The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  Which was good—because the extraction team didn’t want them looking up to see Mito appearing out of thin air, nor down the hallway as Bodhi slipped out of the hub.

  Bodhi casually gleamed up a wall until he was coasting forward with his back to the ceiling. He went unnoticed when a large group of heavily-armed reinforcements turned the corner and ran up the hall toward the hangar bay. They didn’t concern him; Bodhi was interested in the one man going in the opposite direction.

  He came running into the hallway so fast he nearly got bowled over by the reinforcements, had to hug the wall to let them by.

  “Keychain is right on schedule,” Bodhi said, notifying the team.

  Mr. Keychain wasn’t heavily armed, and he wasn’t the sort to head toward the sound of explosions. No, Keychain was making a break for the safety of the elevator, and Bodhi needed to hitch a ride. Bodhi was quiet against the ceiling as Keychain ran under him to reach the T at the end of the hallway. He ran his security badge over the reader.

  Then Mito’s clock dropped to zero.

  The sound of automatic fire erupted from inside the hangar bay.

  Unfortunately, while Keychain was an integral member of the extraction team he never had the wherewithal to hit the floor fast enough when bullets started ripping holes in the hallway’s walls and pierced the sheet metal of the elevator’s doors. He also never bothered looking back but crawled through the elevator doors as they opened, ran his badge over yet another reader on the inside and frantically hit the down button the moment it came to life.

  Because he never looked back, he never noticed Bodhi standing in the middle of the hallway. He let out a groan and wiggled a bit. Had there not been far too much gunfire to hear, there would have been a sound like a buck fifty in quarters dropping to the floor as the bullets Bodhi had just intercepted on Keychain’s unknowing behalf fell off him.

  Death, even from friendly fire, was something the team couldn’t let happen tonight.

  Bodhi glanced back into the open hangar to catch a brief glimpse of Mito running past, bullets eating up the floors and walls around him as he went.

  After the explosions were detonated on each side of the hangar, Mito had dropped into the center of The Cell’s main cluster of armed guards as they surrounded the support staff. They hadn’t missed him hiding above them out of a failure to check the ceiling, but rather because Mr. Clean had waited until they were focused on the explosions to teleport him inside.

  Now, Mito was making a casual, albeit lengthy, show of disabling The Cell’s surface manpower. He looked . . . well . . . like a modern-day ninja, but that was the perception they were going for.

  Depending on how long any of The Cell’s agents remained conscious, they were about to have the most one-sided fight of their lives. With an active alien implant hidden beneath his gear, Mito didn’t need any of the equipment he was carrying nor did he need to dodge the bullets they were sending his way.

  This was all about appearances—until the time was right.

  Mito knew the choreography of this dance. His job was to keep everyone on the surface fighting a battle they believed could be won for as long as possible. He made no definitive show of his strength or resilience—though some of his escapades neared the inhuman line. His opponents fired when and where Mito knew they would. So, Mito made it appear that he went about the whole affair moving out of the line of fire just in time, before moving in to engage one or two of the men in close quarters combat.

  In the heat of combat, the men Mito tranqed wouldn’t realize he’d been predicting their movements unless they got a chance to review the footage.

  With places to go and people to see, Bodhi turned away from Mito’s theatrics and back to the elevator. He pulled a thin flat crowbar from a belt strapped to his thigh and slipped it between the doors. A moment later he gleamed down the shaft wall and caught up to the elevator car. As it reached bottom, he hovered over the elevator’s ceiling hatch and checked the countdown displaying on his HUD.

  He heard Mr. Keychain scamper out. A few seconds later there were other sounds, a heavy armored panel sliding open, a couple of confirmation beeps from electronic equipment, and then came his signal to move. It began as a vibration that shook enough of the nearby area that he could see the dust shiver on the elevator’s roof. It was caused by a lift system that had just begun the process of raising a no-nonsense sized blast door a few feet outside the elevator.

