Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Be pissed at me all you want,” she told him. “Better that than a cop going off like some half-cocked bullshit action hero. Or do you think you can rescue your cousin’s kid all by your lonesome self?”

  Hill’s fists clenched and unclenched a couple of times; his reds snapped and tangled with the blue of a police uniform. The blue won.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Zockinski?” Hill asked.

  Good question. Rachel reached out to trace the cell signal of the fourth member of their small team. Detective Jacob Zockinski was halfway across town, his signal immersed within others she recognized, as well as hundreds she didn’t. Next to Zockinski’s signal was the silver-bright pulse of Phil Netz.

  “He’s already at the parking garage where Hope and Avery got ganked,” she said. “Phil’s with him.

  Washington D.C. being what it was, it took them nearly thirty minutes to travel ten miles, and that was with the police strobe light affixed to the top of Santino’s tiny hybrid.

  None of them spoke, but Hill’s reds looked like the caldera of a volcano.

  When they finally reached the garage, they found it crawling with cops. The majority were FBI, but a few other federal agencies and the local MPD had a strong presence. Enough of them knew the team from First District Station well enough to let them on the scene.

  Rachel ignored the flashes of OACET green that popped up as she walked through the checkpoints, Santino and Hill following close behind. Those flashes of green were usually a warning to her, and anyone with OACET in their thoughts received her full attention. Today, considering the victims, the green was to be expected.

  She led the men straight through the crowd, to the colors of autumn orange and bright silverlight that stood together on the edge of the active zone.

  The source of the silverlight was Phil Netz. Barely a hand’s width taller than Rachel, the other Agent was pulsing with energy. As soon as she was close enough, he reached out to shake her hand. As they touched, his mood spilled into her: nervous, anxious…eager. Ready to fight.

  Her adrenaline rose in response. The sounds of the crowd clarified, the edges of their colors crisp and sharp. The mingled scents from all of those people slammed into her like a sledgehammer, body odors and shampoo and food and a hundred other smells that went along with cars and cities.

  She stepped away from Phil, reminding herself she couldn’t start punching strangers for the hell of it.

  “News?” Santino asked.

  Jacob Zockinski was just over forty, broad and brooding, with hair beginning to go to salt-and-pepper at the temples and a razor for a jawline. “Nothing to go on,” he said. “The FBI’s on Forensics. MPD’s out patrolling, interviewing witnesses, the usual.”

  “Nothing?” Rachel wasn’t surprised. Anyone who could steal themselves a Hope Blackwell and survive had done plenty of prep work.

  “Nothing,” Zockinski replied. “Or, at least they’ve told me nothing.”

  Phil turned towards her. “Run the crowd?

  “Guess we have to,” she sighed. “Boys, we’ll go high.”

  “We’ll go low,” Santino said. The three men from the MPD each had a small carbon fiber case in their hands, and were fitting earbuds into their right ears. “Ping us when you’ve found something.”

  “If,” Phil whispered as they moved into the shadows of the parking garage. “If we find something.”

  Rachel cast a scan behind them, to where Hill was pacing angrily under dark, hateful reds, and didn’t reply.

  Phil fell silent as they went deeper into the garage. He was somewhat out of his element: as an explosives expert, he was used to a certain type of crime scene, one which was typically soggy, smoky, or still on fire. Kidnappings were alien to him—rather than hunting for clues from what had been left behind, they instead sought to find what was had been taken. Still, he kept his back straight and his steps sure as he tailed her through the garage, his silverlight core visible beneath cloudy layers of professional blues and orange-yellow uncertainty.

  Rachel took the stairs. Somewhere below, a man shouted at the FBI to let him get his car and go home.

  “Another hour, if we’re really lucky,” she said to Phil, as the push of yellow curiosity that preceded a question reached her scans. “We probably won’t be, though. The media’s already down there.”

  “Stop that,” he replied. “Or at least wait until I’ve asked the question.”

