Hollow

by Lee Doty

  “Looks like that priest is going to meet his boss today.” Xian commented idly, giving Jayda an annoyed roll of his eyes, then he turned his attention back to the Cleric on the line.

  “Look,” Xian said, willing patience into his voice, “we’ve got two teams underground and in pursuit. They can lock her down and move her out of the area in the tunnels…”

  “She lamed the first group of Falcons.” The Cleric interrupted, voice bitter. “I’m going to extract that team and both transports…”

  “Lamed?” Xian asked, brow furrowing.

  “Telemetry shows leg wounds on three and the fourth has some broken ribs and a broken arm.” The cleric paused, “If they had her muzzled somehow, that’s clearly not the case anymore.

  “But the tox screens from the police report,” Xian shook his head, trying to clear a way for logic through all the incredulity, “she was sedated like a rampaging zoo elephant…”

  “She obviously got better, or you were right… this is a trap.” The Cleric said, his sentence punctuated by a sharp series of cracks coming both from the train station ahead of Xian and through the channel with the operations Cleric.

  “What?!” the cleric hissed, “Scrub! Everyone out! It’s a trap!”

  “Talk to me!” Xian shouted into the link, “What’s going on?”

  “We just lost four… no, six of the Falcons in the station!” The Cleric had managed to get the panic in his voice under control, but it was still there, coloring his words. “Abort! Everyone, abort! I’m closing this channel!” The tablet chirped as the line with the Cleric went dead, and the sounds of suppressed gunfire reached them from the station ahead of them.

  Jayda looked at Xian, stunned. “Orders?” she said, hands resting lightly on the wheel.

  “Thank you for remaining calm.” Xian said, stowing his tablet in a jacket pocket. “Panic is so unprofessional.”

  “What are you going to do, Sir?” She asked.

  “Well,” Xian blew out a long breath, “First, I’m going to stay right here and observe.” In front of them, the brown panel van pulled away from the curb, accelerating away at top speed.

  “Longer term?” Jayda asked.

  “Longer term, I’m going to attend the next staff meeting and give another object lesson by shooting that jumpy Cleric in the vitals.” He mused, watching the fleeing van. “Perhaps I’ll give a small speech on the importance of serenity under fire as he bleeds out.”

  Ahead of them, two Falcons burst from the near exit, sprinting after the retreating van. The priest with the crappy wheels parked illegally across from the other exit exited after them and killed them with their companions’ weapons in a short series of amazing shots while running flat out. Jayda put the car in gear, almost unconsciously.

  “Please turn off the car.” Xian said mildly, pointing his pistol absently at her abdomen, “Or I think I might need to give my serenity speech now.”

  Jayda stiffened, then forced herself to relax, putting the car back in park and switching off the ignition. “Sorry, sir.” She said with a penitent nod. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I’m sure it won’t.” Xian said, returning his pistol to its holster. “You will notice that we are not necessarily in this trap that has been sprung.” He gave her a wry look, “Fortunately, we are parked a safe distance away, and can blend back into the city with a fair amount of ease, should we need to. Neither of us are dressed as soldiers, neither of us have been aggressive tonight.”

  “Unless they notice that we are in the car that hit the cab.” Jayda said nervously.

  “Jayda,” Xian said reassurance in his tone, “Who would recognize this car? We disabled the traffic camera when we took control of the traffic signal. We took out their aerial surveillance, the taxi driver abandoned his cab about ten blocks away, fleeing on foot. Don’t worry. If I thought there was a chance that this car would compromise us short-term, I’d have left it and your cooling body here and simply walked away when the trouble started just now.” He gave her a warm smile.

  “Whew, then.” Jayda said hopefully, favoring him with a nervous smile.

  “Of course, I joke, Jayda.” He said as the brown van almost made it around a corner ahead before it exploded into a fireball. “But we would have left the car and walked away. May I have the glasses, please?”

  “In the glove box.” Jayda inclined her head.