  Bodhi temporarily disabled the gleamer ring in the sole of one boot, kicked in the ceiling hatch, and dropped into the elevator.

  Everything in the tunnel was coated in the angry red of the emergency lights. Mr. Keychain whirled around to gawk at Bodhi standing in the elevator as the massive blast door slowly made its way up. The look on Keychain’s face was priceless. Behind his mask, Bodhi mimed the man’s expression as it went from ‘No! The timing. How could I be so unlucky?’ To the far more terrified, ‘Dear god, luck has nothing to do with it!’

  “How?” Keychain squeaked as his hand went for his gun.

  “Yeah, ya been setup, brah,” Bodhi said, already zigzagging his way forward.

  Mr. Keychain was an analyst. The Cell didn’t keep him around because of any skill he possessed with the weapon he carried. Bodhi didn’t need bulletproof skin, superhuman speed, or the gleamers to outmaneuver him. Just like Mito, he already knew how many shots the man would get off and precisely where he didn’t want to be if he wished to avoid them.

  A moment later, another tranq cartridge dropped from the injector beneath Bodhi’s wrist. He set Mr. Keychain down and unclipped a small pager-like device from the man’s belt. As he leaned over him, he checked his HUD just in time to see Perth and Tam’s next event timer hit zero.

  He leaned over Keychain protectively, closed his eyes, and covered his ears.

  A loud crash followed, sending a cloud of displaced dust out of the elevator shaft as the car imploded behind him. Bodhi opened one eye in time to see a large metal nut roll past him on the cement floor.

  “Elevator is officially out of commission,” Perth said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE TWO AUSSIES weren’t light on their feet. Seeing as that was the case, almost every part Tam and Perth had to play in tonight’s plan was loud and explosive.

  Their landing had been inelegant by design.

  As the primary point of entry for the entire facility, that elevator was where The Cell’s surface reinforcements would eventually try to enter. The one thing the extraction team didn’t need this evening was more goons shooting at them. Taking the elevator out now ensured that they only needed to deal with the manpower The Cell already had on hand below the surface.

  For the sake of killing two birds with one stone, they’d had Mr. Clean transport the two large Australians in at the highest point in the shaft. Tam and Perth then dropped like anvils. Upon landing they arrived a few feet from their destination while simultaneously putting the elevator out of commission.

  “Well, look at that. Kid didn’t blow it,” Perth said to Tam as they strode out over the remains of the flattened elevator. “Guess someone owes me fifty bucks.”

  “Get stuffed,” Tam said. “Night ain’t over.”

  Bodhi shook his head. Though honestly, that they were betting on tonight’s outcome and that Tam had bet against him wasn’t the least bit surprising.

  As they joined him, the two looked like SWAT lumberjacks, each dressed head to toe in black but carrying a stack of long alien steel bars over one shoulder. They also each carried a duffel bag that looked like a snake who’d swallowed a meal too large for comfort.

  As they set the bags down gently on either side of the tunnel, Bodhi pulled the unconscious man out of the way. Tam and Perth needed the space—the stack of alien steel they had carried in on their shoulders was a some-assembly-required sort of project.

  Security systems are functionally simple. They let the right people in and keep the wrong people out. As a rule, their most exploitable
weakness is the so called right people—the folks with the keys and codes to bypass all the obstacles meant to keep the wrong people out.

  This evening Bodhi and his allies were the wrong people and the obstacle in front of them was a real bummer: A man trap.

  A man trap functions a lot like an air lock. In this case, two blast doors placed in tandem within a tunnel. Getting the next door open meant that one of them would have to step between the doors. There, a pressure plate built into the floor would detect weight, and signal door one to close and lock.

  Only after door one was back in place would the system confirm that the weight of whoever stood on the plate matched the person who had activated the elevator in the first place. If one was keeping up, this all meant that Bodhi only got the chance to try bypassing door two if the weight matched Mr. Keychain. If the weight didn’t match—Bodhi would be—well—a man . . . trapped . . . between two blast doors. It wasn’t just a clever name.