  “Hey, it’s on my mind, too,” she said aloud, and pointed towards the streets four flights down. A crowd had gathered, mostly shoppers from the nearby mall who were beginning to demand answers. Further down the street, a van with a startling array of antennae was crawling through the checkpoints. “The clock’s ticking.”

  They left the stairwell at the top floor of the garage, emerging into bright afternoon sunlight. Phil winced in mild red pain and adjusted his sunglasses. She picked a convenient flatbed truck and hopped into the back, then stretched out to get comfortable. Phil did the same, brushing aside a few leftover autumn leaves before settling down beside her.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Let me run some scans of my own,” she replied. “Then we’ll get funky.”

  “Sure,” Phil said, and closed his eyes so he could do the same.

  Up here, Rachel could take in everything. The sun was warm on her face as she flipped off the visual frequencies she used to see, and began to run the garage from the top down.

  Structural elements came first. She probed the interlocking network of concrete and rebar which formed the shell of the garage, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Then, the utilities: she traced conduits and pipelines back to their sources. Basic police work, really, or basic for all OACET Agents working with law enforcement. Start by checking off the fundamentals to make sure there’s nothing hinky about them, and then proceed to those areas of the scene most likely to have been involved in the crime. Necessary, but it was also time-consuming, which is why she and Phil had retreated to the empty fourth floor for privacy.

  Her scans found nothing unusual about the structure, so she moved on to the security system. It was a decent mid-range system with the usual collection of cameras and motion detectors. As she poked around the system’s digital storage unit, she felt Phil’s mind moving along with hers.

  “Anything?” she asked. Phil was better with computers than she was; if there were hidden secrets within the system, Phil would be more likely to find them.

  “No,” he said. Then: “Ready?”

  She took a breath to steady herself, and then reached out to twine her fingers through Phil’s.

  Her world exploded.

  Rachel had introduced Phil to the finer points of scanning the physical environment, but that had been more than two years ago, when they were both new to cyborgery. Since then, their abilities had gone their separate ways, with Phil teaching himself how to recognize the trace components of bombs—chemicals, molecules, and the like—and Rachel continuing to focus on the little details that made up the strangeness of human nature.

  Together, their scans could pry the fabric of the world apart.

  Her version was full of color and textures and movement entwined into one; his was of sights, smells, and strands of music, each holding its own space in his mind. She reopened parts of her brain that were rarely used and let herself take in everything that existed below, and she stopped existing in the single body that housed the majority of what she knew as Rachel Peng.

  Hive minds were…complicated.

  Their shared link was mostly Rachel and Phil, but along the periphery of their joined minds were the others in the collective. The presence of the others was felt rather than seen or heard—if they had wanted, Rachel/Phil could have reached out and asked if others wanted to come along for the ride as they plunged themselves into their scans. They didn’t: adding more minds would just make a mess out of things. Skin contact kept them contained and focused.

  Together, they
knew what this mess of senses below meant, where reds and the heavy bass of OONCH OONCH OONCH had meaning. They understood that the repetitive beat of dance club music signified a null state in which no chemical traces stood out as significant, that the orangey-yellow that was the dominant color of the crowd meant confusion and uncertainty, with a large dose of the grays of boredom as they waited.

  Their minds swept down and out, tracing the building, the people…

  Is that Bryce Knudson?

  They paused and determined that, yes, it was indeed Knudson’s raspberry core standing beside the FBI at the crime scene. The Homeland Security agent was more red than yellow, anger radiating from his body in whiplike threads. OACET green lay trapped within the reds, the vivid green all but choked beneath Knudson’s emotions. The music that came from his body in steady streaming pulses was reminiscent of mid-90s acid metal.

  He doesn’t like us very much.

  There was a flicker of guilt between them. The part of Rachel/Phil that was Rachel had come up against Knudson up on more than one occasion, and had won every time.

  Not our fault, they reminded themselves. The same memory from two different perspectives: Rachel dodging Knudson’s fist, both from within her body and from Phil’s perspective on the ground a story below. A hand clenched: Rachel’s, stiff from scar tissues from where the man from Homeland had allowed her to cut herself to pieces on a broken window pane. God save us from those who think we’re unstoppable machines.

