Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  She couldn’t afford to let the door swing closed, lest she be trapped on this side of it by the racket opening it would make. Trusting the hinges to cover stray footfalls, Diana dashed up from the landing just in time to slip through the door as it clicked shut.

  This hallway was identical to the one below. Fluorescent lights lined the ceiling, some panels no longer functional, so that the illumination was both glaring and irregular. Cream-colored walls gave the industrial facility a strangely lighthearted aesthetic, softer than the pure white of a hospital. The rubberized floor made it easy for Diana to keep her footsteps silent as she closed in on the soldier stalking up the hallway ahead of her. He was alone, assault rifle hanging across his back, and the hallway was otherwise deserted, the defunct oil platform far too large for a team so small.

  In her feed, Diana saw that the man was tracing the same path she had laid out for herself. He was heading for Dag’s room. Was it time for another interrogation session? Were they going to remove the scalpel from the raw wound of Dag’s crumbling mind to challenge him with questions he couldn’t answer? Had she somehow miscalculated and they were transferring him somewhere else? No, they had requisitioned the supplies her chopper had delivered. There would be no need for that if they were about to blow this joint.

  The man turned to face Dag’s door, and this small mystery was solved. On a plastic tray with rounded edges, he carried an MRE and a small cup of water. In any extended interrogation, these small tokens of temporary deliverance, appeals to biological necessity, were the currency that eventually bought the victim’s trust.

  Acknowledging the guard’s credentials, the door hissed open. Keeping her pistol trained on him with one hand, Diana dipped the other into a jumpsuit pocket and pulled out a cylinder the size and shape of a pen. The man stepped through the door, and she followed so close behind him that she caught a hoppy whiff of his deodorant.

  As they crossed the threshold, Diana reached up and jabbed the cylinder into his bare neck, the needle within injecting its potent cocktail. A puff of air escaped his lips, not quite a gasp, not quite a grunt, and he shivered as if he had been subjected to a mild electric shock before collapsing onto the floor, deflating as awkwardly as a punctured balloon. The plastic tray clattered down with him, MRE slop and water spilling everywhere.

  A powerful sense of déjà vu rippled through Diana. She had never before set foot in this room, but she had analyzed every digital record of it in Dag’s feed archive, caressed every memory until they were polished smooth, obsessing ceaselessly since Helen had showed off her hostage like a hunting trophy, careless of the clue that was the very room in which he was imprisoned.

  Diana almost couldn’t believe it, but there he was, her kidnapped lover, her nemesis, her second half, her Achilles’ heel, her best friend.

  Dag.

  CHAPTER 24

  Dag lay on a small couch in the middle of the room. There was no other furniture, and plywood boards covered the doors to the suite’s adjoining office, bathroom, and bedroom. The audiovisual deluge had been mercifully paused for the delivery of his meal, although she could see the caged light fixtures that had been bolted around the room. The reek of urine and feces wafted over from a plastic bucket in the corner.

  Dag’s eyes were wide open and bloodshot, staring straight through Diana into infinity. He was dressed in loose-fitting black pajamas and tucked into a tight ball, knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them.

  A hole opened up inside Diana, resolve draining like water from a leaky vessel. It was one thing to imagine Dag under interrogation. It was another to see him in front of her, gaze vacant, eyes sunken, lost in the maze of a mind rebelling against reality. She had seen prisoners reduced to wrecks before, pushed until they babbled whatever they imagined you wanted to hear, inventing fractured fantasies that held together only long enough to taste a sweet sip of water. Desperation was a blunt weapon. It might eke out a crucial detail at a critical juncture, but it also ate away at truth like corrosive acid. Beyond its questionable utility, using such techniques made intelligence officers believe their actions were justifiable, and the reality of a world in which crises were constant and urgent created a race to the bottom when it came to the circumstantial evidence required to justify torture.

