by James Knapp
They’ve got security feeds set up, I said.
We see them, SWAT said. Ready to cut their power on your mark.
An LED on the rear door flipped from red to green, and the latch turned.
Wait.
The door slid open and someone stepped out. It was a man with thick black hair and a surgical mask tied over his face. Over his clothes, he wore a black rubber apron.
One of the suspects just came out. Hold position.
The man walked out into the snow and the apron left a trail of black drops. He moved to the side of the car and turned away from the camera. Steam drifted up from in front of him as he started to urinate. From inside, someone barked in Russian. The translator scrolled text at the bottom of my periphery.
Clean it all up! Set the charges, and let’s get the fuck out of here!
You get that, SWAT?
Roger that. Team, watch for explosives.
I turned to Van Offo.
Can you lure him away from there? He nodded.
I turned back to the man, and watched as the stream of urine stopped suddenly. His head perked up, like he’d heard something.
They’ll see him on the camera, Van Offo said.
That’s fine.
The man swayed on his feet for a moment. He zipped up, and stood there like he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Come on,” Van Offo whispered under his breath. I zoomed in on the man, and watched his eyelids droop. Van Offo had him.
The man in the apron took a single step back. He turned toward us, and I heard a soft pop as his body jerked suddenly. Blood jetted from one ear, and left a red scribble in the snow.
What was that? The SWAT leader asked. It wasn’t a gunshot. One of Fawkes’s kill switches had detected Van Offo’s interference and gone off. If the others weren’t alerted, they would be soon.
Cut the power. Move in now.
The man’s body crumpled to the ground as the floodlights went out with a loud snap. The LEDs on the storage units went dark as boots tromped through the snow. I closed in on the body, Van Offo close behind me.
“Get that door open!” the SWAT leader shouted.
The magnetic lock had powered down with the bolt still in place. One of them slammed a metal crank into the key and released it manually. Snow drifted down as another officer moved in and heaved open the door.
It was halfway open when a bright flash filled the opening and the force from an explosion inside the car blew the door off its track. It struck the SWAT officer and hurled him back onto the ice. Through the ringing in my ears I could make out shouting, as firelight flickered behind the tinted glass of the train car’s windows.
Get that fire out, the SWAT leader said. A team moved in and I followed close behind them. Flames raged behind thick black smoke inside the car, as one of the men slung a douser through the doorway and it thumped in the small space.
The flames died as a huff of hot air and smoke blew through the opening.
How many inside? the SWAT leader asked. The smoke was still too thick to enter the car, but using the backscatter I could make out two male figures inside. They looked dead, but something in there was still moving. A shape slunk below the smoke level, close to the floor.
There’s something in—
A dark shape lunged out of the smoke. A male revivor collided with the closest officer, one arm trailing behind it on a cord of sinew. Half its face was obliterated, and one moonlit eye stared from the blackened mess.
“Revivor!”
The officer went down with the thing on top of him. Smoke drifted from the revivor as it clamped its gray, meaty fingers around the man’s throat.
I fired a burst into the back of its skull, and black fluid splashed across the fresh snow. A rifle shot slammed into its chest, and it let go. The officer shoved the body to one side and got back up.
Something heavy landed on my back. I slipped on the ice and fell as it came down on top of me. Coarse hair brushed my neck, and rank-smelling breath huffed over the side of my face.
I twisted onto my back and saw a dog baring sharp yellow teeth. I got one arm between us as it went for my throat, and clamped down instead on the body armor covering my forearm. Its paws dug into my chest as it thrashed its head and growled.
A shot went off near me as several shapes leapt, trailing smoke, out of the storage car. As I struggled I saw two more dogs, large huskies, hit the ground and scramble on the ice. Exposed ribs stuck out where the hide had been blown off of one, and another was missing a back leg. Growls, punctuated by loud barking, sent clouds of breath through the frigid air, and I saw moonlight yellow in one set of eyes.
I pushed myself to my knees as the dog on top of me continued to thrash. The weight of it pulled me down again, and claws raked my face. I pushed the barrel of my gun into its flank and pulled the trigger three times. It let go, but didn’t go down. It snapped its jaws as I pulled away, and saliva flecked my face.
I put a shot through one of its eyes, and it staggered and fell. I peered through the hide and saw components clustered along its spine.
They’re reanimated, I broadcast. Destroy those dogs.
One of the officers fired, and the dog nearest him jerked and went down. The third lunged and clamped its jaws down on the man’s calf, thrashing as the rifle went off three more times.
A bullet tore through the animal’s side and it went limp. The SWAT officer pried the jaws free and let it fall.
Hold your fire.
The last shot echoed off, and the yard got quiet. The remains of the revivor lay crumpled in the snow, along with the three dogs and the SWAT member who got caught in the blast. Nothing else moved from the direction of the car.
A few feet away, the body of the man in the black apron lay face down in the snow. I used the backscatter to scan into the bloody hole in his ear, and saw traces of shrapnel that had been pushed from the inside out.
“That’s Fawkes’s work,” Van Offo said.
