Element Zero r-3

by James Knapp

  Paper blew down the street like snow as we made for the garage.

  5

  EVENT HORIZON

  Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

  By the time I could see Alto Do Mundo through the helicopter’s windshield, I’d thrown up everything there was to throw up. My stomach twisted into a knot, and my throat burned as sweat rolled down my face. I was concentrating, my jaw clenched, on the huge, lit spire at the top of the tower when I heard the pilot shout back at us.

  “Hold on!”

  I felt Penny’s hand on my back as I bit down and held on to the metal rail beside me. Something whipped through the air in front of us, and as it spun back around, the helicopter dropped underneath me.

  Spit sprayed from between my teeth, hanging in a long strand. The lights outside spun by the window, and over the rotors I heard a high-pitched whine. There was another helicopter up ahead—no, two—and a huge muzzle flash flickered from underneath one of them. As the pilot spun us around and I slammed into the wall, I saw sparks and shattered glass explode in a trail across the side of a building. It rained down toward the street far below. A huge mob was forming down there around the building.

  “They’re firing on us! We need support up here now!”

  The bottom dropped out from underneath me again and bile crawled up my throat. I hit the wall again as the two helicopters disappeared for a minute behind the spire.

  “We’re coming in now!”

  The engine went up in pitch as the world tilted underneath us. Below, the roof of Alto Do Mundo was coming in very fast. Lights around a helipad began to flash, and I could make out soldiers as they ran past it to set up some kind of rig. One of them began to signal with a glowing baton.

  “We’re going to return fire,” a voice crackled. “Hold your course!”

  A flash went off on the rooftop and something hissed past the window next to me, trailing smoke behind it. A whistle sailed off into the distance, then was swallowed by the sound of the rotors.

  “Was that a hit?” a voice asked.

  “Negative. We missed them, but they’re moving off.”

  I focused on Penny through my wet, tangled hair, and after a second she noticed me and met my eye. I reached out with one hand and groped; she moved closer and put her arm around me. As I shook, I felt her kiss me on top of the head.

  A minute later we were on the ground, or the roof anyway. The soldiers flanked Penny and me as she helped me off the helicopter and across the helipad. The air was cold, but having solid ground under my feet and some fresh air made me feel better. I took a deep breath as more armed men arrived through a door about one hundred yards ahead and approached us. In no time, we were surrounded by men with guns.

  Inside, the door thudded behind us and closed off the racket from the roof. The air was warm, and I rubbed my hands together, shivering as we followed the group of men to the elevator.

  “Ai is waiting for you in the war room,” one of the men said. Penny nodded and took a minute to wipe my face as the car went down two floors. In the mirrored interior of the elevator car, I looked horrible; my skin was a pale, sickly gray, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My hair was a mess and caked with dried blood on one side. There was a gash on my forehead that was still wet, with a big knot underneath it.

  “Get a doctor to meet us down there,” Penny told the man. “I want someone to look at that.” He nodded.

  “I’m okay,” I said. She didn’t answer. She was in crisis mode and wouldn’t take no for an answer on anything, pretty much until she was out of it, so I just let it go.

  The elevator doors opened and we followed the men down a long corridor, then through two doors with keypads to another hall where I could see a set of glass double doors up ahead. Through the glass I could see the room was dimly lit, and light from monitors flickered to make shadows. There was a crowd of people inside, sitting in leather chairs in a tight circle around a giant oval table in the middle of the room.

  Ai was inside, I could sense her even though I hadn’t seen her yet. I could sense her whenever I was inside the building with her, but right then it was even more intense than usual. Unlike most people, her thoughts were almost fractured, with each shard clicking away, doing its own thing. They were all bound together in a master pattern, like bits of stained glass that formed a picture in a window. They said she was the next step in evolution, and maybe she was but sometimes I secretly thought she was more of an accident. No other mind was quite like hers, not even the other powerhouses that were in there humming around it.

