by Lee Doty
Shadow pivoted his weapon a few degrees to the right and discharged a two-round burst from his submachine gun between the collar ring and helmet of Reach’s body armor, killing him instantly. At the same time, Tink tackled Cat sideways, and they disappeared into an office to the right of the hall. Shadow spun quickly and juked to the right, bringing his weapon up. Zip, HoldFire’s sniper was still scanning the far end of the hallway ahead through the optics of his weapon, and hadn’t yet fully realized what was happening in the hallway closer to him. Shadow’s next burst hit him in the face, driving his corpse through the doorway he’d been using for cover.
Shadow juked left and loosed a burst of less-aimed suppressing fire toward Storm’s position, then turned and sprinted down the hall, away from Storm and toward the empty guard post and the narrow metallic hallway.
Less than three seconds had elapsed since Phoenix’s attack on HoldFire when Storm finally returned fire. His twin bursts caught Shadow in the back, bullets pinging off his helmet, the armor on his back, and tearing through an unarmored spot on his right thigh.
Shadow grunted, staggered only slightly, and continued his reckless sprint for the narrow hallway. “Tink!” he shouted, “Tink, MOVE!”
Storm fired twice more, scoring a hit on Shadow’s left calf and just above his left knee. Shadow fell, both legs wounded, tumbling end-over-end then finally lunging through the opening and into the narrow hallway. He continued crawling desperately forward.
On a sub-panel of the tactical display, Bai saw the crosshairs of Storm’s gun camera settling into a steady aim on Shadow’s exposed vitals as he struggled forward, leaving a crimson trail behind him. “Kill order?” Storm asked into the command channel.
Liu, HoldFire’s Cleric, looked at Xian for direction, shock only partially glazing his eyes.
Xian nodded, cold and distant as always.
“Affirmative, Storm.” Liu said, but then there was a crackling crunch through his radio feed and his helmet cam jerked toward the wall on his right, his gun camera wavered to the ceiling, then the gun fell to the floor, followed by his body.
“Clear!” Crow shouted from his position behind the corpse. “Status?” he barked down the hall.
Shadow kept crawling down the narrow hall, but reported, “Tink took Cat through the second door on your right. The rest of HoldFire were neutralized. Delta is maybe a hundred yards out on your six!”
Crow brought his gun up, covering the doorway where Tink had disappeared. “Tink, move!”
“Coming!” Tink shouted back, then he exited the office at a trot, leaning forward and left as he dragged Cat’s unconscious form behind him by the strap attached to the top of the plate carrier on her back.
Crow immediately understood. “Tink, forget her and MOVE!”
Tink slogged forward, at most of a run now, but without letting go of Cat.
In the trailer, Bai heard the squeal of Shadow’s microphone as it, his helmet and gun cameras, and all of his telemetry went dead. He’d moved a little over halfway through the narrow hallway. On the tactical display, Bai noticed that Shadow’s position trace line ended at exactly the same spot where Crow’s had ended ten minutes before.
Bai’s mouth dropped open as at least part of Phoenix’s plan crystallized in his frantic mind. The EMP not only hadn’t killed Crow, but somehow Crow was aware that it had disabled his telemetry feed to the Clerics. More incredibly, he and his team were operating directly against orders and against the other Falcons. The OSI must have made contact with him somehow… but that didn’t make any sense, he would never act against the other “real” players and earn himself a permanent suspension from the League and the Hallow, unless…
“Kill switch!” Bai blurted out. “Now!!”
“Do it!” Xian said immediately.
“Isolating the former members of Phoenix…” Liu began, fingers flying across his keyboard.
“Kill them all.” Xian snapped back, voice raising with a dangerous tension, “Kill the team!”
“But…” Liu began, but stopped as Xian’s pistol seemed to wink into his hand from thin air.
“Now.” Xian said with a lethal finality, his magically appearing pistol trained on Liu.
Liu nodded, and began to enter the necessary commands.
“Yuen,” Xian said, turning to Delta’s cleric, “Inform your team of their new objectives: Terminating Phoenix is now top priority. Destruction of the base and personnel is now of secondary importance.”
***
Crow sprinted down the hall, racing after Tink as he dragged Cat toward the narrow hallway and the EMP field.
“Tink!” he shouted, “Drop her and get into that hall!” Then after three more steps, he tried again, “Tink, I’ve got her… Drop her and run!”
“No can do, capt…” Tink’s voice ended in a snorting grunt and he dropped. He didn’t fall, he didn’t tumble to the floor… he simply dropped like a child’s discarded rag doll, slack body sliding to a halt on the polished stone floor.
“Tink!” Crow shouted, leaping over Tink and Cat’s bodies as they fell only a couple of strides before him. “No!” Crow slid to a stop, then turned and rushed back to his fallen teammate. Gently, he turned Tink over so that he could see his face. “Tink!” he shouted again, but he already knew that Tink wasn’t here anymore.
There was dark blood on the floor beneath his friend’s head, covering his mouth and chin, still flowing from his nose and eyes. Tink’s eyes were wide and staring in different directions, colored the deep red of burst blood vessels.