I looked over the body. The only thing the man had on him was a drugstore cell phone. It was clean; no numbers were stored. I pulled the ID from it and fed it back to Alice Hsieh back at headquarters.
Alice, we’re at the site. I need a number run from a cell phone we recovered. Can you trace the last circuit?
Hang on.
The SWAT leader was calling in an EMT, his breath blowing plumes as he barked into the radio. I put in for a biohazard team to come impound the revivors.
Got it, Alice said. I was able to go back twenty-four hours. One call only; someone named Harold Deatherage.
Thanks.
“Last call went to a guy named Harold Deatherage,” I told Van Offo. He shook his head.
“Do you know that name?” he asked.
“No.”
“The car is clear!” a voice shouted. I looked through the thinning smoke and switched to a thermal filter. There was nothing living left inside, and no active revivor signatures.
I waved smoke away as I crossed to the entrance and through the doorway. The inside of the car was a mess of twisted metal and broken wire cages. There were remains scattered through the car, but it was hard to separate them all out. Some were canine; I could see singed fur and pointed teeth buried in the mess. A human leg and two misshapen arms were sprawled among other, unidentifiable pieces.
Near the back of the car were several scorched gurneys. I could make out frayed wire and a broken housing for electronics, along with an IV rack that was bent in half. Some kind of test had been run there, but there was no way to know for sure what they’d been doing without a forensic reconstruction. Van Offo crept through the debris behind me and surveyed the scene.
“Why dogs?” he asked.
“You got me.”
In theory, anything with a brain could be revived, but the bottom line was that a real dog was cheaper and easier to maintain. It didn’t make sense.
Out at the edge of the yard I saw the first group of camera eyes gathering, recording everything
they could see. A van pulled up behind them while I watched. In twenty minutes the place was going to be mobbed.
Alice, this was definitely Fawkes. We’re going to need a forensics team down here. They were able to blow the inside of the unit, but I think we can salvage something from it. We need DNA identification on two bodies, and put a rush on that revivor impound; this is too public.
Understood.
I looked around the car. The broken shells of computer terminals were scattered in the wreckage, along with a second gurney. When I scanned the floor, I could make out surgical tools. The head of a dog lay a foot from its body, eyes staring up at me.
Run Deatherage’s name. See if anything comes up.
I’m on it.
The SWAT leader appeared at the doorway behind us and leaned in.
“Agent, it looks like the techs picked up a transmission just before the explosion,” he said.
“What kind of transmission?”
“Some kind of large transfer. We think it was a core dump, to save the data before they blew the place.”
“They get a destination?”
He nodded.
“A copy?”
“No.”
Alice, it looks like they did some kind of backup or core dump before they blew the place. We’ve got a destination.
Where? I checked the SWAT channel. When I saw the name, I grit my teeth.
Mother of Mercy. It was a clinic downtown.
Isn’t that facility on our list? she asked.
Yes. We’d been there several times to pull records and hadn’t even marked the place as suspicious. I’d been there once myself. Things were slipping through the cracks.
Forensics will clean up the storage site. Take SWAT and get over there. Let me know what you find.
I looked at Van Offo. “You heard the woman.”
“Mother of Mercy,” he said. There was a strange look in his eye.
“Problem?”
“No.”
Back outside, the wind gusted. Grit and snow pelted the side of the train car. Van Offo looked out at the revivor’s remains, its shirt flapping in the breeze.
“Let’s go.”
You have one job now, he told me early on. Manpower, equipment, funds…anything you need, you’ll get.
He was right. I got everything I needed. As long as in the end I put Fawkes down for good, nothing else mattered. Obstacles disappeared. Any footage taken from any camera that put the investigation in a bad light disappeared. If it did air, it was pulled. They were willing to search anyplace and detain anyone. None of it got me any closer to Fawkes.
I climbed back through the wreckage, back out into the cold. Van Offo followed, staring out through the snow as he turned over in his mind whatever divination he’d just received that he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, share.
2
BREACH
Zoe Ott—Stillwell Corps Base
It was warm in the car, and as Penny sped down the street, the snow that streaked past the windshield was almost hypnotic. Penny rode low in the driver’s seat, head bobbing in time with the beat as she whipped down the sharply curved ramp, apparently able to see even though I couldn’t. I hated Penny’s music at first, but it had grown on me, and as the bass beat in my chest, I caught my own head bobbing a little.
I offered her my flask as red dots of light appeared in the dark up ahead. She waved one hand no, so I nestled back into the big leather seat and I took a long pull off it myself while panels on the dashboard lit up. A holographic display blinked on an inch in front of the glass of the windshield, and the computer highlighted the red dots down the road in front of us. Penny’s fingers tapped at the dash console, and the words BLOCKING SCAN appeared there.
When they realized the scan was blocked, they’d call; this was the fifth time we’d been there, and they did it every time. The place had a ton of security, and no one got in without being checked out, but it didn’t have to be on the record. Not for us.