  Xian retrieved the field glasses from the glove box and brought them to his eyes. He focused in on the priest and a woman as they stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the entrance to the train station. The line of intervening parked cars interfered somewhat, but he could see their upper bodies. The woman was facing mostly toward Xian, so he could see her face clearly, but the priest had his back to Xian.

  “Who are they?” Jayda asked quietly.

  “No idea.” Xian answered, “I don’t know the woman and the priest’s back is to me. Whoever he is though, he’s a big step forward for the OSI if he wiped out two teams of Falcons that easily.” Xian paused, then said absently, “Not sure if I could have pulled that off.”

  There was a distant boom, as the priest fired the pistol he’d had trained on the woman.

  “Did he just shoot her?” Jayda asked, uncertain.

  “No.” Xian observed, “I think he was punctuating some point he was making.” Then the priest turned his head quickly, scanning for threats, and Xian got a brief look at his face. He sucked in a surprised breath through his teeth.

  “What?” Jayda asked.

  “What are you doing here?” Xian mused, thinking furiously, then “Wait.” He said, inspiration blooming in his mind. “Now I understand why the air patrol was so light, why the OSI’s backup plan is a ham-handed show of overwhelming military airpower…” He chuckled to himself.

  “Sir?” Jayda asked.

  “They are off balance and over reacting. They are spooked. This is a trap, but it isn’t the OSI’s trap.” He said, smiling admiringly. “It’s his.” He lifted his chin, indicating the priest who was still pointing his gun at the woman blocks away.

  “Jayda,” Xian said, still smiling, “I need you to get a tracker on the priest’s car. They’re far enough away that they shouldn’t see a microdrone… if you hurry, that is.” He fumbled in his outside jacket pocket, not removing his eyes from the field glasses. He withdrew a metallic case about the size of a fully extended tablet and passed it to Jayda.

  She opened the case, pulled out one of four small drones and folded out its collapsed carbon fiber wings. She then paired it to the navigation app on her tablet and put the drone on the dashboard behind the steering wheel.

  In under a minute, the drone’s electric engines whirred to life and the light, semi-automated drone lifted off of the dashboard, darted around the steering wheel, and flew out the driver’s window of the car.

  “I’m going to put it inside the right front wheel well.” Jayda said as the tiny drone sped silently through the night air toward the small rusty car parked illegally in the red zone near the entrance to the station.

  Facts and Life

  OSI Headquarters, Rural Virginia, 2019

  Crow, Shadow and Tink paused at the narrow opening to a long metallic hallway. At a gesture from Crow, Tink retreated to the intersection of the hallways thirty yards behind them. He stopped just short of the intersection and kept watch.

  A small unoccupied guard post stood on the right of the much narrower hallway ahead. Crow nodded to the small desk and Shadow moved to the computer terminal integrated into the desktop. He looked up after a few moments trying to coax the console to life, then stood and shook his head.

  Crow glanced inquiringly at the narrow hallway ahead.

  “Some kind of scanner, maybe?” Tink ventured, his voice a whisper in the eerily silent hallway. From time to time, there was a shudder in the superstructure of the building as it settled around the damage the artillery bombardment had caused. “Or it could be a trap.” Shadow’s eyes darted about
the hallway, “No resistance since the lobby, no contact since we breached the building proper… I don’t like it.”

  “Forward?” Crow asked, equally quiet.

  Shadow jerked a nod at Crow, “I don’t see the option… I’m pretty sure this is the way to the core of the building. If they’ve got her, it’s this way.”

  Crow nodded. “Wait here.” He said, bringing his weapon up and stalking silently into the metallic hallway. The hallway was tight. He could have touched his elbows to both walls at the same time if he extended them. He’d gotten three steps in when a sudden, subtle disorientation swam through his senses. He hurried forward, a buzzing surrounding him from the machinery on all sides. He could feel a subtle pull on the weapon in his hands that shifted as he moved forward. Maybe this was some kind of active magnetic scanner, like an MRI, he thought, hoping for the best.

