And then the elevator door bulges, expanding like a balloon.
“Incoming!” Nate yells. He rushes toward the elevator, deploying a Barrier. A wall of bricks appears in front of the elevator. The bricks expand horizontally, pushing the bulging door backward.
In another thirty seconds, those bugs will chew clear through Gun. When they eat enough of his code, his avatar will collapse and he’ll be ejected from Vex.
“Bug Repellent!” Lox yells.
Gun twists away from the golem two more times, then yanks hard on his left thumb. This activates his Bug Repellent. Yellow goo springs out of his pores, smothering the bugs. His avatar immediately starts healing, the holes made by the bugs patching over.
He pulls a small switchblade out of his pocket. As soon as he flips it open, the blade lengthens into a long dagger. When the golem rushes at him again, he cuts off its arm. It thunks to the floor. The creature shrieks, swooping down to grab the arm and reattach it.
“I could use some help over here!” Mage says. His arms are loaded with books. He runs across the vault, dodging the golem who follows on his heels. “Can’t hack anything if I’m being chased!”
“Hey, mud face!” Gun grabs a book off the nearest shelf and flings it at the golem. It sinks into the mud of his skull, crumpling the top of it.
The creature grapples at the book, walking in a sightless circle as it tries to dislodge the volume. In his periphery, he sees Lox engaged with his own golem. The man has, of all things, a small pen knife in his hand. He swipes at the golem’s face, cursing.
The first golem has managed to get his arm reattached. It howls, charging at Gun. He squares off, holding his switchblade ready. He’s going to cut this monster into tiny little pieces and mash him into pulp. He’s going too—
An explosion of bricks rockets through the room. The barrier Nate erected in front of the elevator crumples. Half a dozen black-clad mercs pour in.
Global mercs. Each one wears a black uniform with the Global insignia stitched on the breast. What are the hell are they doing here? How did they get in? Do the Winns have a Collusion Underground membership?
As soon as the cybermercs enter the vault, more golems emerge and claw their way free. One golem for every person.
“Protect Mage!” he shouts, who’s the only one actually doing something other than fighting.
The man has managed to scramble up the shelves. He knocked a bunch of books onto the floor and is wedged on a shelf a dozen rows up. His fingers fly across the surface of the books as he tries to unlock the data within.
“Five minutes,” Mage calls. “Buy me five minutes.”
Gun finds himself in a melee with two golems and a cybermerc. He alternates between hacking at the golems and fighting off the merc.
Nate rushes past him, followed by several golems and Global mercs. “Write ‘met,’” he says as he streaks by. “On the golem. On his forehead. Write—umph!”
One of the golems manages to grab his leg. Nate goes down. Two more jump on top of him.
Gun snarls, fighting toward his friend. He elbows one merc in the head, then kicks a golem so hard his foot is buried up to the ankle in mud.
Nate’s muffled voice comes from under the pile of struggling bodies. “Write ‘met’ on the golem’s forehead! That’s the Hebrew word for—!” His voice cuts off. The pile of bodies lurches as Nate disappears from underneath them.
He’s gone. His avatar is destroyed and he’s been ejected from Vex.
Gun renews his efforts. A group of golems has cornered a group of mercs. Gun finds himself squaring off against two golems. They rush him at the same time.
Gun sidesteps, sweeping low with his blade. It cuts through both legs of a golem. As soon as it goes down, Gun springs at the remaining beast. He manages to slice off one arm before pinning it to the ground.
Bugs swarm up his avatar, chomping on his body. The bug repellent continues to ooze from his pores, but the bugs are eating him faster than his defenses can administer repair.
Gritting his teeth and holding the remaining arm down with his free hand, he drops his blade and sinks his index finger into the forehead of the golem. Finger moving rapidly, he scrawls the word met on the monster.
To his shock, the firm clay beneath him goes mushy. The face melts, losing all traces of definition. Gun scrambles up, grabbing his knife.