The video panel lit up and a good-looking guy with a crew cut and a Stillwell Corps uniform appeared. He looked at us, and Penny gave him a little wave while he verified our faces. He said something I couldn’t hear over the music, and a light next to the display turned green. He nodded at us, and the screen went dark.
The snow stopped abruptly as we blew into the tunnel, the tube lights fixed on top snaking off into the distance like three big, white worms. Text began scrolling across the bottom of the windshield, warning about stuff like security clearance, vehicle search and seizure, and other things that sounded even worse. We didn’t have to worry about any of that. The people who counted knew we were coming; in fact, they dreaded it. No one was going to search us or detain us—they wouldn’t dare. We were special messengers sent by Ai herself, and I was Element One, the grand savior of everyone who stood against Fawkes.
A jeep and an unmarked black car with tinted windows passed by us going the other way inside the tunnel, before we came out into the huge, underground lot. Penny made her way toward the side entrance they liked us to use. Two armed guards stood to either side of it as she pulled in and killed the music in time to hear the tires chirp. The two men stood like statues in the headlights while I took one last swig from the flask.
“All right,” Penny said. “Let’s do this; I need a real drink already.”
As soon as we pulled up I sensed something was missing. The buzz that came from the research lab’s busiest brain wasn’t there. I’d seen him only once in person, some scientist on permanent loan from Heinlein. He’d worked on Huma, so it made sense he’d be our best hope to sabotage it. He was an older, ugly Chinese man with thinning hair and spots on his skin. He had a cool aura, though. It was complex, with a million focused points, and in between it all his colors roiled like a storm. They reminded me of how Nico’s used to look, and thinking about that made me a little sad. Penny patted my arm.
“No Chen,” she said. She noticed it too.
I was about to get out when the door between the two guards opened and an older man in a suit stepped out. I immediately recognized the square face, and the gray military cut. I took an extra mouthful of ouzo and swallowed hard before stowing the flask in my suit-jacket pocket next to where the pistol was strapped.
“General Osterhagen,” Penny whistled. “That’s not good.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got bad news. He wants to make sure no one glosses over it.”
His face looked serious, like it always did, but Penny was right: there was something about the soft light of his consciousness that was grim and determined. Behind the thin white halo that surrounded it and behind the layers of his thought I saw worry, and that worried me.
Osterhagen didn’t look especially intimidating. In fact, if you didn’t know anything about him, you’d think he just looked like somebody’s grandfather. I knew plenty about him, though, and that included all the men he killed when he was in the service, and all the ones he killed once he was out. He’d actually killed men with his bare hands, but when you looked at those calm blue patterns that usually made up his aura, you’d never guess that any of it bothered him, ever. He didn’t scare or worry easily.
Penny killed the engine, and as we got out, I could see she’d noticed it too. We walked up to him and he held out his hand. First Penny shook it, then I did. His hand was hard, and he always squeezed a little too tight, but even though I hated touching people, I’d learned to give him my best shake. It was one of those things that mattered to him.
“General,” Penny said, throwing him a wink, “if I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have dressed up.”
Penny was dressed up; we both were whenever we visited the Stillwell Corps research facility. She flirted as a matter of course, with men and women, but there never seemed to be much interest behind it. Osterhagen, as usual, completely ignored it.
“I thought I’d give you a tour of the lab tonight,” he said. “There’s something I want you two to see.”<
br />
“Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
In reality, she was actually really excited to see the lab, and so was I. Ai had sent us before to get what she called an unfiltered report, but so far they’d drawn the line at letting us walk around inside the work area and see what was going on. Ai never pushed it, so I assumed Osterhagen had let her view it remotely or walked her through himself, but I’d always been curious. The lab was where they took all the Huma-infected subjects they’d been able to find. I’d never actually seen one. Not that I knew of anyway.
The guards straightened up even more as he passed back by them and opened the door. We followed him in, and they brought up the rear as the door slammed shut behind us.
The hallway behind the door was long and led directly to the wing where the research took place. No one ever saw us come or go except the guards and the skittish scientist type named Moses who usually met us. There was no Moses, this time. Osterhagen turned back and I saw orange light flicker in the darks of his eyes, like I used to see with Nico sometimes, way back when. As soon as it happened, the two guards peeled off and left through the next door we passed, leaving the three of us alone.
“So where’s your man?” Penny asked. “Chen?”
“Mr. Chen is not currently on the base.”
“Why not?”
“He is off shift.”
“Hey, it’s not like we’re coming down to the wire or anything,” she said, offhand. The general scowled.
“I know that better than you,” he said. “His team works in twenty-four hour shifts. He can’t be here all the time.”
“Fair enough.”
“You seen the map lately?” he asked. He meant the computer model that kept track of all the recorded visions we’d been adding in over the years. It looked a little like a space nebula or something, a colorful ring around a dark center. A bright point where thousands and thousands of visions converged on the rim of the void like a star. That point signified some horrible holocaust, after which there was just a big nothing. Since not all recorded visions were completely certain, the nebula changed subtly over time. No matter what we did, though, it still hadn’t changed in the only way that mattered. The star was still there, and so was the void on the other side of it.
