by Eyal Kless
Mannes turned his head and checked that the workers were still welding pipes and plates, as he had ordered. “When it was obvious that the world was on the brink of mutual annihilation, Adam sent infused and enhanced DNA material into the atmosphere and shut down a large part of himself so Tarakan secrets, our secrets, would not fall into the wrong hands. The DNA is the cause of the mutations otherwise known as ‘the marked,’ or ‘the tattooed.’ The mutations themselves transformed into many types of subspecies, but only one type carries the right genetic code to unbind Adam’s powers: the Puzzlers. Before locking himself away, Adam converted all the emergency bunkers to have puzzle locks attuned to a strain of a genetic code and let Darwinian forces take effect.”
“Are you saying Emilija is the key to healing Adam?”
Mannes’s eyes lit up. “There are thousands of minds trapped within Adam. Imagine what would happen if we could bring them all back. The greatest scientists, artists, military strategists, and thinkers of humanity are waiting to be rescued.”
“Yet when you had the chance, you chose to rescue me. Why not someone else?”
The look on Mannes’s face suggested he would have been raising an eyebrow if he had one on his face. “Are you sorry I brought you back?”
I looked around. “I can’t say I care for this world,” I answered softly.
Mannes surprised me with a bemused chuckle which turned into a wheeze and a cough. He recuperated quickly, though. “I was able to do some things on my own”—he gestured at the ground—“like hack open the emergency bunker below us without the use of a Puzzler, or get into the hibernating agent database and draw you out. But I needed someone with skills and proven survivability. As for why it was you instead of another agent, it was not planned. You could say I grabbed whoever I could in the short window of opportunity I had, and I got lucky. Your credentials are impressive, and you managed to complete your assignment under less than ideal conditions. To free Adam from his own cell I needed a Puzzler, and you brought me one.”
He was keeping things away from me. It was obvious and also the logical thing to do, but nevertheless, it annoyed me. “What will happen to Emilija?”
Mannes’s eyes narrowed slightly. He wasn’t expecting for me to be concerned with her fate. “She will fulfil her destiny for the better of humankind. She is a Puzzler, and according to my tests, her DNA contains pure, uncorrupted Tarakan code. If all goes well, this Puzzler is the last one I’ll need. She is literally the key that can open the gate for thousands of minds trapped within Adam.”
“Will she survive the process?”
Mannes’s body language betrayed his growing annoyance. It was obvious he was unaccustomed to being questioned.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“I am not sure I am comfortable risking a life of a civilian, especially someone who seems so unaware of reality.”
Mannes’s stare hardened. “How many innocents did you kill through direct and indirect consequences of your actions? It was all in the name of peace and stability for Tarakan.”
“Maybe it’s time to change course, then, and stop sacrificing people, as glorious or important as the reasons might be.”
“I outrank you, Colonel Major.” Mannes spoke softly but his tone was steel. “And I will not stand here and explain centuries of operations just to satisfy your moral code.”
“I don’t think rank matters here and now, not to me.”
“Oh, but it does.” Mannes took another step towards me. We were standing too close for comfort, but I held my ground. “Perhaps the ranks of sergeant and lieutenant, or even colonel major, are of no real importance in the grand scheme of things, but the rank that truly matters belongs to the one who is in charge. That would be me.” He drew himself up as he spoke, and his voice rose in a dramatic crescendo until he was shouting his last words into my face. I knew the type; I’d seen others like him before. He was not Dr. Mannes Holtz, a Tarakan civil servant anymore. He was Mannes, the Master of Men, and he liked it.
A logical inner voice warned me I was about to go too far but I opened my mouth anyway, just as the soldier who brought me into the barracks saved me from myself.
“Master,” he said, handing a flat-screen to Mannes, “this came through just now.”
Mannes looked at the screen. I saw him absorbing the information, calculating and reaching a decision within seconds. “Radio the second platoon to reach the station and deploy, meet them there, and take the colonel major with you.”