  He emerged from the far end feeling slightly dizzy. There was a symmetrical guard post on this side of the short hallway, also unoccupied. Crow scanned quickly around the short hallway on this side and motioned for Shadow to hold his position. There was a pair of swinging doors a few yards ahead made from a heavy frosted glass that stretched from floor to ceiling. He could see nothing through the doors.

  Crow keyed the ultra-short range band on the communicator at his throat, “Shadow, I don’t think that was a scanner. Hold your position for now, I’m going to move ahead a bit, then signal you with further orders.”

  He heard nothing in response. In retrospect, he also hadn’t heard the small squelch that should have accompanied the activation and deactivation of his microphone, bracketing his words. Crow checked his mission clock in the armor at his left wrist, but the LCD display was a garbled pattern of stationary dots and smudges. Crow looked back through the machine and signaled Shadow, indicating a communications failure with a gesture and a hand at his throat, then ear. He then signed the three letters “EMP” back to Shadow and gestured for him to remain where he was.

  “Orders?” Shadow signed back.

  “Follow the plan.” Crow signed.

  Shadow nodded, but then grinned and signed back again: “You mean the crazy plan?”

  Crow smiled and nodded. Shadow shook his head: resignation, not refusal.

  Crow turned, brought up his weapon and advanced to the opaque glass doors.

  They opened silently and he slipped between them, moving to the right, tracking the barrel of his weapon across the room until he was sure that it was empty. The room was a small waiting room with a few comfortable looking couches and chairs spread around it. There were three exits, one in each side of the room, with the fourth exit being the one through which he’d entered. He scanned the room and found what he was looking for. There was a small camera blister in each corner of the room, and a large, dark video screen against the far wall.

  Crow advanced on one of the camera blisters, looking directly at it and waving his arms. He did this for two minutes and was about to give up when the video screen on the wall finally flickered to life. The screen displayed a rotating icon for a few seconds then resolved to a blue background. Then another flicker and a woman appeared on the screen, looking grave, yet somehow amused. Crow recognized her at once: Therese Smith, their primary objective.

  “Yes?” She asked pleasantly enough, as if answering the door to an unfamiliar salesman in the suburbs.

  “Are you real?” Crow asked.

  ***

  Dr. Therese Smith stood in the external antechamber of the large, round biomechanics lab, near a rack of hazmat suits. “Keep me posted,” she said into her phone, “I’m going to ride this out in biomechanics-one.”

  “The lockdown on your floor would be safer…” Colonel Marks said from the secondary security post at the bottom of the installation, but Smith cut him off.

  “I’m below the blast shield. If they make it past that, the lockdown isn’t going to be much of a challenge.”

  “At least they’d have to find it.”

  “Right, like they won’t have to find me wherever I am. I’ll let them find me in biomech one.” Smith hung up and stowed the phone in her jacket. She knew that there were three heavily armed guards outside the outer lab’s armored door and between those guards and the blast shield three levels up, there were many such doors and many such guards, but she didn’t feel absolutely confident of her odds. It wasn’t rational, but it was still true. If these dragons could threaten them here, then things might be changing, balances of power might be shifting, or maybe she was just realizing that it had already happened.

  Smith knew that these dragons were dangerous. At first, when the OSI had been tasked with investigating them, she had felt resentful. It had felt like a political favor done for some powerful senator with overly tight corporate connections. It had felt like using a SEAL team to intimidate a bully that was bothering your daughter in grade school, but now…

  It had started as a string of robberies at corporate research institutions—small, violent but surgical. The OSI had been brought into the investigation early, when they’d hit the first government research lab in the Ukraine. Smith had resisted becoming involved, and tasked only a few resources as there had been so many other priorities. The OSI had worked with the NSA and FBI to bait a trap at a Genentex lab in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. When a team of four dragons had hit the lab and snatched the bogus tech, the three agencies sprang the trap. They had hit them with overwhelming force from complete surprise. They had lost fifteen agents. All four dragons had made it away with the bogus tech, Even though three of the four had received injuries sufficient to kill a more normal human, they kept fighting with focus and intelligence and an unstoppable relentlessness until they had made it away clean.

