Brute Force

by Spangler, K. B.

  She loved night swimming with her implant. Back in the day, night swimming had been slippery terrors, more of a test of will than anything close to enjoyable. Since activation, night swimming had become immersion within…well, for lack of a better analogy, life itself. Water was alive! Not in a filthy germy way, but in the way of the clean press of a liquid jungle, cells within cells blooming, growing, moving from one state to another before dying and repeating the cycle anew. It was a bath in the heart of the planet, not careless but carefree, free from any trivial concerns except the wholeness of just being.

  And the frequencies!

  Water didn’t play nice with the EMF. The digital ecosystem was heavily distorted beneath the waves, and the deeper she went, the worse that distortion. Rachel had heard rumors of whales and other squishy mammals beaching themselves as a response to sonar tests, and she believed it—the ocean wasn’t pure by any sense of the word, but it was its own true self. The digital ecosystem wasn’t welcome here, and those trillions of creatures that lived in the ocean weren’t equipped to deal with it when it was forced on them.

  Her shield kept its shape as they swam. She had been concerned that it would move with the water, maybe pull thin and dissolve like spun sugar with each wave, but it remained a perfect sphere. It was weaker than she would have liked; some of the frequencies she relied on to block audio and visual frequencies were buffered, and she had the feeling that if they dove any lower, she might lose those parts of her shield entirely. But here, a few feet below the surface, it did its job.

  Sure did seem to be attracting a lot of fish, though.

  She and Wyatt were still a couple hundred yards from shore, and it was plenty deep. Fish of all shapes and sizes were swimming out of the liquid light beneath them to check out these strange invaders in their realm. Rachel remembered a nature program about how predatory fish navigated using electrical impulses, and was about to make a note to ask Santino about how her shield might play into this when her spinal cord noticed the huge dark shape swimming towards them and crawled straight up its own vertebrae.

  Oh, that’s right, she thought to herself, as calmly as possible. Sharks are fish.

  “Hey,” she said to Wyatt, her mental voice calm—so calm. “Hypothetically speaking, have you ever fought a shark before?”

  Purple humor colored his sandalwood; he thought she was joking. His was the only color in this bright white expanse of energy. Even the very large dark shape—ah, yes, that would be shapes, there are two of them now—swimming beside him didn’t give off any emotions other than more of this intense living white.

  “Humor me and get out your knife,” she said.

  His colors took on orange annoyance and rolled like eyeballs as he took out his flashlight instead.

  “Don’t,” she warned him. “The guards might see it from the shore.”

  He nodded, and they continued swimming.

  As they entered the shallows, the fish got bored and swam off, taking the sharks with them. Rachel and Wyatt stopped just outside of the spotlights and stayed low, shedding dive equipment and the diving suits as they moved. The waterproof case which held Wyatt’s rifle was clipped to his stomach beneath the suit; same with her own service weapon. Rachel gave the guns a quick scan. “They’re dry,” she whispered to him. She checked her shield and tightened what she could.

  Then they ran.

  There was no beach. It was hard-edged rocks and shattered beer bottles and rusty car parts, every inch of it slippery with seaweed. They were on all fours most of the time, tactical gloves and shoes finding purchase in this tetanus minefield. They dodged the arcs of the FBI’s searchlights (which seemed focused on the north end of the shore while they ran up the south, hmm so strange) and made it to dry land.

  Concrete beneath her feet and scans—blessed, shark-free concrete. The last sprint to the side of the building was as easy as a run through a park.

  They began to climb.

  OACET’s scouts had chosen well when they had selected this part of the factory for the ascent. There were window ledges and industrial gutters aplenty, and between these were spots on the wall where enough mortar had fallen out from between the bricks for shallow finger-holds.

  They paused before they reached the roof, clinging flat to the black wall in their black suits, so Rachel could run one last scan and make sure they weren’t about to leap over the ledge into a trap. Or drop into a hole. Or meet predatory roof-roaming wolves. Rachel was lost in her scans when Wyatt went pale and yellow beside her. She scanned up, then down and around, unable to find the threat she had missed. Wyatt tapped her on her shoulder and pointed towards the ocean.