Mannes flipped the screen so I could see what was on it. He tapped the screen. There was a frozen three-dimensional image of a slick-looking, weaponised hovercraft driving upside down through some sort of a gate. Mannes magnified the image, and I saw the woman with fiery red curls I had seen in my dreams. She was driving two other men. The one in the back was looking away, and the one in the passenger seat was too blurry to recognise.
Mannes moved his hand and the image changed to a brief, looped video clip of the same hovercraft, this time driving upside down on what seemed to be the Sky Train’s tracks.
“The driver is the girl’s mother,” Mannes said. “Vincha. She is highly dangerous and possesses Tarakan military-grade communication tech. The other two are agents with enhanced battle capabilities.”
“Agents of whom?” I asked.
“Of those who do not want me to do what must be done,” Mannes answered, “and there is no time to answer all of your questions.” Mannes turned to the soldier standing next to us, “Lieutenant Rachim, take the fastest vehicle we have and join the second platoon.” Mannes pointed at me. “Take our guest with you. Apprehend the girl’s mother.” When he saw the look on my face he said, “The process can sometimes be confusing for the Puzzler. It would be easier and have less chance of being lethal if we could have the girl’s full cooperation. Having the girl’s mother in custody—”
“You will use her as leverage,” I said.
“I will try to persuade them to cooperate willingly, and perhaps this will save the girl’s life.” Mannes nodded. “We can talk further about this when you come back.”
Mannes was not the only one who could decide quickly. I was trained for these circumstances. “Fine,” I said, “capture the woman. But what about the agents?”
“They are of no importance.” Mannes was already walking away. “Kill them.”
Chapter 65
Peach
After I received my weapons at the gate, Lieutenant Rachim and I ended up riding on an old, fossil-fuelled motorbike that was nevertheless extremely fast. Gripping the sides of the motorbike, I used the short drive to replay my conversation with Mannes in my head.
Despite his appearance, Mannes was an impressive figure with a magnetic personality, and he was playing me. He was also anxious and eager; the way he oversaw the work on the power lines betrayed he was running out of time, patience, or both. No matter what Emilija might do for humanity, I was guessing she was important to Mannes on a very personal level.
There wasn’t much time left for me to figure things out.
Most of the platoon was already deployed when we reached the air train station and parked next to two huge tanker trucks. The fossil oil arrives through the station, then, I realised.
Two soldiers and a sergeant, all clad in battle armour, were waiting for us in the shade of the trucks. The Sergeant eyed me with open curiosity but did not say anything. Instead she began briefing the Lieutenant. Their body language betrayed some sort of close familiarity. Perhaps they’ve seen action together, shared a bed, or both.
“The platoon is deployed inside, and snipers are in position. Alpha is on the top platform, Delta is on auxiliary.”
“How long have we got?”
The Sergeant glanced up into her left-side visor. “They are not as fast as the Sky Train, so we just need to wait a little longer. Orders?”
“Capture the woman, kill the other two,” Lieutenant Rachim answered.
The Sergeant was about to
touch the Comm button on her helmet to relay the order when I stepped forward.
“Wait.”
Both looked at me, equally annoyed.
“They are outnumbered and you are deployed and ready. With that kind of an advantage, perhaps there won’t be a need to fire a shot. We could capture all three.”
Lieutenant Rachim turned to me. “There is no ‘we’ here. You are only an observer. We’ve got our orders.”
My next step brought me shoulder to shoulder with both of them. “You are right, I am only an observer, but I have led troops to battle and I know how fast things can go wrong. One of your snipers might get overexcited, or miss the target, or the marks could move at the wrong moment, and once a battle begins, you have no way to control who shoots where and who gets hit. Your priority is to catch the woman alive, isn’t that true?” Lieutenant Rachim nodded, hesitantly, and I pressed on. “What if there’s a way to catch them without any risk?”
“How?” the Sergeant asked, breaking the chain of command. Definitely sleeping together, then.
“You still have a functioning control room here?” I asked. Lieutenant Rachim turned to the Sergeant and she nodded. “Then take me there and keep your Comm open. You have nothing to lose. If I fail you still have your advantage.”
