Assault or Attrition

by Blake Northcott

  If Valeriya was revealing herself now, it could only mean one thing: her opening act had had drawn to a close. This was the onset of phase two, and whatever she had planned, it was going to be a game-changer. She wanted me in the front row, eyes forward, and she had my full attention.

  “No need for introductions,” I replied. “I know who you are.”

  “And you already know why I am here, and what I want.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “It was you. The Kashstarter campaign.”

  Her face didn’t reveal a single tell. She just stared up at me, unflinching. “What makes you think that?”

  “The words that Astrid Neve used in the video, the terms she used...you wrote that speech for her.” I’d recognized a similar tone and inflection during Valeriya’s powerful speech that she delivered just prior to the Arena Mode tournament, condemning the values of the Western world, and calling out the tyranny of capitalism. Her iTube video following the event was just as biting, and equally eloquent. “Not to mention the clothes.” I flicked my eyes to her designer jacket and matching boots.

  “The clothes?” She asked.

  “I know the Taktarov family background. You’re the orphaned daughter of poor farmers. Either you hit the lottery, or you’re using some of that Kashstarter money to finance a new wardrobe.” Brynja had replicated a number of similar garments using our 3D printer over the last three months. I recognized the designs because I frequently found them scattered around the fortress. I was hardly an expert when it came to fashion, but I could spot the difference between a four-thousand dollar jacket and a cheap knock-off that was stitched together by slave laborers.

  “Are you, the richest man in the world, going to lecture me about my lifestyle? About excess?” Valeriya’s words poured out like venom, although she didn’t seem angry, or even annoyed. I couldn’t read a single emotion by studying her face.

  “So why not just do it yourself?” I asked. “Taktarov’s only living relative, asking for revenge? That’s strong motivation to rally support.”

  “Sympathy for a poor little Russian girl who misses her brother?” She nearly laughed at the notion. “That will move a few – some who are easily swayed, with soft hearts. What I required was an army. For that type of commitment I needed a common enemy.”

  It was a brilliant strategy. Nothing brings people together faster than mutual hatred. I still wasn’t buying her reasoning, through. She could have recorded the video herself, and was more than capable of delivering a powerful address. “It seems like being on-camera yourself would have had more impact. Why not just tell everyone that Sergei was The Chosen One and that I was the bad guy?”

  Valeriya’s tiny lips twitched at the edges, hinting that she was about to crack a knowing smile. She resisted the urge. “I needed someone without an attachment to Sergei. Someone to plant the seeds. The world is angrier than they have ever been, and slowly, they are readying themselves. In a few moments when I release my new video, they will see who I truly am, and they will finally be prepared for what I am about to become.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and smiled. A calculated smile, wide and condescending. It was in my best interest to keep her talking. The more she said, the more I could learn. I knew Valeriya wouldn’t tip her hand, or reveal anything she didn’t want me to know until the time was right, although I could sense her opening up. I was hoping for a slip and if I kept pressing, I might be able to rattle her. “And what will you ‘become’, Valeriya?”

  She paused for a moment, as if giving my question some genuine thought. “A messenger. Like Joan of Arc.”

  “So you’re becoming a bipolar egomaniac with a God complex?”

  “No,” she replied calmly, unfazed by my verbal jab. “I will be an inspiration, just as she was. When Joan of Arc heard the voice of The Almighty and passed on his message, the people listened. She was able to lift the spirits of an entire nation with nothing more than her words. France was losing the war to England, with little hope of turning the tide. She re-energized an army that changed history.”

  This was getting ridiculous – she had to be screwing with me. “People were idiots back then. Some farm girl claimed that god was speaking through her and everyone just blindly accepted it. You think this shit will work now?”

  “How are things any different?” she asked, without a trace of irony. “Five centuries have passed and nothing has changed. People are sad, broken. They are crushed beneath an oppressive leadership that barely allows them basic necessities. Yet they remain credulous and devout, even as their prayers go unanswered.” She lowered her voice and stepped forward, pressing her palms flat against the blast door. “They are going to believe me because they want to believe me. They needed someone like my brother, and now, with the only person he speaks through, they will have faith once more. Something worth fighting for.”