  Down, down, into the crowd, to look for those who knew more than they should.

  These were close scans, almost intimate. They kept themselves on the outside of clothing, scrutinizing every inch of what each person chose to show to the world. They found traces of blood and fluids, poorly-concealed weapons…one woman’s jeans were coated in a chemical agent they dismissed as household fertilizer; a man had apparently spilled gasoline all over his boots several days before.

  Many of those gathered near the parking garage had handled firearms recently. Their hands fluoresced in a busy disco beat, an indicator of trace amounts of gunpowder. The singular being that was Rachel/Phil swept low, scouting, paying close attention to anyone whose hands blinked in a steady rhythm.

  There!

  A man in a suit, his emotions a nervous yellow straining against a professional blue. The suit was the right size and a decent cut, but he wore it with resentment, tugging on the tie between attempts to find a place to house his hands.

  Those hands pounded in the yellow-white drumbeat of someone who had recently fired a gun, and within that professional blue was a melody of OACET green.

  Curiouser and curiouser… Why would an innocent bystander have us on his mind?

  They inspected him. He was chatting on a cell phone but didn’t have any other electronic devices. There was nothing in his pockets which gave off an RFID signal, and he carried an old automatic pistol in a well-worn shoulder holster.

  But the damning factor was his shoes.

  They were polished leather, shiny and new. So new that the soles hadn’t even been scratched up with more than a block or two of walking.

  Somebody remembered the suit but forgot the shoes, they agreed, and then they reached out to Raul Santino’s earpiece.

  Rachel’s partner in the MPD answered as quickly as if he was an Agent himself. “What have you got?” he asked, his voice muffled as he pretended to cough into his shoulder.

  “White male, standing by a blue Volvo. Brown hair, brown eyes, gray pinstripe business suit.”

  They had never asked how their mental voice sounded when they were joined. Not good, apparently; Santino paused, then rolled with it. “Anything we can use to bring him in?”

  “No. He’s got a weapon, but he’s carrying concealed. You won’t be able to notice unless you’re lying on the ground, looking up under his jacket.”

  “Damn,” their partner said. “Time to take a fall. Got it. Stand by.”

  Rachel/Phil pulled back from Santino’s earpiece. They tracked him with their scans as he joined up with two other men. Santino was the one who didn’t look like either a cop or soldier. He was tall and lanky in jeans and a dark blue windbreaker, with dark hair swept back from his face and pinned behind his ears with a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. His body language changed, falling from confident into awkward in a single step.

  Behind him was a man so obviously a detective that he could have been typecast in a procedural: Zockinski, moving like a bull through cattle.

  And behind Zockinski was a black man built like a basketball star, who was carrying himself like a predator on the hunt—

  Shit, they thought, as they spotted the reds seeping into Matt Hill’s conversational colors again. They reached out to Hill’s earpiece.

  Beneath them, Mako’s cousin paused as he touched his ear. “Go.”

  “Stand down, Hill.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Hill’s head snapped up towards the upper levels of the parking garage. “He’s got my niece,” he said, and Rachel/Phil shivered at the menace in his tone.

  “Which is why you need to fall back. We’ll give him to you,” they promised. “We just have to take him down first. Legally. Or he walks, and Avery stays where she is until we catch another break.”

  Hill paused. Again, they saw the red of his anger weigh itself against professional blue. There was more red this time—much more red, and moving like a tornado around him—but the blue slowly engulfed it.

  “Thanks.”

  Hill didn’t answer. They watched as he stalked off towards the road leading out of the perimeter to cover the most likely exit.

  Three hundred feet away, Santino and Zockinski pinned the man in the gray suit between them.

  They had the element of surprise on their side, and not much else. All they could hope for was that the man in the gray suit would spook and give them a valid reason to arrest him.