“Fine,” Lieutenant Rachim said, and turned away. “Sergeant Reims, relay your Comm through me. I’ll take point in the control room in the tower. Make sure all the exits are covered, but no one should fire a shot without my orders, clear?”
Sergeant Reims did not look pleased but nodded. I followed the Lieutenant into the building and up to the second floor.
“You get your fossil fuel through here,” I said as we climbed the metal stairs.
“Yes, it comes from the North—” The Lieutenant caught himself midsentence and snapped, “Stop asking questions.” But his slipup was enough for me to make the connection. The Oil Baron to the North was supplying Mannes with refined oil while attacking the land around the City of Towers. There was a Machiavellian plan at play behind the scenes. If Mannes was working with the enemies of the City of Towers, was he actually working against Tarakan as well? Was my gut feeling right and I was being played here?
I had no time to mull things over before we reached the control room on the top floor of the control tower. The door to the room was gone, so we simply stepped into the large room. The walls were transparent in all directions, and I could see the air train tracks leading into the platform areas. There were two soldiers sitting among two dozen floating screens, each displaying a different location. The soldiers snapped to attention and saluted as we walked in.
“Where are they?” Lieutenant Rachim did not bother to tell the soldiers to be at ease.
One of the soldiers pointed at a screen showing the hovercar whizzing through. “Just went through section 14E, sir. We have a few more minutes, but they should be slowing down soon.”
I stepped towards the second soldier with enough authority for her to move aside and waved my hand in the air until a transparent keyboard appeared in front of me.
“Whoa, that’s . . . how did you . . . ?” the soldier asked.
“It’s actually a pain in the butt to use those things,” I said as my hands moved around the transparent keyboard. “You have to do it by sight, not touch. I much prefer the old, physical version . . . there.” One of the display screens showed the list of security protocols in play. As I suspected, most were off-line for one reason or another.
“They just passed point 13E,” the other soldier announced, “and they haven’t slowed down. Hey wait—” The soldier leaned forward, cocking her head, and pointed at the screen. “Damn, they’re flying upside down.”
“That would be a very uncomfortable position to be in for the length of time that it would take them to cross the Broken Sands,” Lieutenant Rachim remarked.
“If we’re lucky they’ll be disoriented when they land,” I said, but thought, That woman is coming for her daughter. She will be extremely focused.
A passcode demand appeared in front of me. This was money time and a sort of a test for how much I could influence things. If the system still remembered my personal ID number and security status, I could control the security system and perhaps avoid a bloodbath. I punched in my ID and security number, a twenty-two-digit-long code. A second later I was in the system and managed to contain myself and not whoop out loud, but I guess I failed to hide my smile.
The Lieutenant walked over and stood behind me. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I know some things about the security of similar places.” Actually, as the threat to the gateway to the Star Pillar grew, I was asked to help beef up security and participated in several live tests of these measures right where I was sitting now.
“Places like this were always under threat of attack,” I explained as I worked, “and when you have a mass of people, all running and screaming, pointing and waving their hands, you waste precious seconds trying to find the bad guys and can make lethal mistakes. That’s why we installed a few measurements that would pacify and control the entire area. The only thing is that these measurements eat a lot of power, so I am diverting it from different places and into the security system.” I looked at the power meter. It was at 56 percent and rising, but not quickly enough. I pressed a few more transparent keys, and the lights around us dimmed.
“Tell your teams the lifts to the platforms will not work. They will need to use the stairs.”
Lieutenant Rachim touched the Comm button on the side of his helmet but paused. “Anything else?”
“We’ll need to lure them off the platform for this to work,” I said as one by one screens around us blinked out of existence, leaving us with only three. One was showing the upper platform and the tracks; the second, the lower grounds; and the third was displaying the power meter.
“What are you doing?” The Lieutenant placed a hand on my shoulder. “You’re leaving us blind.”
“Only partly.” I indicated the remaining screens. “You can still see your Alpha team and the platform. The rest are out of play at the moment.”