  There, in the pool cast by the FBI’s searchlights, swam two dark arrowheaded shapes that were nearly as long as the boats.

  Rachel grinned at him and resumed the climb.

  The factory’s rooftop was a wasteland. It was as close to the minefields of Afghanistan as she’d seen outside of her dreams: mostly wasted rubble with plants struggling to grow, and holes that snuck up on you without warning to drag you down into the hollows. Beneath that was a jungle canopy made of metal, with iron and steel beams twisting every which way.

  She and Wyatt chose a nice sniper’s perch in the middle of the roof with those holes all around them. The perch had a structural support column beneath it, and Rachel felt relatively sure the support column would keep them from crashing through the rotting roof into the factory below.

  Right beneath them were the hostages.

  Avery was asleep in the lap of the woman with the copper core. The woman was awake, barely, with the soft colors of sleep dissolving around her like a slow morning mist. There were militia men around them, some sleeping, some keeping watch in drowsy shades of beiges and grays.

  They were heavily armed, of course.

  Two soft taps on a flap of peeling tarpaper; Wyatt had turned yellow again, but this time it was an inquisitive yellow. The light coming up through the holes in the roof was a cold filtered blue; he could see her, or at least the outline of her, so she shook her head in answer and touched her wrist where a watch would rest.

  Wyatt settled himself and started to unpack his rifle. He unsnapped the flaps on his carry bag and stared at the pieces, then began to assemble them, his colors dipping to orange scorn. He hadn’t been happy with the idea of less-lethal weapons, especially when he was supposed to be covering the enemy from a distance. Rachel agreed—weapon accuracy counted in a firefight, and while the idea of rubber impact rounds with a pepper spray additive sounded nice and all, she was somewhat concerned about how the enemy carried real guns with armor-piercing rounds.

  He finished assembling the odd-looking rifle and lay flat on the roof, gun pointed at the militia members deep inside the factory.

  Above them was the night sky, overcast and starting to drizzle.

  This was the weirdest sense of vertigo.

  Sniper duty with my own pet psychopath, she thought to herself. How in the hell did I get here?

  (The answer was that she needed a bodyguard while she was in deep scans in hostile territory, and everybody but Wyatt was needed on the ground. Especially as it was safer for the main team if Wyatt didn’t go with them, what with his sudden but inevitable betrayal still yet to occur. Plus, she had planned this part of the raid, so she had willingly stuck herself with him. But a good rhetorical question deserved a good rhetorical flailing.)

  Below—multiple stories and most of a wastewater system below—Mulcahy opened a link.

  “In position,” he said.

  “Us, too,” she replied.

  “Report.”

  “Clear up here,” she said. “One guard on the roof. He’s over on the far side of the factory, near the front doors. I think he’s watching the movie.” She took a moment to throw her scans to the movie screen below—Sean Connery was busy saving Alcatraz from Nicholas Cage, or some other equally unpleasant threat—and the guard’s colors flickered slightly as the scenes changed. “Yeah,
he’s worthless.”

  “Worthless? Not if he’s up and moving,” he said as he pressed back against her mind. “Focus.”

  “You’re not as pushy when you’re a robot,” she replied.

  She felt him laugh, quietly. He was so very tired, and his walls were thin enough to tear, but at least he laughed. In exchange, she let him into her scans so he could contrast her rooftop perspective against Phil’s sewer-cam.

  “Wait,” he said. She did; a few moments later, she felt him pick up the threads of her scans and Phil’s, and weld them into a single image. Mulcahy was much less skilled at this than she and Phil: Rachel was in two places at once and her dinner threatened to come up and then go down the nearest roof-hole, and that would certainly notify the militia that somethin’ sticky was a-brewin’.