  I laughed, loud and caustic. “So this is your play? I refuse to come outside, and you leak a video claiming that you speak to your dead brother – a ‘god’? Gather as many fanatics as you want, you’ll never get to me.” She certainly knew her history, but not much about state-of-the-art architecture. This steel and iridium plated fortress could withstand a full assault from an actual army – her Red Army, which was no more than a few belligerent idiots armed with pistols and rifles, had no way of breeching my security. Trying to shoot her way in with ancient machine guns would be like trying to dismantle a tank with plastic forks.

  “You believe that you are safe inside of Cameron Frost’s fortress?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

  I nodded confidently. “Yup. Pretty confident.” Even if she released her statement and it inspired more dissidents to gather – which felt like a long shot – it wouldn’t have changed the fact that she’d have to get inside the fortress before the authorities arrived. She had three hours, max, and then she’d be hauled away in handcuffs, along with her gang of hired thugs.

  “Perhaps you are safe. For now. But your friends, your family...they are on the outside.” She spread her hands and gestured around, to nowhere in particular. “Not quite as safe out here, I would assume.”

  A painful knot twisted into my stomach. I knew what she was implying, but I couldn’t believe she would be willing to go that far. “If you have something to say, just say it.” I needed to hear the words out loud.

  She glanced over her shoulder towards one of the hunters – a tall, stocky man with a serious looking beard. He jerked the sleeve away from his wrist and tapped his wrist-com, projecting a small holo-screen into the air.

  “Would you like to see someone you love suffer? See them die, the way my brother died at your hands?” Her icy demeanor was melting away. I could see the fury in her eyes, like crackling embers about to burst into flame. The unnerving transformation set my teeth on edge.

  I held up my hands. “Look, I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not too late. We can—”

  “It is too late,” she shouted, hammering her palms into the glass. “Much, much too late. For my brother, and for you. Come out here, right now, or he dies.”

  The holo-screen flickered into focus, revealing my brother-in-law, Gary. Bound, gagged, bleeding from a gash across his eyebrow. A masked man stood behind him, holding a syringe to his neck, with his thumb poised to press down on the plunger.

  I froze. I wasn’t angry, or afraid – at least not in that moment. I just kept rolling the same thought over in my head: this was some kind of a trick. It had to be. A virtual masking program meant to create the illusion that one of the kindest, most selfless people on this dying planet was about to die himself.

  “You have nothing to say?” She asked innocently. “Perhaps he would like to say something. To beg for his life.”

  The man standing guard ripped off his gag. Gary let out a hoarse cough, dotting the camera lens with blood. “Don’t come out,” he shouted. “They’ll kill us both. Take care of the kids an—”

  His final words were muffled b
y the gloved hand of his captor, cranking his head back as the syringe plunged into his neck. The jade-colored liquid disappeared from the barrel, filling Gary’s bloodstream. The effect was instantaneous. His body convulsed violently, then stiffened. It happened so fast that he didn’t even scream. The whites of Gary’s eyes turned a sickly shade of green, and two sizzling streams of acid dripped from his tear ducts, running down his cheeks. It was over before his captor could pull the empty syringe from his neck.

  “More humane than the way you killed my brother, was it not?” Valeriya waved her henchman off with the flick of her gloved hand. He stepped back obediently, terminating the holo-screen transmission. “It was you, was it not? The one who decided that this was the way that Sergei should die?”

  I gazed, unblinking, into her crystal eyes. The gravity of the situation was still sinking in.

  Valeriya stared back at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she was trying to solve a puzzle. “This upsets you, but it is not the type of pain I was hoping for. You are concerned, for your sister and her children, perhaps. Sad for their loss.” She shook her head, as if disappointed by my reaction. “It will take more to convince you to give yourself up. I see this now. Maybe whoever is coming back in your jet.”