A tightness seemed to surround Crow as he sat on the hallway floor, holding his friend’s head in his lap. The tightness seemed to increase, until it was crushing him. Crow had seen Tink wounded on five other occasions, two of those seriously enough that he’d lost consciousness. Once, Crow had carried Tink through fifteen miles of African jungle, insensate. He’d seen Tink battered, incapacitated, but he’d never seen him broken before, and not just broken—gone.
The crushing pressure seemed to increase, somehow passing through Crow’s skin and into his bones and guts. With a start, Crow realized that the pressure wasn’t physical… his body didn’t feel it directly, but it was some trick of his perception or his mind. This realization made the feeling no less real, but seemed to reclassify it somehow.
For an instant, as he cradled his friend’s head, Crow saw Ash, dead eyes staring at him, close enough to touch yet forever lost. The pressure was now an ache, centering in his throat and chest and eyes, he was gagging on it, it was burning him like tear gas, blurring his vision, tearing at his chest.
“Crow?” Shadow said from over his shoulder, “What does this mean?”
Crow glanced back to see Shadow limping from the narrow hallway maybe six feet away.
“He almost…” Crow’s throat closed on the words, “He almost made it.”
“Is he…” Shadow looked uncertainly at Crow, “Is he going to the Library now?”
Crow’s mouth hardened into a grimace as the horrible pressure seemed to harden in his chest, seemed to crystallize into a different feeling entirely, a clarifying, bracing new feeling: rage.
“There is no library.” He said, laying Tink’s head gently back down on the floor. He pushed himself to his feet and checked the action on his weapon. “This is the only real world. We’ve been lied to since we were born.”
Shadow shook his head questioningly, but said nothing.
“Delta will be here soon.” Crow said, wiping the tears from his eyes, “let’s make sure none of them get away.”
***
In the back of the trailer, Bai willed his hands to unclench from the arms of his work chair, failed—willed his face to unclench and mostly succeeded. Fortunately, he’d been laboring with fear and discipline since childhood, had been conditioned by harsh training and harsher discipline since he could speak—since he could remember.
Also fortunately, he’d been sitting between Liu and Xian, on Xian’s side of the
little cluster of four computer terminals, so he didn’t get showered like he’d been with Mae. Still, little red droplets settled on his hands, arms and face, pulling his mind back to Mae, pulling it forward to his own likely fate.
“What is the lesson I want you to learn?” Xian asked in a dry academic tone, shattering whatever thoughts Bai had running through his overtaxed mind. “Lee?” Xian said, as if he were a university professor breaking up a lecture with an unexpected question.
“That…” Lee stammered, “That we, uh…”
Xian’s pistol drifted into a loose orientation on Lee. Lee half raised his hands and his wince intensified. “That we should… oh God…”
Lee’s head disintegrated. The thunder of the pistol hid under or behind its silencer, and the subsonic .45 caliber round made no crack as it flew straight and true through the tight air inside the trailer. Bai’s reeling mind dwelt briefly on how this allowed him to actually hear the clank-click of the operating pistol’s action and the wet sound from Lee’s head above the mechanical sound of the shot.
“Yes, Lee!” Xian shouted, eyes bright, his voice raw with pleasure. “Yes, I want us to learn that we should think faster! That we should not need to be commanded in the mundane operations of battle! That we should show an eager, yet appropriately subservient, proactivity of mind!”
The pistol drifted in Bai’s direction, but didn’t actually settle on him. “What else did we learn, Bai?”
Bai’s mouth was dry, his flesh bloodless, yet his heart was hammering in his chest and somehow, behind his eyes as if it were pumping hot air through his arteries. Bai’s addled mind somehow had time to note that Yuen, the only other remaining Cleric, and the only one with a living, still obedient team, actually smiled slightly. Now that’s cold, Bai thought, and in this trailer—in this company of murderers and blood-soaked supermen like Xian, that was really saying something.
And yet, it was only a fractional second before Bai said, in a voice so detached that he both amazed and impressed himself, “We learn that immediate obedience is more important than initiative, that initiative is more important than wisdom, wisdom more important than tactics, and tactics more important than strategy, for it is not our business to think, save as it applies to the immediate task our masters set before us.”
Xian smiled, “Indeed!” He holstered his pistol in a time continuum where insects’ wings flutter more than buzz. “The lessons you learned in your youth still apply yet today. Your observance of the Liturgies and prayers of your youth have spared your life today, Bai. Remember those lessons and continue to apply them and I will be…” he paused, seeming to consider the irony of the next word, “merciful… with your considerable failures thus far.”
Bai dropped his head in a small bow.
“Now,” Xian turned back to the tactical display, and to an even, businesslike tone as if he had not just murdered two of his subordinates in the last minute. “Yuen, what is your plan.”
“I have delta in a 2-2 split, moving in to Phoenix’s last known position from the north and east halls. If they intend to eliminate us as they say, they will attempt to draw us there and attempt to seize the initiative.”
Xian seemed to consider, then nodded. “Cleric Bai, as your team is… otherwise engaged,” he gave a small self-satisfied snort at his own joke, “I’d like you to focus on the tactical situation generally. See if you can anticipate Phoenix’s next moves.”
