Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  And hits the guardrail. Dead on. Dead instantly.

  We in the foxhole are helpless to stop it. The copter agents can’t do anything either; they have weapons at their disposal, not time machines. The combined IBI and city police forces busy barricading the road eight miles down with spike strips aren’t even aware of the crash until it’s well and truly over. And the innocent passengers in the other cars are powerless to do anything other than watch the red sedan slam into the low cement wall, collapse inward on itself, glass shattering, metal screeching, fly up over the top of the guardrail, a storm of hot, sharp debris, and tumble through the air, downward, downward, until it careens into a patch of Route 17 forty feet below, a mighty crunch, all its bits and pieces raining down around it.

  The cars on 17 clear the impact area before the debris stops rolling across the asphalt and into the grassy ditch. (To make sure none of their occupants witness the horror of Castile’s mangled body.) Once they’re gone, the hovercopter circles the crash site two, three, four times, and then lands in the grass just as the first police cruisers and IBI SUVs pull up in blockade formation to seal off the area to civilians. They pour out of their vehicles, uniformed police and agents in combat gear, handguns and automatic rifles.

  Weapons raised, they slink toward the once-a-car, now an unrecognizable, uneven hunk of warped metal surrounded by a halo of glass and pointy pieces. As if there will be anyone alive inside the cabin. The angle of the closest street cam obscures the view of the driver’s side door, but Lance, at his terminal in the foxhole’s far left corner, is able to zoom in close enough for us to see through the back windshield—or, the gaping hole where the back windshield used to be. At first, I can’t make out anything but a jumble of torn car seat cushions and busted plastic components. But then…

  The car shifts, and a limp arm flops into view. Just an arm. There is nothing attached to the shoulder. Half the agents in the foxhole gasp in horror. Some recoil. Mostly the techs, those with no battlefield or murder scene experience. But even the more hardened agents flinch at the bloody, lifeless arm, broken so badly that bone peeks out through shredded muscle. Dynara, Briggs, and Weiss wipe all emotion from their faces. They’ve trained away their physiological responses to brutal death. Through frequent exposure.

  It’s a requirement for people in positions like theirs, breaking your heart until it heals calloused. Because they must be the immoveable rocks, reliable always, for their men and women to stand upon when the rest of the world shifts like sand beneath unsteady feet.

  From somewhere behind me, Jin whimpers, and I toss a quick glance over my shoulder to find him with a hand over his eyes. He doesn’t handle gore very well. (As I learned during an old world horror movie marathon he invited me to. I don’t think the stains ever came out of that shirt.) He’s close enough for me to touch, so I reach back and take hold of his free hand, squeezing like he squeezed my own when I woke up in the infirmary. He peeks out between his fingers, swallows hard, and attempts to smile. He fails miserably, but I smile back anyway, and mouth to him, You can leave if you want. You don’t need to watch this. There’s no reason for you to stay.

  He chews on my words for a moment and then replies: You still need a chauffeur.

  I release his hand and flick the back of his palm. Not for much longer. The nanos are done. I’m out of this thing as soon—

  “By the old gods,” whispers an agent seated three terminals down from us.

  I whip my head back around to face the screen, and as soon as my brain processes the image on the screen, my stomach tries to fold in on itself, into a crinkled paper ball, and expel all the bubbling acid through my throat. I clench my teeth and hold it back. But Jin, who (often) makes the terrible mistake of following my lead, gags, gasps, turns on his toes, and rushes from the room before he vomits all over Briggs’ shoes. I don’t know if he makes it to the bathroom or not; I can’t bring myself to care at the moment.

  On screen, the remains of Sally Castile have flop-slid out of the remnants of the driver’s seat, thanks to the misstep of some poor policeman who got more than he bargained for when he tried to examine the car’s interior. As expected, the former professor is in pieces, all her limbs and at least one ear ripped away by the force of the car’s interior buckling wildly around her. Her face was crushed by a direct hit with the steering wheel, and every bone, every tooth imploded into her brain. Her eyes were either ripped from their sockets or driven into the bone-brain stew, and her scalp peeled back at some point to reveal the shattered skull beneath.

