by Greg Bear
Much better. The numbness had faded. Now his skin felt cool and electric.
Still naked, Nathaniel picked up his bag. Hardly anything here was important enough to pack. A few clothes. Toiletries. He could leave the rest without regret, as if it belonged to a different man.
He dressed slowly, luxuriating in the feel of fine linen on his arm hairs.
The fabric brushed his scars.
The condo intercom wheedled. The security system that watched over his class of people in the Ziggurat asked him if he would like to receive visitors—and displayed a picture of three men and a well-dressed, attractive woman.
They were waiting in the spacious lobby, hundreds of feet below.
He did not recognize any of them, and so he did not give permission for them to rise to his unit.
In the lobby, as he watched, the group split up.
Best to find an unobvious way out.
The Ziggurat's security system was accustomed to arranging for exits after dubious late night activities, or drinking in the many bars.
Chapter Nine
Talos Campus
Fouad emerged from the annex, put on his spex, and stood stiffly upright in the lounge—a slight heat pulsing through his torso. The prochines in his blood had never felt like much of anything before. Now, actively bumping up against each other—chock full of distributed data—they seemed to be coming up on the radar of his body's immune system.
A fever at this point might attract attention. Axel Price was almost psychic in his ability to sniff out actions contrary to his plans. Fouad did not want to stay at the building's hub any longer than necessary.
Something was wrong with the building's network; his spex flashed two small yellow antenna symbols, out of range. He walked clockwise around the lounge, glancing north along one of the long Buckeye corridors, lined with classrooms.
Two men in gray shirts and black pants ran in from a garden entrance. Their boots squeaked on the linoleum—armor vests, campus security. For a moment, Fouad thought they were aiming right for him and his stomach muscles tensed.
Armor was unusual on the campus, except in training.
"Need any help?" Fouad called.
"Get the hell out of here!" the larger of the two shouted as the pair aimed for the next radius corridor—one of the spokes—their faces red with adrenaline rush.
Then the big guard slowed, lowered his chin into his bull neck—and spun about. He marched back toward Fouad—crown sporting brown fuzz, broad face, wide rectangular mouth sucking air and showing brownish teeth.
Big Guard. Happy to keep things secure—even happier to be aggressive.
The second guard stopped, shook his head, and reversed to join his partner. This one was slighter and shorter but wiry, with small black eyes, a plump face and butch-cut blond hair.
Little Guard. Happy to follow. He matched his wide stance with Big Guard but curved around to Fouad's left.
"We don't know exactly where the problem is. Network's down, teacher." Big Guard tapped his spex. "Any clues what's going on?"
Big Guard was a bigot. Fouad was being targeted based on skin color and appearance—in his experience, rare at Talos. Bad for discipline.
The pair rushed him in parallel and shoved him against the wall. His back pressed painfully against the corner of a framed poster of one of the nations in which Talos had operations—Nigeria.
Against his first instinct, Fouad let his muscles relax and said nothing. He did not frown, did not smile—did nothing to provoke. Perhaps he had tripped a silent alarm system inside the annex. Perhaps the network had shut down after sensing an unexpected intrusion.
He had to buy time.
"Are your spex working?" Big Guard asked, fingers pinching for Fouad's eyes. Another hand came up high and flat to slap him if he resisted.
Little Guard stroked the black knob of his electric baton. The men were starting to grin. Their eyes took on a focused vacancy, getting ready for resistance.
They had found the problem—the problem was a brown man.
Wild, high-pitched shouts echoed from the end of the radius. Big Guard lifted his nose, and Little Guard did likewise—pack dogs scenting other, bigger prey.
Fouad pushed them away—gently.
"Down there, perhaps?" he suggested, eyebrows lifted.
Big Guard and Little Guard smirked, cocked their heads, and again shoved him into the wall—their version of an apology, thanks for wasting our time. They backed off, reversed, and sprinted toward the shouting, louder and more frenetic.
A growing number of men made unhappy.
The pair reached the end of the radius, a hundred feet off, pulled out their electric batons—serious weapons, very painful—and swung left.