Half of the golems have been killed by cybermercs, all of them formless piles of goo. Lox still fights two of them, while Mage flings books down at two cybermercs who climb up the bookshelves toward him. The remaining golems and mercs fight each other.
One of the mercs breaks away from the melee, charging at Gun. Blue glitter drifts from his clenched fist. The man cranks back his arm, preparing to fling the dust straight at him.
Dream Dust. Gun swears. He can’t afford to be trapped in Vex, can’t afford to be captured by Claudine Winn.
He scans the room, looking for some means of escape. He could fight, but not without getting doused by the Dream Dust. He could climb the bookshelves like Mage, but again, he risks the Dream Dust.
Right as blue dust sprays from the merc’s fingers, Gun makes his decision.
In the real-world, he yanks off his Vex set.
22
The Hole
Gun half lunges, half leaps off the sofa as he crashes back into the real-world. Nate is already there, pacing up and down the study as his fingers fly over the tablet.
“Mage has something!” he crows. “The file, it’s coming—no, no—arg—damn it!” Furious, he hurls the tablet onto the sofa with a string of curse words.
“What happened?” Gun grabs the tablet. On the screen, the words download interrupted flash at him.
It’s Gun’s turn to curse. “Did they get anything else?”
“Negative.” Mage and Lox, back in their real-world apartment, appear on the large screen behind the desk.
“The encryption on the files was nasty. I deployed Bug Repellent, Stingers, Anti-Wash, Oil Leak, and Snowplow. After all that, I still had three different firewalls to hack through.” Mage shakes his head. “That was one tricked out vault. I needed more time.”
“You did manage to get thirty-nine percent,” Gun says.
“Really?” Nate snatches the tablet from it. “Let me see what that thirty-nine percent entails.” He hunches over the screen.
“The Global mercs were waiting for us,” Lox says. “It was a trap. How did they know we’d be there?”
“A set-up?” Nate asks, glancing at Gun. “Could she be a double agent?”
He thinks about this, wondering if Li Yuan indeed set them up. But her loathing of Global is too genuine.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “The Winns, particularly Claudine, have been on high alert ever since our attack on Infinity Stadium. There’s extra security at every Vex appearance. She’s trying to track me down and find out who I am. She may have known Collusion Underground was a place I’d eventually visit.”
“So you think she had cybermercs stationed there, just in case?” Lox asks.
Gun nods. “One of the mercs came after me with Dream Dust. He wanted to catch me.”
“Guys, look at this,” Nate says. “We got a video clip.” The twins are relegated to the upper right-hand corner as Nate throws the clip onto the wall screen.
A woman huddles in the corner of a room. Her pretty face is raccooned with two black eyes. Blood dribbles from her nose. There’s something in the tilt of her eyes and the slope of her cheekbones that seems familiar.
Her black, shoulder-length hair is a tangled halo. She wears a loose cotton dress that conceals her body, but she cradles her arm in a way that makes Gun think it’s broken.
She’s surrounded by three soldiers. All he can see of them are their navy blue pants and black combat boots.
The sight of all that navy blue makes his blood run cold. League soldiers wear that color.
“Please,” the woman whimpers. “Please, stop.”
Her words seem to act as a trigger. The boots lash out, kicking with brutal precision. The woman curls into a tight ball, screaming and crying. The sound of cracking bones can be heard, along with the hollow thump of the boots against her body. The sight is so awful, Gun almost tells Nate to turn it off.
But this came up in the search for Project Renascentia. It has some significance.
Blood blooms beneath the woman’s dress. She weeps, her movements growing feeble under the onslaught.
Another pair of legs steps into the picture. The camera pans back, revealing a black-haired man in a white, Smart-Plastic mask. A blue sea serpent crawls up the side of his face.
Imugi. Or the man hired to play Imugi, before he was killed on the freighter.
“Your betrayal has been noted,” Imugi purrs. “Noted, and duly punished. If you were not a valued asset, this would be you.”