  Below the neck, somehow, some way, she is even less intact.

  Absolute quiet falls over the foxhole. The quiet that comes when HORROR, all caps, etches itself into the squishy matter of your mind in a place where you cannot ignore it. Ever.

  Ten or twelve more agents lose their composure and rush from the room. Some on the verge of upchucking, like Jin. Others with tears streaming down their cheeks. Still others shaking so hard they appear to be mid-seizure. No one chastises them for running away, not the SWAT team or the strike team, not Briggs or Dynara. No one blames them for turning their backs on the sort of grotesque no human being should be forced to experience. No one mocks them for taking a break less than a minute long to keep themselves sane in the face of a mind-bending nightmare.

  They will come back, all of them, once they calm their stomachs and dry their tears and cease their shakes. They’ll come back, take their seats, and do their jobs. They will not speak of their “episodes,” and no one else will either. It’s understood by everyone in this moment.

  When the last of the fleeing agents pass the threshold of the foxhole door, Dynara throws a quick wave to Lance, still at his terminal, greener in the face than he was in Nexus 4, surrounded by Geller’s blood. But he holds his position, breathing slowly through his nostrils, clenching one fist so tight his nails must break the skin. At Dynara’s signal, he cuts the cam feed and pulls up a trio of case file windows on the screen in its place.

  Dynara strips off her Commissioner coat, balls it up, and tosses it in a nearby empty terminal chair. “All right. Show’s over, everybody. To those on the Castile tracking team: split yourselves up and join the hunt for Anderson or Lang. I want them found before they end up sacks of shredded meat on the asphalt, got it?”

  A round of confirmative murmurs passes through the room, and Dynara waves again to signal to all the stunned and sickened agents, Get back to work. Then she turns around and heads off in the direction of the task room. Briggs, rubbing his temples, not far behind her. And Weiss, chewing his bottom lip, not far behind Briggs.

  Just as Dynara reaches the task room door, one last pertinent thought about this “event” occurs to her, and she shouts to no one in particular, “Oh, and somebody call the coroner.”

  * * *

  Lance Lovecraft discovers the next snag in this wreck of a case an hour after Castile’s remains are scraped off the asphalt of Route 17. Somehow, Castile’s Ocom (GPS disabled, of course) survived the high-speed impact with the guardrail and the resulting forty-foot drop with no more than a few scratches to its screen. One of the IBI CSI crew members found it jammed between two large hunks of seat cushion and sent it our way for analysis, with the hope that we could use Castile’s last few hours’ worth of activity to crack this case open. Finally.

  Alas, not fifteen minutes after Lance gets his hands on the tablet, he runs into a computer security wall that not even his expertise, or that of the other coordinators and techs, or that of the IBI Cyber Sec team (minus Jin, who still has his head in a toilet) can surpass. In the task room, all of us bone tired, eyelids sagging, he explains the issue. By standing up, pacing back and forth, and waving Castile’s Ocom around in the air like he can shake some sense into it.

  “So, naturally, she deleted most of her communications with Lang and Anderson, and when I say deleted, I mean deleted. Wiped from the internal drive and the National server backup. No chance of recovery. She knew what she was doing on t
hat front.” He runs a hand through his limp, unwashed blond hair and sits the Ocom on the table, tapping one finger against its screen. “I also feel the need to note she put a virus trigger inside the biometric sensor override program, so when the techs out in the foxhole brilliantly decided to wipe the sensor data without a thorough pre-analysis of the tablet’s software, they almost cost us every bit of information on the machine.”

  “Lance.” Dynara swivels her chair back and forth. “Move on.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He plucks a cup of coffee from the table next to where he sat the Ocom and chugs half its contents down in a single gulp. Given how much cream the man puts in his typical coffee, I’m surprised he hasn’t made himself sicker than Jin yet. “Anyway, the real problem. After I confirmed the message deletions, I went searching for any sort of shadow folders hidden from view, and, surprise, she had one that appears to hold the key to contacting Finn, our mystery competition creator.