“I don’t like it,” Lieutenant Rachim muttered, but there was no time to argue. We all saw the hovercar fly in between the tracks, rapidly approaching.
“Here they come,” the soldier announced. “Damn, they aren’t slowing down.”
I glanced at the power meter. It showed 78 percent.
“Alpha, clear the platform,” I heard the Lieutenant and the Sergeant shouting in unison over the Comm.
A few seconds later the hovercraft disappeared inside the hall and I was half expecting it to burst through the other side. We all turned to the screen.
Eighty-two percent.
The driver—I assumed it was still Vincha—must have realised she wouldn’t be able to brake in time and, either as a defence measure or a Hail Mary attempt, unloaded her entire weaponry. She did not have time to target the missiles and focus the rail gun’s fire, so the shots exploded all over the place. The hovercar flipped just before reaching the top platform and immediately dropped down. Its discs were deployed, but its speed and momentum were too strong. The vehicle smashed into the second platform, crushing one of the Alpha team soldiers and hitting another. It bounced several times before turning sharply and flipping several times on its axis. Unsurprisingly, as the hovercar dropped from the second platform to the main hall below I saw flashes of white inside the vehicle, which meant that the ECF—Emergency Crash Foam—had been deployed. The people inside were held fast by the gooey substance and had hopefully survived the ordeal.
The hovercraft flipped twice more, spraying white crash foam everywhere, before coming to a halt.
“Report,” Lieutenant Rachim barked into the Comm.
“Corporal Sgar is dead. Mittal is injured, broken legs. Three more casualties in Beta team.”
The Sergeant’s voice filled the Comm. “Alpha team, stay back. Delta team, move in and secure the area.”
Lieutenant Rachim turned his head to me. “How is that security measure of yours?”
I shook my head. “No need to lure them anywhere. They are in the right zone, but I still do not have enough power.”
We both watched the figures of the Delta team run toward the crashed hovercar. “Well. If they’re even alive after that crash, I’m sure they are in no condition to resist.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said, remembering that at least one of them was functioning in a combat vessel. And never underestimate the willpower of a distraught mother.
The soldiers surrounded the crashed hovercraft. The windows were gone, of course, and the ECF was beginning to melt.
“I see three inside,” one of the soldiers reported, “all unconscious.”
“Secure them from the craft and move away before it blows,” the Sergeant ordered.
We watched the soldiers get to work. Vincha was the first to be taken out of the driver’s seat and carried away between two soldiers. Three others took hold of the large unconscious man wearing LeatherFlex combat armour and his power machine gun. The third man was in the worst shape. I could see that he’d dislocated his shoulder and his face was bruised and bleeding.
The power meter was at 84 percent. I looked back to the screen displaying the action in the hall.
The Delta team was walking away, their movements most likely traced by several snipers from the Beta team above, when I saw something that caused me to lean closer and magnify the display on the screen.
“Is there a breeze in the hall?” I asked. “Because the woman’s hair is twitching strangely.”
“What? Where?” The Lieutenant turned his head when several things happened at once. A sharp screech blasted through the Comm, making everyone, including the Lieutenant and myself, stop everything and claw at their ears to unplug their Comms. Everyone but the redheaded woman named Vincha, who turned around, punched the closest soldier straight in the exposed part of his neck, and grabbed his rifle. Then she kicked the other soldier in the face and began shooting upwards at the snipers. One of the Delta team recovered quicker than his squad members, forgot his orders, and raised his gun to shoot the woman. She would have died in that moment if he’d squeezed the trigger. Instead he was suddenly punched by the man in the LeatherFlex armor so hard that he flew back, spinning in the air and landing somewhere outside my line of vision. The man grabbed another soldier, and with the strength that only combat vessels have, used the poor soldier to hit the last two standing Deltas and then lifted him up as a shield as death began to rain from above. With his other hand, the combat vessel bent down and grabbed his still-unconscious friend while Vincha kept shooting upwards, and both of them retreated towards the upturned hovercraft, her red hair dancing in the air as if she was a mystic medusa.