  In The Never, the man trap hadn’t seemed like much of a problem during their first encounter. After all, they literally had superpowers and given enough time and motivation they could simply muscle their way past both doors. Perth and Tamsworth’s shadows had been quick to reach this conclusion. So, Bodhi watched while the two played bulls and rammed their shoulders against the first door.

  They were right, forcing their way through wasn’t a problem, but as soon as they did so, the entire tunnel had begun to collapse. Bodhi had crushed his portal stone while buried under six stories of cement and dirt.

  Lesson learned.

  Turned out, architecture was one of the reasons Jonathan and the alien were taken to this location. Designed during the cold war, the facility’s top priority was keeping secrets contained. This was tantamount to the safety of any occupants, friend or foe, should the facility come under siege.

  Much to the extraction team’s annoyance, each wing inside the facility was built with a single point of entry and similar safeguards in place. That said, if the facility was a castle this tunnel was the drawbridge.

  And Keychain . . . well, when he woke up he’d find out he’d unknowingly been the guy who lowered the bridge for invaders. In order to open door one of the man trap, facial recognition had to match the face of the man stepping off the elevator to the ID of the badge that had activated the console in the first place. A confirmed match initiated the first door’s identity checks, and an armored panel on the door moved aside to reveal two biometric scanners: retinal and palm print.

  Mr. Clean had already tapped into the hub on the upper level to make sure that—amongst a number of things their team didn’t want The Cell seeing—the camera on the elevator never showed Bodhi, Perth or Tam following Keychain into the tunnel. Once he’d passed the retinal and palm scan, Bodhi had put him to sleep.

  Perth and Tam had arrived while door one was still on its way up.

  Now, they had to activate the pressure plate and wait for the man trap to relock that door. If the weight of the man inside matched Keychain, a second panel on the second door would open to reveal a numeric entry pad. At the same time, a short-range radio signal emitted from door two activated the device Bodhi had taken off Mr. Keychain’s belt a moment earlier. Said device would then display a twelve-digit code to be entered into the panel.

  Unfortunately, said code was always evolving based on an algorithm. Each time the device synced with the door, the code that was generated only had a twenty second shelf life.

  Had Keychain not been there to help, the extraction team would have needed to bring along a stand-in for his physical appearance, retinal pattern, and palm print. They would have needed to match his weight as well as stolen his code generating device late enough in the day that it wouldn’t be reported stolen before they made their move.

  Anthony and the rest of extraction team found the whole ordeal was far less labor intensive if they simply singled out a person with access and timed their arrivals accordingly. Thus, Keychain had become an essential member of the team.

  Mr. Clean had designed the bars that Perth and Tam carried to fit together like Lincoln logs. Still, the two were practiced at getting them assembled in under forty-five seconds. Perth laying out the pieces as Tam followed along from joint to joint with a powered driver. The finished product looked like they had stolen a section of metal fencing from someone’s yard.

  Most of the design was kindergarten simple, as its main function was to hold up the weight of the blast doors while still allowing Tam and Perth enough space to squeeze through with the bulging duffel bags. However, the bottom tips of the door brace were crafted with greater attention to detail as each had to match individual locking mechanisms in the floor.

  When the two Australians were ready, Bodhi hoisted the unconscious Keychain over his shoulders. He didn’t cross the threshold of door one by way of the floor—the pressure plate would have detected that even if he crossed with the gleamers. Instead, he gleamed in along the surface of the wall and came to a stop at the second door. Glancing back, Perth and Tam gave a thumbs up, and so he eased Mr. Keychain on to the floor.

  Blast door one began lowering back into position as the weight was detected, and Tam and Perth carefully positioned the door brace into place. When the door made contact, its weight pushed the five keys at the bottom of each leg into place. There was a loud click, and a moment later, the code entry panel on the second door slid open.