  I’d never actually been inside the war room before. Two guards stationed outside opened the doors so that Penny and I could go in. The armed men who’d escorted us down left us at the door, then turned and went back the way they came.

  The inside was impressive. All of Ai’s top people were there, watching the far side of the room where a giant array of huge monitors were set up, each one displaying something different. In one, I saw General Osterhagen’s face looking back at me. Robin Raphael looked out from another one. A third, twice the size of the rest, showed the future model like a gas nebula floating in space.

  Some of the other screens had faces I didn’t recognize, but most of them showed what I figured were live feeds from throughout the city. In one, I saw helicopters moving in between buildings, while people ran through the streets below. In another, I saw a vehicle on fire in the middle of a traffic jam, while soldiers tried to put it out. Everywhere I looked things were burning or smoking, and people were scared and hurt. It didn’t seem real. Less than five hours ago, everything had been normal.

  “…the threat of the nukes is very real,” I heard Osterhagen say as we walked in.

  “How did this happen?” someone else on one of the other screens snapped.

  “Unlike the activation code, this security breach didn’t occur at the Stillwell compound. As best we can tell, he used contacts on the inside at Heinlein Industries to access the defense shield,” Osterhagen said.

  “You’re saying this breach came from inside Heinlein Industries itself?”

  “Heinlein Industries is connected to several other large military contractors, as well as the Department of Defense,” Osterhagen said. “In addition, they have their own defense satellite which is tied to the grid.”

  “The Eye,” a woman said.

  “They have the means for sophisticated satellite access from inside Heinlein,” Osterhagen said. “Somehow, someone on the inside was able to leverage that to find and exploit and tap into the main defense shield. We don’t know exactly how it was done yet, but it would have taken a detailed understanding of the satellite system, and a lot of time to figure out how to crack it. This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t come from Ang Chen. Fawkes had others inside Heinlein helping him. Defense system specialists, with high-level access.”

  “How many have been compromised?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Osterhagen said. “No one anticipated this move. It’s one of the most secure facilities in the UAC, and we weren’t watching Heinlein specifically.”

  “Is this it?” the older man asked. “Is the satellite’s payload of ICBMs the catalyst for the event?”

  “It’s the source of the destruction in the visions,” Mr. Raphael said. “It must be.”

  “But do we know?” someone asked.

  “General,” Ai said suddenly, and the rest of them stopped talking. “Can you regain control of the satellite?”

  “I have a team on it,” he said. He nodded offscreen and a window popped up in the corner of the monitor along with him. In the window was the face of a pale, blond man with intense eyes and drawn cheeks.

  “This is First Lieutenant Hans Vaggot.”

  Eyes flashed when he said the name, and I sensed a kind of surge through the room, even from the group at the table who otherwise seemed to be in some kind of trance. The name Vaggot was tied to the very rare visions that took place inside the dark void, where most coul
dn’t see. I knew there were several possibilities who they thought might be the man in question, but it looked like this might be the one.

  I watched his face, but it didn’t look familiar. In the vision, he was horribly deformed so it was impossible to know for sure if it was him. Those perfect, symmetrical features on the monitor didn’t seem like they could belong to the monster I’d seen, but …

  This can’t be coincidence, I thought. This has to be it. The event they’ve been talking about is real. It’s happening.

  “Regaining control of The Eye would be trickier,” Vaggot said calmly, “but we believe we can regain control of the nuclear satellite from here. We don’t have a time frame yet, but confidence is high that Fawkes will not be able to hold on to his nuclear option very long.”

  “He doesn’t need very long,” someone said.

  “Agreed,” Vaggot said. “But if he wanted to launch, he’d have launched by now so he’s waiting for something. If we can stay under his radar, he may lose this option before he has any kind of warning.”