  Torture. A word that was anathema to the government doublespeak that buried anything distasteful in acronyms and euphemisms, a broken culture that Diana could no longer ignore now that Helen’s power play had ripped the silk glove from the iron fist. This was how Helen guaranteed Diana’s compliance.

  Self-disgust spurred Diana to action. Now was not the time for wallowing. Besides the man lying unconscious on the floor, there were six more heavily armed killers roaming this platform who would happily dispatch her and Dag if they were caught. She summoned her feed and triggered the next set of distractions. Smoke would begin to pour from the chopper’s engine housing, whipped by the Arctic wind, a fake malfunction to call their attention away from the action below. Simultaneously an automated SOS notification would ping every feed in the area, the distress call originating from one of the abandoned oil platforms inhabited by libertarian seasteaders who, in this fictional call for help, were suffering a massive fuel leak. The combination should give Diana and Dag a few minutes of respite before being unveiled as a ruse.

  Dismissing her feed, Diana knelt in front of Dag. Belatedly realizing that he could see nothing but an indistinct shimmer, she unwrapped her shemaugh. Her disembodied head appearing before him should have provoked a reaction, but Dag’s eyes remained wide and unfocused.

  “Dag, honey,” her voice cracked. “It’s me. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  No response.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. “I promise.”

  She wanted to pull him into her arms, to weep on his shoulder, to apologize for having put him in danger, to confess the awful things she’d done, to tell him this wasn’t the person she wanted to be anymore, to comfort him and nurse him back to health. But right now she had to focus on getting them both out alive.

  Swinging the backpack off her shoulder, she removed two gas masks and a bandolier of pressurized canisters. She held a mask in front of Dag and employed the calm, firm tone people in shock were most likely to respond to.

  “I need you to sit up,” she said.

  No response.

  “Dag, I can’t do this on my own. I need you to sit up.”

  His hands unclasped from around his knees. He let his legs drop off the edge of the couch and slowly raised himself to a sitting position, still staring straight ahead.

  “Okay,” she said, raising one of the gas masks. “Now I’m going to help you put this on and then put on my own.”

  Careful to keep her movements slow and precise, she placed the gas mask over his face, tightened the straps, and double-checked the seal against his skin. Then she repeated the process for herself. Shoving the unconscious guard onto his side, she pulled off his jacket and boots and helped Dag slip into them. Standing back, she inspected her handiwork. Almost there. She wrapped the shemaugh around Dag’s head, and it vanished against the background. Better.

  Who knew how long she had. Maybe they had noticed the guy who delivered Dag’s food wasn’t responding, maybe they’d seen through the fraudulent SOS alert, maybe they’d realized the chopper’s troubleshooting was a sham. She needed to move quickly.

  Kneeling down again, she made eye contact with Dag through their visors.

  “We’re leaving,” she said. “It’s going to get weird out there, but all you need to do is follow me and do what I say. Understand?”

  No response.

  “Do you understand?” She hated herself for the command in her tone. It felt like kicking a puppy. But she had no choice.

  Dag’s head jerked up and down twice.

  “Good,” she said. She took his hand and helped him to his feet, then turned away and rested his hand on her s
houlder. “Keep your hand there, it tells me you’re still with me.”

  She approached the door, Dag shuffling behind her. Pulling one of the canisters from her bandolier, she thumbed the release, heard the hiss of releasing gas, and rolled it out the door and up the hallway. Haruki’s pharma supplier didn’t have access to lethal compounds, which Diana wasn’t after anyway, but he could fabricate aerosolized doses of legal recreational narcotics.

  This particular molecule was similar to classic LSD but with faster onset, stronger psychoactive effects, and a longer half-life. A few lungfuls of the colorless, odorless gas would set off neurotransmitters like Christmas lights. Diana stole a glance around the doorjamb. Excellent. Her pet drone had already come through on its tour of the facility, using thin layers of spray paint to turn the floor, walls, and ceiling of the hallway into mirrors.

  “Let’s go,” she said, leading Dag down the hall.