He flicks his fingers. One of the mercs draws a weapon and fires. The woman’s body shudders as two bullets enter her torso. She keens as blood streams from her, spreading around her in a viscous ellipsoid.
“You have been warned,” Imugi says. “Return all evidence immediately. This is your one and only warning. Your next infraction will result in the death of you and your son. Be smart. Make the right choice.”
Imugi steps out of view. The camera zooms in on the dying woman. She’s gone into shock, her body shaking as her life drains away.
Her head falls to one side, glazed eyes staring at nothing.
And that’s when Gun recognizes her. Or rather, sees the family resemblance. It’s so striking, he wonders why it took him so long.
“Oh.” The sound of recognition comes out of him in a rush.
“What?” Nate asks. “What is it?”
“The merc boy,” Gun says. “Taro Hudanus. The son of Black Ice.” Gun points at the screen. “That’s his mother.”
My associate had proof, Li Yuan had said. The proof is no longer in our possession.
Is this what she’d been talking about?
“You think Black Ice had proof to unravel Global?” Nate asks.
Gun nods. “Yes. I think that intel cost him his wife. He turned it over to save his son. The Winns spared him for some reason. No doubt they value his talents as an operative. Taro’s, too.”
They stare at the screen in silence. The woman’s body has gone into convulsions, a horrible moan cutting through the air.
“Can we turn it off?” Nate’s face has gone pale.
“Yes.”
When he hits the pause button, the screen freezes on a close up of the woman’s face. In her tilted eyes and straight nose, it’s impossible not to see the face of Taro Hudanus.
“That is his mother.” Nate shakes his head and turns off the film. “Poor bastard. Do you think he knows?”
Gun shrugs. He wouldn’t complain if Taro Hudanus magically disappeared, but he wouldn’t wish the murder of a parent on anyone.
“This is all very sad and enlightening,” Mage calls, he and his brother once again filling the screen. “But what does this do for us?”
Silence. Gun feels the warmth of anger creeping up his neck. Weeks of work on this mission, and all they have to show for it is a god-awful snuff video.
“On the outside, it looks like a League extortion video,” Lox says. “Is there anything in the video that links Global to the League?”
“We need to go through it,” Gun says. “Frame by frame.”
Nate snorts. “Are you going to do that, bro? No way am I going to watch that thing again.”
Gun turns to his friend, eyebrows raised. Never before has Nate flat out refused to do something.
Nate sees Gun’s expression and holds up his hands. “Sorry, bro. I just can’t watch that.”
Gun doesn’t respond. He thinks of the things he’s done for his father that aren’t all that different from what they watched on that video. Nate knows about that side of the family business, but has never seen it.
Gun experiences a moment of self-loathing so wide and deep, he almost chokes on it.
I am slime, he thinks. Out loud, he says, “I’ll do it. I’ll go through the frames.” For Sulan, he can and will do anything.
• • •
Gun has been up for sixteen hours. Nate snores on the couch. He volunteered to keep Gun supplied with a steady stream of espressos, but he passed out around three in the morning. Gun doesn’t bother to wake him up.
He’s poured over every frame in the snuff video multiple times. He enlarged anything that looked suspicious, hoping for something to tie the League to Global.
Nothing.
Not even a partial scrap of anything useful.
Gun exhales, smacking his fists against the desk.
Nate starts in his sleep, eyelids fluttering, then sinks back into slumber. His snoring permeates the room.
Why have this video if it doesn’t contain anything useful? Gun rubs at his eyes, which are gritty with fatigue. On a whim, he pulls up the video code, staring blearily at the stream of data.
What was that? He scrolls up and pauses, staring at the code. Is that . . . ? A spear of anticipation goes through him.
“Nate!”
“Wha?” Nate startles so violently he tumbles off the sofa. He sits up, scratching at a red mark on his head. “What time is it?”
Gun ignores the question. “Get the twins on the line,” he says. “I think I found something.”