  “I managed to crack Castile’s password with brute force—it was her birthday combined with her favorite food, believe it or not—and I found a dozen secret messages exchanged between her, Lang, Anderson, and a man who literally just goes by Finn. No last name, occupation, or any other identifying characteristics. Just Finn.”

  Briggs stifles a yawn and says, “So, what’s the problem then, Lovecraft? Something about the messages themselves?”

  Lance sighs, removes his workstation glasses, and shakes his head. “They’re encrypted with a one-time pad cipher.”

  Weiss, not seated but leaning against the table next to where Briggs is hunched over, tugs his Commander’s shirtsleeve and makes a series of subtle body movements. A twitch of his bottom lip. A half blink of his eyes. The crossing of two fingers on his left hand. A series of letters or words or symbols that make up part of the secret code Weiss and Briggs built decades ago when they first started working together. I still haven’t decoded it, so whatever the silent Lieutenant says to Briggs, it passes over me unheard.

  Briggs reads the words loud and clear, and he sits up, ramrod straight. “You’re kidding. An OTP? A real OTP? I thought those things were never used.”

  Dynara jerks her neck left to right and right to left; it cracks twice. “Not in commercial applications, no. They’re too unwieldy to build and maintain for the average consumer system, so stream ciphers with pseudorandom keys are typically used instead. Simpler. Cheaper. And unless you’re careless and totally bungle the construction, they function reasonably well for cyber security purposes.” She drops one of her fists on the table, rattling the damaged Ocom in front of her. “But one-time pads are used in certain military divisions and top-secret installations, like this one. EDPA has three in use, one for the Nexus system, one for our lower-level vault security, and one for the sorts of files that shouldn’t exist but do and need to be hidden away where no one can ever read them.” A sly smile tugs at her lips, but it’s malformed. “So they are out there, and theoretically, anyone with the tech and know-how could build one. Makes sense that this secretive Finn character would be one of those people.”

  Lance picks up the Ocom and rolls it around in his fingers. “I’ve got my guys working to crack it, but true OTPs are impossible to crack without their keys, and there’s no key file on Castile’s Ocom. Which means she either kept it on a piece of non-networked tech that wasn’t on her person when she crashed, a stack of actual paper hidden somewhere, or, in her head, memorized.”

  “That’s a lot of information to memorize.” Briggs rubs his chin, stubble poking through.

  “Adem could do it. So could Dy.” He points a finger at me then Dynara. “And there are plenty of other people in the world with extraordinary memorization powers…and, of course, people with illegal tech mods who’ve altered certain lobes of their brains. I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

  Briggs nods. “In passing.”

  “So, what you’re saying, Lance,” Dynara begins with a sigh, “is that we’re dead in the water unless we can find Lang or Anderson or the key to the OTP cipher.”

  Lance sticks his glasses back on and shrugs. “That’s how it is. I can’t work miracles. Sorry, Dy.”

  She hand waves his wafting guilt out of her face. “Not your fault. But if you’re in here whining and moping about how hard this case is and miss a crucial breakthrough by your team in the foxhole, it will be your fault that you fail to get credit for actually contributing to something more important than relaying your failures to me.”

  Damn. I knew Dynara was in a poor mood, with no sleep and no success, but…Ouch.

  Lance shrivels up like a prune beneath Dynara’s glare, but she ignores his discomfort and finishes with, “So skedaddle back to your terminal and do some work, will you?”

  Lance stuffs Castile’s Ocom in his pocket and pretends his trudging steps to the door are from personal disappointment instead of part of a Dynara-induced shame walk. He taps the control pad on the wall and waits until the door slides open. But he only makes it a single step across the threshold when the scene in the foxhole beyond stops him short.

  From my vantage point in the wheelchair (that I’m about to abandon, with Cyril’s approval or not), I can only see a murmuring crowd of EDPA and IBI techs gathered around a specific terminal on the left side of the room.