Fouad nudged out from the wall. The poster rattled. It was hard to imagine what the difficulty might be. The personnel most likely to engage in fistfights were off at the mess hall—young foreign soldiers and fresh security in training. Perhaps Big Guard and Little Guard belonged to that group. Perhaps a general alarm had brought them over to Buckeye.
He curled his lip in disgust, caught between two impulses.
The only people in Buckeye who stuck around through the dinner hour were software engineers, whose work never seemed to end.
Fouad shrugged to unruck the sleeves and shoulders of his coat. Then he fell back into a crouch at the sound of two rapid pops like champagne corks, followed by staccato slaps, softer echoes, explosive grunts from punches.
More swearing—then sizzling snaps, puppy-like whimpers, sharp cries of pain.
Everyone wore side arms in Talos—Price's mandate—but nobody would be letting off rounds on campus outside of the ranges and training village—nobody who was not in serious trouble. All the side arms were keyed to fingerprints or chips in the gun bearer's hands; shots fired were accounted for at the armory every two days.
Another series of champagne pops. Dust and chips blew out from a wall. Fouad lined up behind the heavy frame of a security door.
Odd that the doors were not closing . . .
Discretion told him to allow the trouble to come to him, but that was not the Talos way. Like dedicated warrior ants, Talos employees were trained to move in fast, whatever the danger. Trouble was to be immediately reported and taken care of—not avoided. Clearing out of the building—even at the forceful suggestion of security—would arouse another set of suspicions.
Good minions—excellent henchmen. All of us expendable.
And of course, as a brown man with an accent, his behavior would be judged by even higher standards.
He loped down the hall, past long windows looking into empty classrooms—flush to the wall, broken-jogging side to side, SIG-Sauer 380 presented at drop angle, finger off trigger . . . He caught himself and raised the barrel, finger back on the trigger—standard Talos training.
Talos operated in parts of the world where accidental shootings were preferable to responding a split-second slow, letting soulless attackers get the drop on you.
It might just be a disgruntled student taking out his anger on a wall or the ceiling. But students were issued weapons that fired only in training.
Disgruntled employees were rare in Talos. Most were dedicated, well paid. Price had learned his lesson with out-of-control contract security in Iraq. There, Talos employees had been caught pumping up on steroids, snorting cocaine, even shooting heroin to get through the grueling, dangerous days escorting officials, generals, diplomats, though the hell of Iraqi cities.
Fouad slowed as he came to the end of the hall, the outer circumference of this side of Buckeye. All he heard now was harsh, husky breathing and moaning—four or five men down, wounded or in pain.
A bullet had pocked the cinderblock on his right.
Another had gouged the linoleum floor, interrupting the golden reflection of the outer windows.
He darted a look to the left, around the corner, along the rim of the wagon wheel. In the warm afternoon light, Big Guard and Little Guard were t
rying to subdue a tall, skinny man and doing a bad job of it. The skinny man wore a green shirt and gray pants—engineering and programming—and jerked this way and that, loose jointed, like a puppet tugged by an idiot. Three other guards had been tossed back like dolls, belts and holsters empty—guns and batons thrown out of reach along the circumference.
Big Guard and Little Guard maneuvered like wrestlers, trying to grab the skinny engineer, but he escaped as if made of smoke.
For an instant, Fouad thought he was witnessing someone out of his head but very strong—on meth or PCP. Clearly the skinny man was not following any formal martial arts training, yet his movements were brilliantly unexpected and effective. He pranced rings around the guards, laughing as if at a dry joke. Big Guard and Little Guard were tiring.
Fouad was sure they were about to make serious mistakes.
He could not make sense out of any of this. Talos tested for drugs a dozen different ways each day. The air was swept regularly for traces and metabolites.
Big Guard had had enough. He gathered up all his remaining energy, yelled, and rushed in with arms spread—while his partner feinted to draw the skinny man his direction.