  “And if you don’t stay under his radar?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Osterhagen said. “We cannot leave those nukes under his control. We have to take them back despite the risk. A secondary defense satellite is standing by to take out The Eye once the nukes are off the table, and air teams are ready to scramble and knock out Heinlein’s ground defenses. After that, we’ll send troops in to mop up what’s left.”

  As I watched Vaggot, I found myself drawn to him. I closed my eyes, and when I reached out, I found it was surprisingly easy to contact him. His presence was very strong to me, and like some I had run into in the past, he was extremely open to my will.

  I cracked my eyelids and peered at his face on the screen while I concentrated on his distant little candle flame, the way Ai had helped me master. He wasn’t one of us; I could tell right away. He was sharp and intelligent, but not one of us. His mind hummed like an electronic machine, very compartmentalized and focused. He was worried, but he wasn’t scared. He believed what he said, that he could take control of the nuclear satellite back from Fawkes and back into our hands at the Stillwell camp.

  On the screen, he paused for a second, confused. He sensed me.

  “Leave him alone,” Ai said without looking at me. I eased off and let his consciousness fade away from me. “Mr. Vaggot, a lot rides on you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I understand.”

  “I know you will not let us down.” The window with his face in it flashed and went out.

  “Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, “how are efforts on the streets going?”

  She sat at the head of the big table that faced the monitors, and unlike the rest, she sat cross-legged in the middle of a large, square pillow that was right up on the table itself. None of the others at the table looked at her or even seemed to know she was there. They stared down at the tabletop, eyelids half-closed. Her face had a slack, distant expression like it did when she was deep in a vision and flying on pentatrosin. She stared off at nothing, aware of the things around her but not seeing them. She didn’t see us come in, but she’d known we were coming and knew we were there. One of the many pieces of her aura turned its individual pattern toward me, green light spiking up from out of the blue. With one tiny hand, she waved us over.

  “The National Guard is being utilized primarily for humanitarian efforts at this point,” Raphael said. His handsome face, young in contrast to Osterhagen’s, which scowled from the monitor next to it, looked tired. “They can handle the peacekeeping effort for now. They’re in the process of aiding the wounded and transferring them to local medical hubs, but the hospitals inside the hot zones are getting overrun. The streets are impassable along many major routes, though, and that’s making transfer to outlying facilities difficult without using air traffic.”

  “Are the rescue teams encountering any resistance?” Ai asked, her soft, deep voice airy. “Are Fawkes’s revivors engaging them?”

  “Only as targets of opportunity,” he said. “National Guard teams are blockading off areas, courtyards, and buildings to act as sanctuaries to people caught on the street or who can’t get home. But they’re filling up fast.”

  “Have there been attempts to run those blockades?” Ai asked.

  “Several,” Mr. Raphael said, “but not in any concentrated fashion. They haven’t found any pattern to it.”

  “They are looking for us,” Ai said, her eyes dreamy. “But they won’t stop here, with this city. Before Fawkes destroys it, they will try to leave.”

  “They’re clustered at the three towers,” Osterhagen said, “but overall movement suggests that might be the case. They’re spreading out to cover a wider area.”

  “It won’t work,” someone else said. “All main routes in and out are being locked down. Some will leak through, but not enough to do any real damage.”

  “They will leave,” Ai said, causing some to glance at each other nervously. “What about the virus?”

  “We were unable to deploy it successfully,” Osterhagen said. “He noticed the breach, and cut off the subject we’d implanted; then, before we could try again, he cut off the lot of them. He must have identified them from the time stamp that keeps track of total reanimation time. He cut off every one of them that was active prior to his sending the code.”

  “The virus is sent,” Ai said. Osterhagen frowned, but didn’t contradict her.

  “We’ve tried on several captured revivors, but the initialization time is too long,” he said. “He knows what he’s looking for now; by the time the virus has gathered the network information from the mesh and is ready to execute, he’s already cut off the seed subject.”

  “A door is open,” she said, staring into space. “Somewhere …someone he’s not expecting and cannot see. The virus is sent.”

