rammed through the hangar’s walls.
The Never Army Page 25