This time, the maneuver seemed to work. Big Guard took hold of the skinny man's arm, but he reversed and tugged hard—hard enough to pull the arm out of its socket, with an audible pop. Without any sign of distress, the engineer slammed his other fist back, chopping his assailant squarely on the bridge of his nose.
Big Guard fell to his knees like a stunned ox, then toppled, head cracking on the floor.
Fouad trained his SIG but the line was bad—he might hit Little Guard.
"Shoot the bastard!" Little Guard shouted, frantically kicking and sidling away.
The engineer spun like a dancing clown, his injured arm dangling outward, limp. He had to be on drugs, yet his movements had an improvised genius; a wiry, high-speed ballet of showy blows and dodges.
Little Guard was up again, wobbling but still trying to be game. The engineer executed one final move that Fouad could not follow—a backward run, good hand delivering a blind blow from a position of perfect but unlikely balance—force focused all wrong, more self-injury almost certain—but the blow connected.
Little Guard rocked his head back, wobbled, and slumped. The engineer pranced and watched him fall sideways.
He twisted and landed flat on his face.
Another painful crack.
Now the engineer turned on Fouad.
"I heard you coming down the hall!" he shouted. "My God, you're louder than an elephant!"
Fouad could have fired his SIG—certainly preferred that option over trying to physically restrain the man—but there wasn't much more damage that could be done, for the moment, and more guards would be coming.
"You're injured," Fouad said, his voice light, calm, as if speaking to a child.
"I'm not the one shooting up the place. Too freaking fast for bullets. They're trained to kill—I'm just a geek. Where are they? Send more cops!" He laughed like a loon. "What's fucking keeping them?"
"I am here," Fouad said.
"You're a teacher. Languages, right? Jesus, look at this mess!"
The skinny man was breathing slow and steady, deep, solid. No bullet wounds, only spots of blood on the floor—broken noses, perhaps. Judging by the way the he leaned, he had cracked ribs as well as a dislocated arm. The man was a wreck, but still utterly confident and not in the least concerned by the SIG.
"Doesn't your arm hurt?" Fouad asked.
The engineer stared into Fouad's eyes. "Maybe. I don't know. Trying out new moves, I guess."
There were no audible security alarms in Talos buildings. Guards and other first responders were alerted through earpieces or spex. Strange then that Fouad's own spex still showed no warnings—just two blinking yellow antennas indicating he was still out of range.
"No signal, right? I've cut the network all over the campus," the engineer said. "You look strong. Bring it over here."
"What's your name?" Fouad asked.
"Hey, don't think I'm crazy," the man said. "I'm scared—more scared than you, maybe. But it feels great to be scared! Come on. I don't have a gun."
"It wouldn't be a fair fight," Fouad said, keying in to the engineer's manic rhythm. "I might get hurt."
The man laughed. "You know it, man. You're trained to kill—I can hear it in your voice. All I do is talk to computers. Geek versus killer. You know you can take me."
Fouad stepped to the middle of the hall, gun centered on the programmer's chest.
The five sprawled guards were starting to move. The programmer paid them no obvious attention. One guard had fallen over his Glock—it skittered as he pushed up, a few centimeters from his outstretched hand. His fingers twitched.
Without a backward look, the engineer jumped and horse-kicked the gun down the hall, twisted his foot around, and tapped the guard with his heel.
The guard collapsed with a truncated whimper.
Here was total awareness of environment, more like a martial-arts master than a mouse pusher. All judgments off. Nothing could be trusted.
"You know self-defense," Fouad said. "All Talos employees are so trained."
"Yeah, but I flunked." The programmer raised his good arm, the left arm, and waggled his fingers. "Maybe I can deflect bullets with my thoughts. Anything's possible. Let's try it. Use your pop gun. Shoot me."
Fouad lowered the pistol. "No fighting. We should talk. You're more interesting than anything else around here."
The programmer looked disappointed. He shrugged, then put his hand on his limp arm, testing it. Despite what must have been incredible pain, he wobbled and tugged at the joint, trying to reset it, his attention off Fouad . . . and yet, almost certainly not. He seemed to have a greater sensory bubble of awareness, a heightened sense of space and position. Again, like a martial arts master.