  Or…

  Rachel/Phil sighed to themselves as the suspect spotted Zockinski. His apprehensive orange deepened, and he began to slowly move away as he pretended there wasn’t a cop in plainclothes nearby.

  That’s when Santino tripped and stumbled against the man in the suit.

  It was a hard fall, and clumsy enough to look accidental. Santino went down and came up holding the hand that he had smacked against the barely-there lump on the man’s lower back.

  “Sorry, dude!” Santino was flat on the ground but was smiling worriedly at the man in the gray suit, the stereotypical nerd desperately trying to make friends with the class bully before the ass-kicking began. He winced, rubbing one hand with the other to try and shake the pain out. “Whatcha got there? A metal spine? Like tripping into a rock!”

  Out of instinct, the man’s eyes shot sideways towards Zockinski, and found the detective watching him.

  Zockinski began moving towards the suspect in a big-shouldered cop’s walk, pushing through the crowd as if they were merely objects in his path.

  Rachel/Phil held their breath.

  The man in the suit was good. He wrestled his orange under control, and bent to help Santino stand.

  Shit, they thought, but the part of them that had boundless faith in Santino’s cleverness added: Wait. Just wait.

  Santino kicked the man’s legs out from under him.

  It was quick. Even Rachel/Phil wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t seen that blue-lined streak of white that went with Santino’s trickier schemes. One soft-heeled sneaker pushed against the closest leather-soled shoe, and that took the man in the suit off-balance just long enough for Santino to pull him down.

  Judo? Curiosity, brief, asked and answered in the same thought: Santino’s been sparring with Hope Blackwell.

  The man in the suit didn’t hit the ground. He took a knee, then came up with a hard shove against Santino’s chest. It was nothing but a testosterone bump, but Santino cried out as he fell backwards and sprawled against the pavement.

  “Hey!” Zockinski h
ad nearly reached them. He pointed at the man in the suit. “You! Stop!”

  The man broke and ran.

  Rachel/Phil felt themselves jerk sideways as their bodies tried to follow their mind. On the ground, the man cut across the parking lot, straight towards an opening between the police vehicles. There was an embankment on the other side, and a highway behind shallow hurricane fencing beyond that. They saw what was about to happen…the mystery man would go over the fence, into a car, and would disappear—

  Matt Hill stepped out from behind a news van and shot out one long arm.

  The man in the business suit didn’t see Hill until it was too late. There was a brief flash of yellow-white surprise, and then he was on the ground, hands pressed to his throat as he tried to rediscover the ancient art of breathing.

  Hill bent down and seized the man by his lapels, the spectrum of anger and fury covering him in a burning red halo.

  “Don’t.”

  “Fuck off,” Hill growled. The man in the suit cringed.

  “You need another lecture?”

  They had stalled him long enough. Zockinski arrived, full of pointed questions about concealed weapons and gun permits. The questions came so fast and hard that the man in the suit had admitted to carrying before he remembered that silence was the better part of a legal defense, and was bundled into the back of Zockinski’s unmarked sedan in handcuffs.

  As Zockinski and Hill drove towards First District Station, Rachel/Phil did one last low sweep. The song of the crowd had changed with the commotion: the onerous beat of the dance club was still present, but there was a new strain of electric guitar shooting through this beat. Adrenaline, they knew, the hormones heavier in the air thanks to the slow generation of cortisol and the arrest of a stranger.

  No new threats, they decided, and their joined minds flew back up to the roof.

  Separation came in stages.

  They were too deeply entwined to simply break apart from each other’s psyches. A puddle of motor oil was their doorway to their own bodies. The stain on the pavement of the parking deck was an electric melody of rainbows moving in a slick jazz melody. Motion and tempo began to separate; the feeling of a shoe skidding across oil came apart from the percussive smell of petroleum. A spark of unique thought came through—this spill is a chemical hazard—and the mind which thought of spilled oil as merely an unattractive blotch pushed itself away from the mind which had been trained to think of errant chemicals as the seeds of destruction.