  Twenty feet in front of that terminal, the enormous left-hand screen, unused for the duration of the car chase, is now lit and occupied by two windows. The top window appears to contain the cipher code, strings of incomprehensible symbols that belong to no human language. The bottom window is…the decrypted translation?

  A confused gurgling sound crops up and dies out in the same moment—Lance, who, after seven stunned seconds standing in the doorway, head cocked to the side, mouth hung open like a fool, rushes out into the foxhole and starts to push past the outer rings of people in the crowd. Dynara, eyebrow arched, spins her chair around and peers out into the operations center. Briggs and Weiss both lean the same direction at the same angle and try to decipher the meaning of the commotion. But the crowd is too thick. We can’t see who’s sitting at the terminal doing what EDPA’s best coordinator could not.

  “Hey, Adem”—Dynara snaps her fingers at me, like I’m her freaking butler—“go see what’s up.”

  “Um, you realize I’m a disabled man in a wheelchair, right?”

  Her eyes roll so far back into her head she resembles a zombie. “I know how to count, honey pie. Your med-four treatment was done an hour and a half ago. Cyril hasn’t been up to see you yet because she’s busy programming Wallis’ new synthetics. So get your ass out of the chair and go see what’s up.”

  She leans back in her own chair and drops her feet on the task room table. “If it’s important, report back to me. If not, close the door and leave me alone. I have eighty-seven proposals to read by lunchtime today, so…” She slips her Ocom out of her coat, switches on the holo-screen function, and pulls up an official-looking document two hundred pages long.

  “Fine.” I roll my chair back, lock the brakes, and brace my hands against the armrests. Briggs and Weiss look ready to offer me assistance, but I shake my head. I lift one weak foot and then the other, press them firmly against the ground, and finally, I push myself up into a standing position.

  For a second, I think, Oh, this is fine!

  Before a wave of dizziness sends me staggering into the table.

  Weiss lurches forward and takes my arm to steady me.

  Briggs says, “Why don’t you let us escort you, Adamend? There are some steps involved.”

  I blink rapidly, until the world stops spinning like I’m on a rickety Tilt-A-Whirl. “No, I got it.”

  Weiss releases me and backs off, motioning to Briggs, who receives a message I do not but that I appreciate nonetheless because it makes my old boss zip his lips and let me go. I bow my head to Weiss, Thanks, and use the edge of the table, then the wall, to guide myself out the open door and into the foxhole. There are stairs involved, six from the task room
door to the left wing of the foxhole floor. I take them slowly, one shaking, weak foot at a time.

  Logically, I know a night’s worth of paralysis isn’t long enough to cause muscle atrophy. But each bend of my knee is a chore, and every press of my foot to the ground produces the sensation that my noodle legs are going to buckle underneath me before I make it fifteen feet to the edge of the crowd.

  I press through, grit my teeth, concentrate on movements my spinal cord memorized when I was eight months old but can’t, for its life, seem to recall properly. (I really hope Cyril didn’t neglect to mention a required course of physical therapy in my immediate future.) Past the edge of the crowd, in between agents tall and short, male and female, light and dark, young and old, I shuffle along, until I break the front line and emerge at the heart of the action.

  Lance is standing behind the terminal where a man sits typing like the wind. The blond coordinator’s workstation glasses are lopsided on his face, the result of some collision with a member of the crowd, but he doesn’t reach up to fix them. His arms remain limp at his sides. He gapes, and his blue eyes protrude from his skull so far it’s a miracle they don’t pop out and dangle at his chin. No words emerge from between his wide-open lips, only a soft choking noise.

  Next to the hunched-over man at the terminal, on the desk, sits a water bottle (that I sincerely hope contains actual water and not vodka). The man himself stares intently at the terminal screen, calloused fingers tapping hard on the keys. He switches back and forth between two windows full of scrolling code, the programs working behind the cipher and its translation displayed on the large wall screen.

  As I stumble closer to this man, I realize he’s muttering: “I know this. I know this. I know this.”