“And there lies the tragedy, Agent Seeker. When the media, the net and every avenue of communication is spied upon, controlled, and manipulated to only show their message, what are we supposed to do? How do we get our message across?”
“Are you seriously asking me? I don’t give a shit how you do it. I only care about stopping you feckers from blowing up people, who are just trying to go about their day, unaware they might become a pile of ash before the sun sets down on the horizon instead of having dinner with their loved ones. These are the people I care about, and that’s why I fight the likes of you.”
“A noble sentiment. Too bad you’re protecting a cancerous world instead of trying to cure it. I don’t know why I expected better from you. I told Vassiliki her hopes in you were misplaced.”
My blood starts to boil.
“You don’t pronounce the name of my dead wife to me ever again, do you hear me?” I say, my teeth grinding with hatred.
“Who said anything about her being dead? Don’t you realize it by now? Or were you born that stupid? You have an AI in your brain. You’re connected twenty-four seven to the megacorporations central AIs as well. They know everything you think, everything you like, and they can manipulate you any way they want. In this day and age, the line between men and machine is so blurry we can’t see it anymore. Do you think it would be complicated to implant a false memory of your loved one dying in your arms?”
That last sentence provokes the strongest of shivers I ever experienced in my entire life. Could any of this be real? Is there really a chance that my sweet Vassiliki could still be alive? Working with or directing mad men like Ahmed Al’Hasi? That’s where I have to draw the line of this fantasy. My Vasso would never do something like that. Sure she used to speak of lost freedom often, but she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“Enough, Ahmed! Let’s finish this up, now. I’ve had it with your poisonous lies!”
“One day, perhaps, you’ll understand that I am not lying to you. But very well, Agent Seeker, let’s finish this. I have a city to blow up, after all.”
He launches himself at me with a powerful reverse roundhouse kick, or so I think, as it is a feint, and I fall for it. His last words are still echoing in my head. Instead, he directs his kick towards my knee and I lose balance. I can’t get back up in time and get catapulted backwards by a swift knee strike to the jaw. Before I hit the ship’s armor with my back, I can taste blood in my mouth.
I want to take a weapon or use my repulsors and just kill him now. But I know it is wrong trying to win this way. So I get back up and take one long deep breath. I push my emotions to the side. Tanya is right. I need to be clear-headed in moments like these. He has managed to compromise me emotionally, and my rage is making me clumsy.
She is dead. He’s lying, I keep repeating inside my head.
I get back up just in time to avoid Ahmed’s next combo. He is one hell of a fighter. In fact, he is probably just as proficient as I am in hand-to-hand combat, unlike what I had thought before. But it matters not. I need to beat him or, at the very least, get a hold of the data chip from his back pocket. Then and there I decide that all my next moves will be geared toward that goal.
I catch his last attempt at a jab and grab his wrist and he immediately swings his other fist at my face. I block it, cradling it in my own hand. Before he can try to get out of my hold on him, I thrust my forehead as fiercely as I humanly can into his face. I break his nose upon impact and repeat the move a second time, hearing more of his facial bones crack. I twist my hand cradling his fist and readjust my grasp to his wrist as well. I head butt him once more for good measure.
I’m about to send him flying. Grab the data chip from his back pocket when I do so! I shout mentally to Eleanor.
I hear the afterburners of her fighter burst to life and know she is ready. The fleeting moment it takes to send the message has allowed Ahmed to slightly recover from the shock of my attacks and I see him try to knee me in the guts, but I use my own knee to counter him. Using the momentum of the block I extend my leg and hit him full force and hit him in the face, while still holding both his wrists tightly with my hands. His head flies backwards and a satisfying quantity of blood sprays out of his mouth.
Before he can recover from that blow I prepare myself for the next move, bringing my leg back down and lowering my body slightly by flexing my legs, taking good support. When Ahmed tilts his head back towards me I start half a summersault while still holding his wrists and release them just before extending both my legs upwards with all my strength. My feet impact with his jaw and he is catapulted high into the air. So high, in fact, that I’m not sure if that was just me or if I inadvertently used my super strength. But he goes flying high, and I see Eleanor’s ship tilt to its side, so she’s parallel to his back. Her canopy opens as she shoots her grappling gun and rips the data chip from his pants, ripping the pocket along the way.
“Got it!” she shouts as she closes the canopy, flips her fighter back to the horizontal position and starts veering away.
I expect Ahmed to fly downwards and crash in front of me so I can finish off the bastard but he spins in the air, grabs a blaster from his back and shoots Eleanor’s ship with a shockwave that destabilizes her craft’s systems. The short-range fighter starts spinning towards the nearest skyscraper.
Feck!
I don’t hesitate. I turn Tanya back online with a thought.
“Have the jet bike ready to sweep me off when needed!”
“Understood,” she answers somewhat coldly.
I know I can’t blame her for being pissed at me, and I ignore her tone as I run to the edge of Ahmed’s ship before taking the plunge in pursuit of Eleanor’s ship. It is wildly spinning towards a hundred-and-twenty-story building, out of control.