  Focus, she told herself, in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. We practiced this. Focus.

  Rachel wrapped a lovely cinquain by Adelaide Crapsey around her mind like a Pendleton blanket—

  I know

  Not these my hands

  And yet I think there was

  A woman like me once had hands

  Like these.

  —and let her own body go.

  The sights and smells of the open rooftop took a step sideways, and blended into those of the wastewater tunnels beneath the building. Mulcahy was there, and Phil, and Josh, and the Hippos, smooshed nose-to-ass in a pipe so tight that Mulcahy had to keep his shoulders folded in as close he could. They wore black Teflon coveralls over black tactical gear, and the last person in the chain (Ami, who was the smallest and therefore the most maneuverable in that claustrophobia clusterfuck) dragged a long waterproof bag packed with guns and less-lethal ammo.

  She felt the Agents in the tunnel take a long drag of fresh air through her senses. She would have given them the sky and the liquid light of the sea, too, except the crushing weight of the tunnel might swallow them whole when she cut her end of the feed.

  “Fifteen minutes until sunrise,” Mulcahy said, and all the Agents set their timers.

  Breathe, she reminded herself. They’re—we’re!—the best of the best. All of us combat-trained and ready. This’ll go like clockwork.

  Across the link, she heard the tail ends of the others’ thoughts, all of them trying to convince themselves of the same thing—

  Time… Her subconscious whispered again. It’s all about time…

  “Running deep scans. Ping me when you need to bring me back in,” she told Mulcahy, and left their link to concentrate.

  She lost herself to her search, stretching her mind to try to get the last part of the puzzle to drop into place. The militia members were well-fed and slow. Dawn was almost there. The catering truck carrying the FBI’s tactical response team was cruising towards the crowd barricades…

  What about time? she asked herself, as the barricades lifted. What am I missing?

  Get him off the road, her subconscious said.

  I did! She shouted back at herself in her own head, and could have sworn she heard echoes. He’s off the goddamned road! What am I missing?

  “What happens to me after this?”

  Wyatt spoke so softly that her ears thought she had caught the breeze talking. She hauled her senses back inside her head and turned them on him. “Huh?”

  “What are you going to do with me after this?” His head was pointed down, rifle ready. She might have been able to trick herself into thinking he hadn’t spoken if his colors weren’t bright with yellow curiosity.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she sighed, and pressed the backs of her gloved fists against her forehead. Train of thought, derailed before the station. Mass casualties, paramedics en route. “I dunno. Depends if you’re running a game. You turn on us in here, and anyone who survives will make you suffer.”

  His conversational colors picked up a great deal of iron, and this was clubbed away from Southwestern turquoise and OACET green.

  “Yeah, I know you saved my life,” she said. “Honestly? I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t even know why Adam sent you here. I mean, you’re helping, yeah, but…”

  Wyatt’s colors went slightly purple-gray around the edges, a smooth blue-gray held within this melancholy.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  “No.” He shook his head. Truth.

  She pushed him anyhow: Adam was his soft spot. “Did you kill him?”

  A flash of bright red fury—his eyes moved away from the factory floor towards her.

  “Had to ask,” she said.

  “No,” he said, the fury turning to hard gray granite as his eyes moved downwards again. “You didn’t.”

  “Maria Griffin,” she said. “Remember her? Nice woman? You cut her throat and let her bleed out on the floor? Not exactly a good first impression.”

  He nodded, the slightest movement of his chin.

  “I don’t know you,” she told him. “I don’t like your methods. All I know is you show up after people start getting hurt.”

  Wyatt stopped talking. The two of them went back to keeping watch, her slow scans moving across the rooftop and down into the factory, touching on the FBI agents lying in wait in the van outside—

  “Saw you in the corridor,” he finally said. “That first night at OACET headquarters.” His conversational colors turned opaque over his eyes.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Your implant was off, right? You’re blind without it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He waited a moment before saying, “You ever stop to ask yourself if maybe I’m getting something out of this, too?”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “But I can’t figure it out.”