When the Dread Twins are online, both of them staring out of the screen with bloodshot eyes, Gun says, “I think I found something.”
“I hope so,” Mage replies. “You interrupted my beauty sleep.”
“Look at the code,” Gun says, sending it to them. “The code of the video we stole out of the Collusion Underground. Do you see it?”
Nate grabs the tablet out of his hands for a better look. The twins fall silent as they scroll through the code.
“Damn, how did we miss that?” Lox exclaims, in the same instant Nate says, “It’s an embedded file.”
Gun nods. “Yeah. Can one of you guys extract it?”
“On it,” Lox says. “Give me a sec.”
Moments tick by as Lox digs into the file. “Got it!” he exclaims. “Let’s see what it is.”
The Dread Twins are again reduced to a tiny rectangle in the upper corner of the screen. Replacing them is a large, partial map of the United States.
“This was embedded in the video?” Gun says.
“Yeah.”
The map contains states from the western half of the country. There are three red dots on the map. Two of them mark locations attacked by the League with pneumonic plague.
“This one.” Nate taps the third dot, one marking Duncan, Nebraska. “There hasn’t been an attack here yet. Tell your father.”
“We need to get men to that location.” Gun straightens. If they can get to the site and capture a Leaguer, they might have the evidence needed to convict Global. With any luck, this will be the intel that can free Li Yuan.
He hurries toward the door. He’s just reaching for the handle when door flies open.
“Gun? Gun—!” Maia nearly runs straight into him as she rushes into the room.
Gun catches her. “Maia, I have it. We know where they’re striking next—”
“Gun, Dad is on a rampage. There was another League attack a few hours ago. He sent Li Yuan into the hole.”
Gun feels the breath leave his body. He will never be able to look Sulan in the eye if something happens to her mother.
“Another League attack?” Nate asks. “Where?”
“Duncan, Nebraska,” Maia says.
The room falls silent. Nate looks as stricken as Gun feels. Mage and Lox duck out of camera, leaving an empty sofa littered with trash on the screen.
“What?” Maia asks. “What happened?”
All their hard work. All the planning, the programming, the battle against the cybermercs. All to get a tiny sliver of intel.
Useless inte
l.
Gun stalks out of the room to the elevator. Nate and Maia are on his heels. They follow him to the weapons room on his floor.
Gun grabs several tranq guns and stun batons.
“You’re going to get Li Yuan?” Maia asks.
“I will not leave Sulan’s mother in the hole with administers of influence.” He grabs a string of flash grenades for good measure. “I should have gotten her out of here long before this.”
All this time he tried to play both sides. He wanted to help Li Yuan and placate his father at the same time.
There’s no middle ground with William Anderson. His mistake was thinking he could forge a middle ground.
“I’m an idiot,” he snarls. “I thought if I could get enough intel to indict the Winn’s, he’d let her go. I should have known better.”
“Gun—” Maia begins.
Gun forestalls her with a hand. “I won’t play in Dad’s field anymore.”
“I’ll come with you,” Nate says.
“No. You’re not going down with me. This is my fight. Maia. Make sure he doesn’t follow me.”
He turns his back on them, exiting the mansion.
• • •
The hole. Anderson took Gun and Maia down there on several occasions. They were tests, Gun knew, to gauge how they would react to the suffering of those unfortunate enough to end up on William Anderson’s bad side.
He even made them watch the torture for a short while, explaining that some things had to be done “for the good of the company.”
Maia cried every time. Gun bore it all stoically, as he knew his father wanted him to, but inside he wondered if success was worth breaking another human being.
Deep down, he always knew what lay in store for Li Yuan Hom. He’d been desperate to avoid it, though in retrospect that was foolish hope.
Some part of him—the little boy inside him—still wants to appease and please his father. He has to let that go. For himself, for his own self-respect, and for Sulan and her family. He has to be his own person, not Anderson’s pawn.
Sulan Box Set (Episodes 1-4) Page 63