  Hanging upside down, directly over the unconscious Keychain, a small beep reported that the pager he’d borrowed had synced with door two. After all that, Bodhi always found the beep so anti-climactic. He’d come to remedy this by playing the 8-bit music from the end of every Super Mario Bros. level in his head as he typed in the twelve-digit code.

  He stopped, finger hovering over the entry key. Took a long breath in some attempt to exhale all the irrational fear that came. A little voice in his head worrying that this time—when there were no do-overs—the code panel would report the key invalid. He hit enter. There was a pause. The few seconds were as long as they had always been, but tonight Bodhi felt they surely took longer than usual—in fact, just long enough to let Bodhi’s stupid superstitious nerves increase his stupid superstitious blood pressure.

  Finally, a loud click came as the second door’s locks disengaged and, slowly, the massive doors began to rise.

  Perth and Tam grabbed their duffel bags. They stepped through the bars, and Tam quickly moved Keychain to safety along the edge of the tunnel.

  Not having any pressing responsibilities for the next few seconds, Bodhi turned himself face up against the top of the tunnel and watched the door disappear into the ceiling as it slowly rose. Below him, he heard Tam and Perth go to work. Steel sliding over steel, interlocking and clicking into place Their quick practiced hands each working with efficiency to assemble their individual mechanical monstrosities.

  Bodhi had come to find the sounds rather soothing.

  At least until enough of Tam and Perth became visible to Olivia’s men waiting on the other side.

  If The Cell ever actually gave them a chance to surrender, Bodhi never heard it. He imagined that they must have yelled something like freeze or down on the ground from the other side of the tunnel, but the barking walrus alarm grew to full volume as that second door opened. Maybe they said it, maybe they didn’t, but the moment The Cell’s heavily armed agents on the other side got a good look at Tam and Perth they didn’t wait to see if the two were considering complying.

  Benson’s report of what happened in the tunnel would be largely the same as all the other men who had been standing beside him that night.

  They were following their reaction strategy, exactly as they had practiced in drills over the last two days. Like many others, if the upper hangar’s alarm was triggered, Benson was to be suited, armed, and ready to report to the main tunnel. On arrival, they fanned out to stay out of one another’s line of fire.

  Until an order said otherwise, they were to hold their positions w
ith guns trained on whatever came down that tunnel. Their radios weren’t working, but word had come down that one of the camera feeds showed an analyst above had made a break for the elevator. Clearly, trying to get behind the safety of the doors rather than get into an encounter with whoever was attacking the hangar.

  Thing was, no one was ready to trust that there was only a friendly on the other side. In another minute and thirty seconds, the facilities lock down procedures would have rendered those doors impossible to open from the outside—even with proper clearance.

  Benson’s Commanding Officer must have had better visibility of the situation, because by the time the door was just halfway up, he’d already heard the order to fire. There was a great deal of urgency in his tone as his CO yelled loud enough to be certain he was heard throughout the tunnel and over the alarm.

  So, like everyone else, Benson had unleashed hell. There was so much gun fire in that narrow tunnel that there could have been a small army on the other side of that door and not a single man would have escaped being mowed down. Yet, by the time he was reloading, the door was three fourths of the way up, and the situation had become as clear to Benson as it had his CO.

  In the red glow of the emergency lights, there only appeared to be two men. He couldn’t see them well, as they were standing behind the sort of transparent shields one generally saw police in riot gear carrying. Except—these shields had an open port near their center.

  That was when Benson realized what his CO already had. In that open port on each shield, there was a familiar disk of steel, and it was beginning to turn clockwise.

  The deafening sound of two M134 Miniguns opened fire in unison.

  Some froze up for a moment, but most of the men on Benson’s side of the tunnel dropped formation. They hit the floor or dove for cover as they realized what had been unleashed. In the dim red light of the tunnel, Benson remembered thinking the orange fire erupting from the barrels was almost pretty.