  “You ever wanted to do the right thing, but have no idea what that is?”

  “Always,” she sighed. “Case in point—you.”

  Wyatt’s colors rolled over themselves again in a purple-gray sigh of resignation, and he fell silent.

  Seven minutes. She ran her scans again. The FBI’s coffee truck was still at the barricades, offering coffee and such to the local officers. In the factory below, word was spreading among the militia that breakfast had arrived; the men were beginning to brighten in anticipation, and the slow mass migration towards coffee had begun.

  She pulled herself back to check on Wyatt, and felt metal jab at her through her thick canvas pants. The roof of the building was rusted steel, and there was no part of it that wasn’t covered in sharp edges; Rachel stopped squirming to get comfortable when she realized that only made everything worse.

  “Calm down,” Wyatt whispered.

  “I’m not a sniper,” she muttered. “I’m not trained to lie in one place for eight hours.”

  “Eight? Try eighty.”

  “Liar.”

  “Can be done,” he said. “You gotta work in a team, but it can be done.”

  “Don’t see you as much of a team player,” she said.

  “I always work with a partner,” he said. “Always.”

  There was weight in those words, and his colors had some wine red in them. She had no clue where that sympathy belonged; he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, and the wine red moved into his core of sandalwood.

  Three minutes.

  The FBI’s truck started moving towards the loading docks. Rachel reached out to Mulcahy: “Status check?”

  “We’re at the entrance point. Good to go,” he replied. Through his eyes, she saw the last streaks of heat fade from an access hatch, as the plasma torch finished cutting through the locks and hinges.

  “Us, too. FBI’s almost in position. No movement on the militia.”

  “All right. Breaking cover.”

  She felt hands that weren’t hers attach a magnet lift to the hatch, and her body complained about lifting something as massive as that solid piece of steel. Below, Mulcahy swung the hatch aside and set it down on the ground, as soundless as snowfall.

  Agents poured out of
the wastewater tunnel and fanned out, one-third moving to the north side of the factory, two-thirds moving to the south. All carried less-lethal weaponry; all wore gas masks and eye protection.

  Rachel took out her own gear from a hip pocket and fixed her mask to her face. Wyatt didn’t: snipers liked to keep their field of vision as unimpeded as possible, even if they were shooting a glorified paintball gun.

  Ninety seconds.

  “Cover me,” she said to Wyatt. “This is about to get poetic.”

  He nodded, his colors locking down into steady professional blues.

  She reached out to Phil, still crouching in the cover of the wastewater pipe, and the two of them joined their senses into one. Focus, they reminded each other—skin contact made this so much easier, but at least there was no loss of self in this type of link—and stretched their perspective into every nook and cranny of the factory. Rachel began to pare off the extra pieces. There was no need for chemical sensors, or structural assessment, or even the emotional spectrum: these were clutter, a confusing mess to anyone without months of practice in deep scanning. All the Agents needed was the ability to see through walls and machines, and know where the members of the militia were hiding.

  Once done, she added some color: red for the militia, blue for the hostages.

  “Good?” she asked, once she had removed everything but the most rudimentary form of x-ray vision.

  “Yeah. Bring them in.”

  She did—she offered their perspective to Mulcahy, and she and Phil stepped away from control of their own senses as he joined them to himself, and, through him, the others. Nineteen Agents, online, aware of the location of every human being in the warehouse.

  And Nicholson, sitting upstairs with Hope Blackwell in her office prison.

  “The poem is ‘Dreamers,’ by Siegfried Sassoon,” she told them, and took Phil and herself into the words of a man long dead.

  The Agents began to move.

  “Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land…”

  Ami led the strike force in the hostage room; Mulcahy led the one to rescue Hope. Twelve Agents, including Josh and the other Hippos, followed Ami. Before they hit the room, they peeled off into three groups; one group raced up the catwalk, while the other two hung back, hidden behind either side of the doorway.