  A door slammed behind them, and Diana looked back to see two men emerge, struggling to orient themselves.

  “Hey,” one of them bellowed. “What the fuck? Lito?”

  She considered turning to shoot, but it was better to use the precious seconds to get to the stairs. Diana was able to parse what she was seeing far better than they would be able to. Coming down to check on their buddy, they had stepped into an underworld where reflections pinballed to infinity in every direction, and retreating into the distance down the center of the prism, a headless man and the disembodied head of a woman bobbed along, mirrored a thousand times over.

  And that was before the drug crossed the blood-brain barrier.

  Diana crashed through the door to the stairwell, pulling Dag behind her. The drone had come this way too, and descending the stairs felt like careening through a kaleidoscope. At every landing, Diana opened the door to the adjacent hallway and tossed in a canister from her bandolier. Soon enough the air-circulation system would turn the entire oil platform into a psychedelic gas chamber. It would take days for the guards to sober up and even longer for them to figure out what had really happened. In the meantime Helen wouldn’t be able to extract anything useful from them, even if they were bold enough to alert her. Better to leave behind confusion than destruction. Conflicting information was much more dangerous than straight-up failure. It didn’t just hurt, it paralyzed effective response.

  Just as the sounds of footfalls and profanity echoed down from above, Diana and Dag burst out of the stairwell and sprinted down the hall to the cargo bay. Dag tripped and went down, skidding across the floor. Tapping a hidden reserve of strength, Diana hoisted him back up, and they staggered drunkenly forward. Gunshots rang out behind them. Dodging around crates that were now mirror cubes, they made it to the cargo elevator. The pursuers lurched into the bay, assault rifles roaring as they gunned down their own scattered reflections. The doors clanked shut, and Dag gasped as the elevator jerked into motion, a hidden cable screaming from long disuse. Exhausted and overwhelmed, Dag was hyperventilating through the gas mask, hands on his knees.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Diana, wrapping an arm around his trembling shoulders and giving him a gentle squeeze, not sure whether she was reassuring Dag or herself. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Diana summoned her feed, canceled the chopper’s falsified error cascade, confirmed that the loading doors were still open, and initiated the takeoff sequence. Then, sending it a mental thank-you, she triggered the drone’s self-destruct. Three seconds later, smoke alarms began to blare. That would attract anyone still above deck.

  The doors opened, frigid wind whistled through the growing gap to steal their breath away. Salvation was so close, she could taste it. Soon they would be off this godforsaken platform and hurtling toward friendlier climes. Dag could recover and she could—

  There was a man standing on the helipad, facing the cargo elevator. The parting doors revealed him to be in his early thirties, a short growth of carrot-colored beard covering a prematurely lined face. Like his compatriots, he was dressed in combat gear, a long beige parka whipping around his legs. His consternation at the elevator’s unexpected arrival deepened into confusion and then almost childlike fear as his gaze flickered from Dag’s headless body to Diana’s bodiless head. He began to raise the assault rifle dangling from a shoulder strap, Diana’s feed projecting his line of fire and mapping scenarios and probabilities across her vision.

  She pulled the trigger. Once. Twice.

  Locking Dag’s wrist in a steely grip, Diana yanked him out of the elevator, over the twitching corpse, and across the helipad. The last thing she wanted to do in the world was look down, but she had no willpower left to resist the perverse gravity of slaughter. A single glance was all it took. He lay flat on his back. One shot had hit him straight between the eyes, the other a few inches up on his forehead. His face was surprisingly intact, almost as if the entry wounds were nothing but inexpertly applied bindi. But the bullets had slowed as they tore through his brain, ripping out the back of his skull along with everything inside it, gore spreading out across the deck behind him like a halo, the downdraft from the accelerating helicopter blades sending ripples through the mess even as it crystallized, tendrils of steam rising off hot blood as the Arctic claimed him.

  Shoving Dag in front of her, Diana dove into the chopper’s open maw. As they slid across the metal floor to thump into the far wall, she pinged the autopilot, and the aircraft leapt off the deck and out across the open sea, engine howling, newly agile thanks to its lightened load.