  Her words snapped me out of my daze.

  Peyton, Valentina and Mac. They were on their way here. Right now.

  “I can see the gears moving,” she said calmly. “It is written all over your face. Do you leave your family and friends out in the world, exposed, and hope they can hide from us? Maybe, but I do not think so. You are calculated and require control. You want them here where you can watch them, protect them...but you cannot open the doors without letting us in. And if the jet is close enough, we have a solution.”

  With those words, her second guards – a tall bearded man who looked more or less like his counterpart – stepped forward. He removed his glove, revealing a white-hot glowing palm. He extended it towards a towering pine tree in the distance and fired, slicing it in half with a plasma bolt.

  “Not enough to break down your castle,” she said, “but a powerful enough to destroy an incoming jet, perhaps.”

  I turned and walked away, triggering the massive blast doors to slide shut behind me.

  Valeriya shouted a few final words as I left. She wished me luck, and that I was going to need it. And she let me know that it was just a matter of time before she found her way inside. By assault or attrition, she promised that this siege was going to end – and that the body count was going to start piling up.

  I didn’t reply. I wanted her to think that she’d defeated me, crushed my spirits – so it was important to give her the last word. Without knowing it she’d given me just a little too much information. I had my next move planned before the doors rumbled closed.

  Peyton said I was the same person after leaving The Arena, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’d seen death. I’d experienced suffering. And when Cameron Frost threatened my friends, backing me into a corner, I learned something about who I am: that I’ll do a hell of a lot more to protect the people I love than I will to protect myself.

  Gary’s death gutted me out. It destroyed a small part of me to watch the man my sister dedicated her life to, and the father of the two most amazing kids in the world, die so needlessly.

  His death was going to mean something. I would make sure of it.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Swing around to the north end,” I shouted into my wrist-com.

  “Copy that,” Mac replied, his voice trembling. Valeriya’s henchmen had already opened fire, pocking the fuselage of the jet with a handful of bullets. A slug cracked the cockpit window and I heard Peyton scream.

  The jet circled around the fortress, hovering low into the tree line.

  The gunmen were standing on the runway, blocking the main hangar. As far as they knew it was the only place to dock an aircraft, so I’m sure they were surprised when the G12 passed overhead, and prepared to land in a small secondary hangar that was embedded into the side of the fortress, inaccessible by foot.

  They scrambled to reload their weapons as the doors cracked open. Only a narrow thicket separated the jet and the shooters, and the ice-covered pines weren’t providing much cover.

  The hangar doors opened at a glacial pace, drifting apart as a hail of bullets pounded the side of the hovering aircraft.

  “Think you can open these doors any slower?” Mac screamed. “I’m getting hammered out here!” The aircraft was bullet resistant, but it wasn’t designed for combat; it certainly couldn’t take much more of the punishment that two military-grade machine guns were dishing out, unloading their clips in rapid succession.

  “Something’s wrong,” I replied frantically. “They should be opening faster. I think the gears are frozen.”

  “We’re aborting,” Mac announced, pulling the jet out of position.

  “Do it,” I shouted. My eyes were glued to the monitor, and I watched as the craft ascended and cleared the tree line. “Get to safety and we’ll make a new plan.”

  It was a second too late.

  Valeriya’s superhuman had fired a beam of energy from his hand, slicing off the jet’s right engine in a fiery blaze, along with the wing. The aircraft fell into a flat spin.

  As the remains spiralled towards the ground a secondary explosion detonated, littering the forest floor with fragments of charred metal.

  Welcome back, TheRealMox! You have ... one ... new message in your Private Hive.

  P!nkM0nst3r: How was that?

  TheRealMox: great, if they were listening in i’m sure they bought it

  P!nkM0nst3r: I thought the scream was a nice touch. :)

  TheRealMox: very realistic. Mac could use some acting lessons though

  P!nkM0nst3r: How long is this tunnel? We’ve been walking for ten minutes.