I activate my repulsors in maximum thruster mode so I can catch up with her ship.
“Eleanor!? Please respond!”
“Cole, I’ve lost control of the ship.”
“Eject now!”
I hear an electrical noise over the mental line and I hear her swear immediately after.
“The ejection system is fried.”
“Get out of the ship. I’ll catch you. Trust me.”
She doesn’t answer and as I close the gap between the two of us I see her emergency canopy charges explode, sending the reinforced glass spinning wildly in the air with a whooshing sound. I know I won’t be able to catch her before the ship impacts with the building. My heart is pounding so hard inside my rib cage it feels like it’s going to escape out in the open.
“Jump, Eleanor, jump now!” I scream.
She jumps out of her ship and starts tumbling down towards the ground rapidly. I adjust my heading and divert all power to the repulsors. I see her take something from her pocket as I approach her. She flashes it at me at the same time as her ship impacts with the side of the building and explodes on impact.
I see flames and debris fly in front of my eyes.
“I have the chip! Catch it! We can’t afford to lose it!” she says to me over our mental link.
“I’ll catch you if it’s all the same to you, so hold on to it for me,” I answer.
“We can’t take that chance and you know it!”
“She is correct, Cole,” confirms Tanya. “If you can’t catch her the data will be destroyed.”
Eleanor throws the data chip like a shuriken towards me but it’s not her best throw. I have to adjust my trajectory to catch the chip and while I manage to grasp it with my right hand, I have lost precious distance separating me from Eleanor. I secure the chip under my body armor and decide to spin in the air and use the side of the building as a rebound platform, pushing with my feet upon impact to course correct and augment my current velocity. The glass windows explode upon my pushing away from them as I descent towards Eleanor, now trying to slow her descent best she can by positioning her body horizontally.
Good girl.
The ground approaches at a scary pace, an
d I really need to get to her in the next handful of seconds, or we’ll both splat like bugs on a windshield.
“Where’s my damn bike!” I scream at Tanya.
“Incoming. ETA three seconds.”
I know that won’t cut it. Plan B. No matter how much I dread it, I’ve run out of options. I activate the grappling gun inside my forearm armor.
“The chances of success of this maneuver are less than ten percent, Cole,” says Tanya with worry in her voice.
“Duly noted.”
I aim at Eleanor’s leg and shoot without hesitation. The grappling arrowhead flies through her thigh and deploys. I immediately reverse my position and use my other hand repulsor to reverse thrust, transferring all the power to it. A second later my jet bike swoops in and I’m sitting on it.
I exhale deeply, not realizing I had been holding my breath for a long time during the free fall.
“Great catch, Tanya,” I say as I start bringing the grappling line back towards us.
I hear Eleanor scream in pain below as she’s arching towards the ground and misses it by only a few feet as our trajectory takes us back towards the sky.
“You’re an insane motherfecker!” Eleanor tells me. “But thank you for saving my life, buddy.”
“I’d think you’d be used to it by now.”
“Don’t push your luck, soldier, you still have to make it up to me. You’ve freaking shot me through the leg.”
“Would you have preferred I let you splash instead?”
She doesn’t answer immediately, but when she does there’s clear panic in her voice.
“Watch out, Cole! Incoming.”
I was too distracted and relieved that neither of us had died. I didn’t see it coming. Ahmed’s ship passes in between my jet bike and Eleanor, cutting her lifeline with one of its wings. Before I can react he flips his ship around, sending his other wing to impact into the front of my jet bike, sending it into a wild spin.
Warning lights and alarms blink and blare at me as I try to restore my trajectory in the midst of that chaos of light and sound. When I recover from the spin and reacquire a visual lock onto Eleanor she is again falling towards the ground, but soon a tractor beam coming from Ahmed’s ship hits her and he flies away with her in tow.
I hit the brakes, veer sharply right to vector myself back in the right direction and go in pursuit, activating my jet bike’s afterburners.
Eleanor! Are you alright? I ask mentally.
When she doesn’t answer I try again. Please respond.
“She is unconscious, Cole,” says Tanya.
“We got to get to her.”
“I know. Cole, you’ve used a lot of power.”
“So?”
“So there is no way you can finish this mission without a recharge of your main power cell.”
“I figured as much; we’ll have to find a way to do that soon.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say, Cole.”
“What? Spit it out then.”
“You can’t both go after Eleanor now and get the charge before we head to ground zero.”
I hear her voice, I know what she says is logical, but I refuse to accept her conclusion.
“We are not letting him take her.”
“We don’t have a choice, Cole.”
“Feck that. I have the choice and I’m going after her.”
“Cole . . .”
“We are not . . .”
I want to argue. I want to manage to find the right words so that it makes sense. But I already know Tanya has made all the calculations. Even if she hadn’t I’m not stupid. We lost so much time going after Rasul and the chip, we’re probably already late for the main part of our mission.
“We have to, Cole,” she adds with sadness in her voice. “I’m sorry but we’ll just have to hope Ahmed has a use for Eleanor. And if not, well, you knew all along her chances of survival were very low to begin with.”