"I popped it bad. Bet I could take you with one arm . . ."
"Let's just talk. Tell me what you're feeling."
The engineer laughed. "Ever see combat?"
"Yes," Fouad said.
"Me too. In Arabia. I was never supposed to fight, I'm important, you know—a software designer, a programmer, an essential asset. But the driver screwed up. He took seven of us down Death Alley by mistake and insurgents blew us all to shit. The driver's head ended up in my lap. My fucking lap! Dead school kids outside the truck—spread out like raspberry jam. Do you have nightmares, sweats, that sort of thing?"
"Sometimes," Fouad said.
"Interfere with your work?"
"Not much," Fouad said. "I pray. Allah forgives all His children."
"You're a Muslim!"
"Yes," Fouad said.
"A Muslim in Texas. That has got to be fun. These bastards—" He swung his good arm at the prone men. "They're hard enough on geeks. Guess I showed them something new, huh?"
"You should come with me. I'll take you to a doctor. Your mind is strong but your body is weak. Have mercy. You can't learn your potential if someone here shoots you."
This finally seemed to make sense. The programmer was pale as a sheet and starting to shiver. He rubbed his temple. "My head really hurts. What's your name?"
"Fouad. I'm an instructor . . . in languages, as you guessed. What's yours?"
"Nick. I'm pretty important. Systems about to come on line. Back in Texas to check it out, the last details—then, wow! I get my own internal Krell brain boost. Do you know Axel Price? If you see him, tell him the treatment worked—I'm better than ever."
"I will," Fouad said.
A full squad of guards rushed clockwise along the circumference behind Fouad. From the other direction, behind the fallen guards and the programmer, ten more gathered, assault weapons drawn—pointing at Fouad as well as the skinny man.
They were well trained, not trigger-happy—for which he was grateful.
Fouad waved them back. "He's unarmed and he's injured. He's prepared to surrender."
&nb
sp; The guards moved in, assault rifles at ready, unconvinced. Three of the five on the floor were again trying to get up.
"Shoot the bastards! Shoot 'em both!" Big Guard shouted, but his hand slipped in his own sweat and he fell and cracked his jaw. That was it for him.
Fouad secretly enjoyed this. For a moment, his sympathies were with the programmer—with Nick.
A short, blocky man in a dark red shirt—senior staff, chief of security—joined the group gathering beside Fouad.
Three of the guards pulled steel flashlights with big flat heads from their belts. The programmer yelped with delight. "Try it! Try me!"
The three circled at the maximum distance the hall allowed and swept him with super-dazzling flashes of light, brighter than a dozen suns. Nick yelped and covered his face, too late. The brilliance flooded his retinas, stunned the nerves behind his eyes, temporarily locked his brain in something like paralysis.
Helpless, off balance, he stumbled and fell. The guards swarmed him like ants over a grasshopper. In seconds the programmer was strung up like a roped steer.
The chief lifted one gloved hand, game over, then gave him Fouad a knowing wink, one warrior to another. "Some show, huh? We'll take care of him from here. Get back to whatever you were doing—and not a word to anybody."
Fouad agreed that would be best.
Chapter Ten
Lion City
Sunset painted the empty land like a sheet of flame, oranges and reds on the horizon, blazing gold overhead. Dusty late summer days in Texas were bookended by wind-blown glimpses of hell. In the morning, the hell began yellow and pink and nearly silent; before nightfall, the sky gates opened, fierce and fiery.
South and east of Lion City, the main campus of Talos Corporation—classrooms, barracks, dining halls, mock towns, firing ranges—sprawled over ten thousand acres, larger than Lion City itself, and prouder, as well. Proud and remote.
The walled, moated, razor-wired campus lay quiet under the hot dusk sky, divided into four compounds like a gigantic cross carved into the west Texas flatland. Each compound was devoted to an aspect of Talos's overall mission: to train the world's police and armies in special tactics.