“Yes sir.” Bai said, trying to calm his nerves enough to think. He considered the tactical display, tried to fill in the likely layout of the halls and offices around the location where HoldFire had met their end. There were likely positions for ambush, but nothing more subtle than Yuen and Xian would already be able to divine. Bai had a very certain intuition that being too freely willing to share pedantic or obvious advice would doom him to the head-splattering of final judgment as surely as giving unhelpful or no advice. Yuen was now focused on the tactical situation, and he was proficient at his job. He ran Delta, the number two team in the league, and he ran them well. But since he had a team to run, of necessity, he had immediate orders to consider and give, had to watch out for the most immediate of threats, balance trust in Delta’s ability with his responsibility to command them.
Maybe Bai could remove himself from the situation slightly, keep events at arm’s length enough to spot something the others might miss… and he did know his team, at least as much as any Cleric knew their Falcons. He knew them well enough to know that what they were planning would not be what Yuen and Xian or Delta would expect.
Bai resolved to look where Yuen could not, and where Xian might not. To that end, he discarded the idea of watching events unfold and decided to focus first on what had already occurred, hoping to find some overlooked clue of what might be next.
He first rolled each of the video feeds of HoldFire’s helmet cams back to the point where they had encountered Tink’s “unconscious” form in the hallway that was now strewn with their bodies. He configured the four video feeds from HoldFire into a row of windows on his monitors as well as a window containing the overall tactical display of the relative positions of the four team members. He then watched them in sync, eyes flickering across the windows as the various cameras showed the ambush from various perspectives.
As Delta’s operators crept carefully forward, Bai had time to watch HoldFire’s demise twice, then once more at half speed.
At first, there was nothing that leapt out at him. The remaining two members of Phoenix had been careful not to do anything careless or indicative of their current plans. In fact, they had removed each of the helmets from the dead Falcons of HoldFire, tossing them into an office just to the south of their bodies. Each now showed either darkness as they came to rest too close to a wall or a desk, or a random section of the empty office.
One thing that might work to their favor is that they had not removed Tink’s helmet, but left it where it had fallen in the hall, its camera pointing back down the hall displaying the mayhem left by the last conflict, including three of the four bodies of the former members of HoldFire.
That camera eventually showed two members of Delta carefully advancing on the scene, leapfrogging from cover to cover.
Spiral
Chicago, 2020
“Look, I’m just saying that if you had a hat, this would be easier.” Jackie said in the tone of reasonable accommodation. “You pull up your collar and put on any kind of brimmed hat and your scars would bring less attention… it’s not that they’re not badass… they are, by the way, muay guappo, uh… it’s just that folks are going to be looking for badasses tonight.”
“I don’t wear hats.” The priest said with more cold iron in his voice than either of them had expected. The Priest thought on it for a moment, then added, “Anymore.”
Jackie knew better than to ask. She could tell that he wanted to share, so she let him do it on his own terms. She simply gave him sideways glances as often as she could to let him know she was interested.
“Turn left here.” The priest said, glancing up from Jackie’s phone. Jackie made the turn, then, after another sidelong glance, prodded: “Anymore, huh?”
The Priest nodded, his eyes far away. “I haven’t worn…” He swallowed. “The only place I ever wore anything on my head…” His throat closed, “Helmet.” He said, voice clipped.
And then he broke down crying and Jackie almost crashed the car.
When she’d overcome the shock and regained control of the vehicle, she reached a tentative hand out, placing it on his shoulder. He looked up, face tortured, tears flowing like a child with a skinned knee, like it was the end of the world. He shook his head slightly, an apology, but he couldn’t pull it together. Jackie squeezed his shoulder lightly, but she had nothing to say, so she pulled the car over and waited, hand on his shoulder.
Watching him cry was intensely uncomfortable, as it was clear and unencumbered with pride. It was more than a release, it was communication, and what it
said was sad. Jackie felt the tears falling down her own face. “What the…” she started, rubbing at her eyes, stunned again. She could feel this horribly dangerous priest’s pain, could sense it as reflections of her own memories, felt the loneliness after a harsh breakup in college, saw her mother crying at St. Vincent’s cemetery, Jackie’s small hand enfolded by hers. The most powerful man in the universe was gone and the most powerful woman wept. What was going on!?
“I thought she was dead.” The priest said miserably, snapping Jackie out of her reverie, “I thought she was dead and I swore that I would never…” He broke off, taking a deep breath, “But then I saw her and I was so happy, I was so careful… but then the teams came and I murdered them. I didn’t think twice… not even once. They threatened her and I killed them. I broke my vows. I killed the innocent.” He pressed his lips together and took another hard, steadying breath, “And I’d do it again a thousand times.”
“Innocent?” Jackie said, dubious, “You mean those Dragons?”
“Yes.” The priest said simply.
“But they exist to steal, to murder.”
“And yet they are innocent. Like Ash… like your friend. They are like dreaming children. They don’t know what they’re doing. Not like you do, not like I do now.”
“Ash?” Jackie asked.
“Yes. That’s your friend’s real name… or the name she had first, anyway. It’s no more real than anything else in the world that we both came from.”