  Maybe if Smith had played this differently, maybe if she had realized the scope of the threat earlier, had escalated her agency’s response more quickly, if they’d applied more resources when the assassinations began…she gave her head a single sharp shake to clear it and pressed her hands to her face. Recrimination and regret were distractions to solving today’s problems, distractions she could ill afford. The OSI had made this installation as hard as they could, but these dragons were taking it apart. She knew Hawkins had made the right call going completely defensive until their military backup arrived, but there had to be something more that could be done now.

  She rolled her shoulders, trying to alleviate the tightness that was creeping from shoulders to neck, straitened her jacket and took a deep, steadying breath. Back to work.

  She walked to the stairs, ascended them, and reentered the lab. Hawkins was there, monitoring the security situation at the farthest workstation. There were about ten other techs in two clusters between her and Hawkins. The nearer group was clustered around Dr. Lansing’s terminal and consisted of mostly med techs. The other was clustered around Dr. Nelson, who had returned to the observation lab as the doctors and surgeons had taken over in the lab below.

  Smith bypassed the med techs, leaving them to their urgent work, and approached Dr. Nelson. “Status?” she asked, voice crisp.

  Nelson interrupted a rather heated argument he was having with two other techs—a verbal battle about pions and gamma rays rendered incomprehensible by deep, polysyllabic jargon—and turned to face Smith. “Well, other than the army of killers breaching the installation, we’ve got two related problems. First, what is killing our captive dragon: Lansing and company have found a flood of waste products in her blood, combination of heavy metals and some exotic particulates. The surgeons are pushing a transfusion, they’re putting blood into both arms and draining it from both legs, trying to clear as much of it as we can. We’re also pushing in nanos to bond with the particulates so that we can neutralize…”

  Smith halted him with a raised hand, “I only have three PhDs, Mike. More to the point, I need you to summarize like I’m solving other problems, not bring me up to speed so I can participate in your interesting discussion.”

  Nelson nodded,
“Touché. She’s been massively, massively poisoned. We’ve got some of it isolated, and if she didn’t heal like Wolverine she’d be dead already. We’re trying to get it out of her system with an accelerated transfusion and with some advanced therapy that we developed to treat radiation exposure. I’ve got no prognosis other than that she should already be dead and that makes me at least somewhat hopeful.”

  Smith nodded, “You said you had two related problems.”

  “Yes,” Nelson said, raising his hands between them, “The signal they sent was a fairly intense burst of gamma rays. We’re still not sure of the tech details, but it looks like a distributed lattice of molecular scale machines in her blood and tissues, too small and diffuse for us to detect, and obviously not affected by the EMPs we hit her with before we brought her here. Our working theory is that they were triggered by the cocktail of drugs that pass for the adrenaline response in her body. The machines emitted the burst, decomposing into the toxins we’re now trying to get out of her. We believe they had three purposes: To lead them here, to signal the attack, and to kill her quick and very thoroughly.”

  Smith understood, “So she’s the Trojan horse. We bring her in trailing a light, intermittent signal we didn’t detect until it was too late. They use that to track her to us, then when she makes her move to decapitate us, the signal goes off to begin the wider attack, but the signal also kills her, making sure we don’t get anything useful from her.”

  Nelson nodded. “That’s the theory anyway.”

  “Dr. Smith!” Hawkins shouted from across the room. “You are going to want to see this!”

  Smith gave him a quick nod, then turned back to Nelson. “We need her alive. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but she is your only priority until further notice. Understood?”

  Nelson nodded and Smith turned away, walking to where Hawkins sat at a research station. The monitors were all being used to display tactical schematics and there were a few open security feeds in small windows across the bottom of the displays, but one security display dominated the central monitor: a view of the level one lobby between the outer and inner security zones. On the screen, a scarred dragon stood, looking directly into the camera and waving his arms.