  “Do you know who?” Mr. Raphael asked. But Ai shook her head, just barely.

  “I saw it,” I said, and all the faces on the screens turned to me. Penny looked at me too.

  “What?” Osterhagen asked.

  “I saw it,” I said. “After we crashed. I know who it is.” The room spun a little as I moved toward the screens, but in spite of everything else, I smiled.

  “Who?” Penny asked.

  “She’s one of your people,” I said to Osterhagen. “A soldier, the one with the weird name …Flax.”

  “Calliope Flax?” Mr. Raphael offered.

  I smiled again, feeling giddy. The night I first met Ai, Calliope went to my best friend’s apartment, looking for me. For some reason, she’d beaten the hell out of her piece-of-shit boyfriend, Ted. And for payback, or just because he was pissed, he beat up Karen when she came home. He beat her so bad that time that she died, right in front of me.

  I killed him for that. He was the second person I ever killed, and the first one I killed on purpose. I killed Ted, but the bitch who started it never got what was coming to her.

  “Calliope Flax,” I said, with a firm nod. “That’s her. She’s a Huma carrier.”

  “They checked her,” Osterhagen said.

  “Nico lied,” I said. “He covered it up, kept it quiet. He called in a favor, faked it somehow, so we wouldn’t find out.”

  Ai had turned to look at me and I saw her smile, just a tiny bit, as her big, spacey eyes looked into my mind. Osterhagen was saying something offscreen to someone, and I saw people move suddenly behind him.

  “If she was infected with the same version and she’s not dead yet,” Mr. Raphael said, “then that might just be our in.”

  “Find her,” Ai said in her airy voice. It sounded like it came from far away.

  Something warm ran down my cheek, and when I wiped it away, I saw blood on my hand. Ai was staring at me, and I felt sweat trickle down my back as she seemed to move away, down a long, dark tunnel.

  “Get that doctor down here now,” I heard Penny snap at someone.

  Good work, Zoe, Ai said, but her mouth
hadn’t moved. Everyone was talking at once, but I could barely hear them, like they were underwater.

  I tried to thank her, but my throat had dried up and nothing came out. At the end of the tunnel, everything began to fall away. I was passing out.

  Don’t worry, Ai said in my mind, just before everything faded. We’ll find her….

  …you’re going to get your wish, after all.

  Nico Wachalowski—Downtown

  The attack had thrown the streets into complete panic. Not long after the first hit, another Chimera appeared and joined the first. They didn’t stage another assault, but they prowled above the streets, waiting for something. Reports flooded in from all over as I crept down a narrow lane the guardsmen had set up for emergency traffic. The Chimeras could easily take out the scattered forces on the ground, but so far they hadn’t done it. When the rescue choppers approached, they let them pass.

  “Metro PD got hit too,” Van Offo said from the back. I cut the wheel and felt a jolt go up my dead arm all the way to the shoulder. Some scrambled output trickled by on my HUD off in the corner of my eye.

  Van Offo watched me in the rearview mirror.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  “I heard—”

  Pain stabbed into my head, and the gray hand clamped down on the wheel. My foot stomped on the brake, and Calliope jerked in her seat as the car slid to a stop on the wet pavement.

  “What the hell?” she snapped.

  My head throbbed and light flashed in my eyes. The scene through the windshield flickered, and for a few seconds I was somewhere else; it was a memory, but it was extremely vivid, almost like a hallucination. I was inside the Pleasantview apartment complex for the first time, to visit Zoe. I’d made my way to the seventh floor and had just knocked on her door.

  The door opened, and a woman that wasn’t Zoe answered. She was stocky and curvy, with a pretty, round face marred by a bad bruise. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I recognized her now as Karen Goncalves, Zoe’s friend from downstairs. Behind her, the room was dark except for the flickering light of candles. I flashed my badge and told her who I was.