  TheRealMox: i’m coming down to meet you

  Valeriya was brilliant, but you can’t fight biology – she was still just a kid. She was impulsive, and couldn’t resist the urge to show off her henchman’s superpower, taunting me like a child wielding her father’s gun.

  Valeriya knew my private jet was on its way back, and that I wouldn’t turn it away. She was right: I wanted my friends here. I wanted them safe, inside Fortress 23 where I could protect them. She was desperate to take out the aircraft in mid-flight, twisting yet another knife into my gut. Hurting the people I care about was her most effective weapon, and unlike Cameron Frost – who in retrospect, had a shred of humanity – she had no qualms about pulling the trigger.

  Not to mention that destroying my shiny new G12, a symbol of decadence for the ultra-privileged, would undoubtedly make a bold statement to her followers. I was, after all, not just ‘The God Slayer’; ever since winning the Arena Mode tournament I was one of the elite. I represented everything the poor and the middle-class despised...everything that I despised, to be honest. I hadn’t even been wealthy long enough for the irony to sink in.

  My plan was simple enough: have Mac fly in low beneath the tree line, and hover to a stop a few kilometers south of the fortress. It was a location by a small frozen river at the edge of the forest – right at the entrance of the South Tunnel.

  It turns out that the long underground pathway I had discovered, which was protected by a circular steel door, led to the mouth of a narrow cave. London had been very helpful in uncovering its mysteries. The entrance to the South Tunnel, on the far wall of the cavern, just appeared to be stone from the outside. But with a few voice-activated keywords the hidden door rumbled open, revealing the long narrow path back to the fortress. Like the castle escapes of medieval times, Frost had included a similar feature here in Fortress 23, so in case of emergency you could get to safety on foot, escaping into a remote part of the forest completely undetected. We were just using the tunnel in reverse.

  Getting Mac, Valentina and Peyton to safety was phase one, and it was the easiest part of the plan. The second part relied on our
wrist-com conversation – the one that continued as the jet was being flown directly into the line of fire. Valeriya was leaving nothing to chance, which meant that she was almost certainly monitoring all incoming and outgoing transmissions. I’d bet the house on it. And if she was listening in, I had to give her a realistic enough reason to have the jet hover just a few hundred feet from her gunmen, giving them a nice big target to shoot at.

  Remote piloting the jet from the South Tunnel, Mac was able to move it into position, and the only thing left was the voice acting (I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare, but even under the circumstances I thought he was phoning it in.)

  Letting her superhuman lackey slice the jet down with a plasma bolt was the final phase of the plan. I knew that it would be a spectacular wreck, but the secondary explosion was just a happy coincidence. With that much damage, it would take days to sift through the remains, if they even bothered to do so. They wouldn’t locate any bodies at the disaster site, but after crash like that I don’t know if they’d expect to.

  Either way, my friends were safe, and I’d bought a little time. At least enough for the authorities to arrive and arrest Valeriya and her mercenaries.

  I took the main elevator down to Sub Level 7 with Chandler in tow. We circled the stark white hallways until we reached the entrance to the tunnel where Valentina, Mac and Peyton had just emerged, pushing the heavy vault door closed behind them.

  Peyton rushed towards me and threw her arms around my neck, burying her face in my shoulder. The smell of her skin, the wave of pink hair brushing my face as we embraced – it was a time machine. I closed my eyes and I was back in The Fringe, walking through the front door of Excelsior Retro Comics with the bright morning sunlight streaming in behind me. She would always run to greet me, even if she was in mid-sentence chatting with a customer. For a second I could almost smell the burnt orange carpeting; the ragged eyesore that we all begged Gavin to replace, but he never did. It reminded him of a simpler time. If there was anything I could relate to it was the powerful allure of nostalgia; how an object, even something that was seemingly trivial, could take you back to someplace special. Someplace that you wished could be preserved forever in a pristine collector case, shiny and new; never to age, or change, or be ravaged by time. But now, that special place exists only in your memory. I’d always used my comic collection for that very same purpose, though I’d never experienced it while holding onto a person.