I punch the control panel of my jet bike in frustration, and the control glass cracks but stays in one piece.
“Where to next?” I say.
Tanya doesn’t bother answering and instead takes control of the bike for me and vectors us towards where we need to go. My heart aches and I feel sick to my stomach. I want to hurl but fight against it. That’s not who I am, I don’t abandon my partner, not after all we’ve been through together.
“If it makes you feel better, Cole, I would have seized control of your body anyway if you hadn’t complied. As much as I understand how you must feel right now, we can’t weigh the life of one person against hundreds of thousands, and you know it.”
I know what she is doing . . . she’s trying to lower how guilty I feel. I wish it was working but it isn’t.
“It doesn’t make me feel better, no. But thanks for trying.”
“I’m sending Drone Two in pursuit but far enough so that it doesn’t get shot down. Hopefully we can at least track her, and her vitals are still transmitting. For the time being . . . we know she is still alive.”
Tears start burning the corner of my eyes as the wind blows them out in the blurry sky. I am no longer able to think straight, emotions rushing at me at light speed. I close my eyes but there is nowhere to hide from the inner pain that torments me to the core.
I’m so sorry, Eleanor.
C H A P T E R
XV
Mission completion time: T minus 105 minutes.
We’re at a secondary safe house, the one nearest to our next destination, ground zero. That is, if Ahmed keeps the same target; but it’s not easy to move a nuke to a new location without being detected less than two hours before it’s meant to explode. Of course, he could decide on another timeline now.
Tanya is ninety-seven percent sure neither the target nor the timetable has been altered. She compared the online chatter with the real-time data she compiled pre-mission and that’s how she calculated that high probability figure.
I’m flash-recharging my core systems, and in fact I’m over-charging them. A procedure that is not without risks, but there is a margin for error here. My body’s internal power circuitry, thanks to a few clusters of nanites acting as temporary capacitors, allows me to store an additional thirty-five percent power, but the excessive power will drain rapidly. Still, it should allow me to perform this last part of our mission at full power and then some.
I can’t help but blame myself for not shooting that son of a bitch on his ship. I’d given my word that I wouldn’t, but what good is my word now? And god knows how bad Eleanor’s shape must be. I have her vitals on my HUD. They’re fluctuating every few minutes and not in a good way. I know exactly what that means, Ahmed is torturing her, either for information or just for spite. He could have made sure to disable the transmission of her life signs, but he wants me to know what he’s doing to her.
If he wants to make me mad again it’s working. In fact, I have to use a lot of self-control not to punch everything in sight. I feel the need to destroy this place and then some. I need to think about something and quickly.
“Any success accessing the data on the chip?” I ask Tanya.
“No, Cole. The multi-layered encryption on it is too strong. We won’t be able to decode the data with only my computing power.”
“Can’t you network?”
“I could, but you’ve given me specific orders, for the time being at least, to keep this for your eyes only.”
“So?”
“So if I network with other computer processing units around the city, there’s a risk the data could be leaked.”
“We can either sit tight patiently on the data and hope to get to it over time, or risk exposing it to the company and other parties.”
Not really a choice I’m happy to make. But it’s the darnedest thing since I have a hunch that this data is too sensitive even for Rewind to get access to it. Not that I can be sure Tanya’s demilitarized memory banks really work as they should.
“Can you c
opy the raw data off the device?”
“I can.”
“How long will it take?”
“Unless there are hidden partitions that won’t show until the right decrypt keys are provided, the amount of data is actually quite small. The raw data is about seventeen terabytes. I can have it copied by the time you’ve finished charging.”
“Any booby traps that could trigger a self-erase mechanism?”
“None that I could detect, Cole, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”
“Start copying the data now.”
Tanya stays silent. Now is as good a time as any to apologize for my previous behavior.
“Tanya, about earlier . . . when I shut you off. I’m . . . I’m really sorry. I didn’t have to be so blunt.”
There is a pause before she answers.
“Apology accepted,” she says rather coldly.
I didn’t expect her to be okay with just a plain sorry, of course, and I know it would take time for her to really forgive me, if she will at all. To say I was enraged is no excuse, of course, but that’s how I am sometimes. In the heat of the moment, I’m prone to saying things without thinking.
“I want you to know I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I add.
“Cole, it’s sweet of you to try to make me feel better, but it’s irrelevant right now. We need to complete our mission. If we don’t, not only will hundreds of thousands of people perish, but so will we. And I, for one, don’t want to die. I get that you’re on edge, and I get that you’re worrying about Eleanor as well. But right now the priority is not to get her back, and neither is killing Ahmed. Do we agree on that?”
Do I agree? I’m not sure, to be honest. If I could manage all three, save Eleanor, kill Ahmed and defuse the nuke, then I would certainly go for it. But she’s right. I have to focus on our number one priority without letting my personal feelings interfere.
Rewind 717: The Adventures of Time Traveler Anti-Terrorist Agent Cole Seeker Page 14