  Never hesitate. He who hesitates, dies.

  CHAPTER 25

  Diana stroked Dag’s hair as he slept on the couch in the small cabin of the charter plane to which they’d transferred from the chopper once it reached the mainland. After administering the sedative, she had stripped Dag down, sponge-bathed every inch of him, and dressed him in clothes she had picked up from the cottage, his chemically induced sleep so deep that nothing could disturb it. After long periods of deprivation, sleep itself began to retreat, like a dog from an abusive stranger. Every cell in Dag’s body might have been screaming for rest, but over the course of the past few days, his kidnappers had trained his mind to associate the drift into unconsciousness with violent disturbance, the anticipation of abuse becoming an abuse in itself.

  As she stroked, Diana’s fingers picked up a thin film of grease. It wasn’t just lack of sleep that pushed people to the psychological brink, it was dehumanization. Shitting in a bucket, wearing pajamas, smelling only your own increasingly rank body odor, all these were tactics deployed to weaken resolve and increase dependency. Knowing that Dag was living this particular hell was intended to prod Diana into executing Helen’s plan. Nothing, certainly not the fate of a retired lobbyist, would stand in the way of her will to power.

  “I’ve got you now, baby,” Diana murmured. “It’s over. You’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

  Diana began to sing “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin” under her breath. The words shone through memory’s palimpsest, and she could still carry the tune. It brought to mind the strength of her grandmother’s wrinkled hands, her funny old-person smell, and the diamond sharpness of her gaze. There was something strangely familiar about this feeling, slipping across international borders, defying the authorities, egged on by fear for those closest to her. Diana was a refugee again, a refugee from the world she’d built, from the life she’d created for herself.

  Dag’s face had acquired a certain hollowness, and his eyes danced beneath their lids. Diana leaned down and planted a soft kiss on his forehead. She could only hope that he wasn’t immersed in some inescapable nightmare, demons pursuing him beyond the bounds of consciousness. As she gazed down at his face, she couldn’t help but imagine a halo of gore spread out behind it. She closed her eyes, but that made the vision only more vivid.

  It had only been a few hours. The guards must be roving the oil platform, attempting to seek answers even as hallucinations chased them along mirror passageways and into dark spi
rals of internal reflection. They would doubtless discover their colleague, asleep on the floor of Dag’s empty cell, their absent prisoner a ghost who had vanished into the ether, leaving inexplicable traces that added up to . . . what, exactly? The cargo helicopter, miraculously repaired of whatever mysterious dysfunction had maimed it, disappearing over the pastel horizon around which the pale sun circled like a python around prey. The flash-frozen corpse of their colleague awaiting them on the helipad, frost lacing the lashes of still-open eyes that stared into an infinity that even they, in the manic grasp of a most potent psychotropic, could not glimpse.

  Diana reached the end of the song, drawing out the last note until her vocal cords matched the vibrato of the jet engine. Between the bizarre state in which they had left Dag’s prison and the evidence of false activity Diana had planted, they would have at least a day or two to make their escape before Helen discovered the truth.

  “You’ll finally get your wish,” she said, her voice breaking. “We can leave everything behind, go off-grid, start a new life somewhere.” She smelled wet earth, admired the complex pattern of sunlight falling through lush vegetation, tasted the fluffiness of Dag’s homemade pancakes. That breakfast felt like a lifetime ago. It was as if she were watching a feed drama instead of remembering something she had actually experienced. If only she could transport herself to a different branch of the quantum multiverse in which every decision forked a new world. Not so long ago, her greatest frustration was Dag’s presence in her life, which his absence had clarified as her own insecurity about sharing herself with the person she loved. She had wanted a new mission that could renew her sense of self-worth and secure the fragile dignity tied to her embittered patriotism. Helen had revealed that veil for what it was, a shield with which Diana defended her own long list of sins.