As the truck neared the bunker, the tank suits leapt into action. Electric jobs or something similar, the suits rose on digitigrade legs, armor covered with blunt studs in places to help absorb blasts. Heavy rotary cannons tracked the truck as it came near, paying close attention to the vehicle and its payload, scanning the contents. Not Walken, who already vaulted from the roof of the storehouse onto the concrete of the yard, a white ghost moving cold and invisible toward the assembly, molecules of opportunity dissected and analyzed in his nostrils along with those of the mountain air. He loped on all fours, his grotesque limbs carrying him forward with grace, until he stopped at corner of the building’s entry face. He crouched there, low and rippling in the dark, watching as troopers came out to sweep the boxes with sensor wands while the tank suits looked on.
Though he could not read their sensor cones, Walken had a good idea of where they were looking. His state of the art suit made him confident he could get closer without being discovered. The troops took their time with the scanning, and he kept an eye on his camo battery slowly draining away as the soldiers did their work. Finally, the doors of the bunker rumbled open, hissing like the iron curtains to a particularly epic grave-rock concert, and Walken felt the moment upon him. Without looking at the suits, he launched himself off the corner of the building and bolted toward the truck, sprinting fifteen yards. He grabbed the lip of its flat bed, and swung around beneath. He took hold of the undercarriage, keeping himself pulled tight against the chassis as the truck moved forward into the bunker. Walken waited for something to go wrong, for the troops to come running over to roll a grenade at him. But they did not, and the truck kept going, through the open doorway and into the bland concrete vault.
Walken put his head out to get a view of his surroundings. The bunker was indeed entirely empty, save for the pipes and wires that ran across its walls and the occasional warning in angry red Hangul. The floor was also mainly concrete, but the truck had parked on a large square metal platform in the center of it. The square rumbled to life, and Walken ducked back under the truck as the platform lowered.
The elevator took the truck and its hidden passenger down what Walken calculated to be a hundred feet or so through a concrete shaft, coming to rest on the floor of another large, featureless bay. Several metal gates lined the walls, all of which swung open as the lift stopped. A gang of claw-handed robots emerged from recesses behind the gates. Crablike affairs painted industrial oranges warmed the truck. He hung tight as the machines began taking crates; he shifted to one side of the undercarriage as they scanned printed barcodes with a tiny laser emitter mounted in the bland expanse of their bodies, and carried each one to a large opening in the back of the room where a conveyor belt ran them elsewhere. Walken waited until one of them hefted the freezer crate from the truck bed before he moved along between them, ducking beneath the box and out of the way of any sensor apparatus. Perhaps it wasn’t perfect, but he knew from the maps that he could get most places from inside the supply network, and going through corridors so far from the lab block was a risk that he did not wish to take.
Just before the machines deposited the fridge box on the conveyor, Walken jumped up into the opening in front of it. If any robot had the capacity to see him on infrared, the cold of the box would protect his already heat-muffled form. He rode the conveyor away from the machines and their silent labor. As he curled up against the box, he reflected on his old deep and abiding fear of enclosed spaces. Not anymore, apparently. He couldn’t say when or how he lost it.
Eventually, he reached a distribution center, where various machines sorted the packages to their intended destinations. The fridge box rode the belt destined for the biomedical laboratories, but Walken could not follow. He knew from the maps it would pass through radiation screens and other devices that would fuck up his suit, if not himself, and he didn’t need to show up for Kim glowing like a Christmas tree. Instead, he chose a conveyor that would dump him into the materials science lab, where hopefully he could get to his chosen destination.
He emerged from the chute at the head of a small line of boxes into a long room filled with anonymous machines, long tables, and a series of massive flat screen monitors that lined every wall. The overhead lights were turned down very low. Nobody was there to receive delivery, which gave Walken the unexpected sensation of an unwanted Christmas gift as he slid out of the delivery hatch in the rear corner and sidestepped the collection bin. He’d hoped for some lonely scientist he could follow out into the hall, but had no such luck. Instead, he crossed the room to the exit, pressed a gloved hand against the lock panel next to the laboratory’s blank steel door, and willed it to open. The panel clicked obediently, and the door hissed open to reveal the profile of a Korean soldier walking past.
This, of course, was why Walken preferred to crawl around in the ductwork.
Walken stepped back into the lab on reflex, twisting to the side, but the surprisingly alert soldier snapped around, unslinging his rifle and bringing it to the ready. As tough as he was, the Chinese-made assault rifle in the other man’s hands would bring a messy end to Walken’s stealth operation.
“Hello?” The guard sounded young. He wore the red of a Youth Veteran’s Brigade armband on the sleeve of his fatigue tunic. Why the Koreans would be stationing teenagers at a military laboratory was beyond Walken’s ken.
“Hello?” The kid repeated himself, the blank visor of his helmet and his slightly distorted voice gave him the appearance of some kind of action figure. He stepped into the laboratory, past Walken, who put his foot into the doorway to keep the door open. As the kid took another step further, he slid past him into the hallway, leaving the young man to his confusion.
Walken really had to move. He hoped the kid would get a maintenance crew rather than an armed response team. Then again, Youth Veterans were raised as soldiers, a suspicious bunch, and he sounded much more uncertain than annoyed at a mechanical spasm. Why the hell couldn’t he have been another bored soldier like that idiot in the command center? Well, he couldn’t do anything about it other than to find Kim and get him the hell out of that hole.
He jogged down a tangle of corridors in the direction of the biomedical labs, stopping when he saw guards, easing past them without obvious detection. After a few minutes, and no apparent increase in vigilance, he dared hope the teen gave up. Had he really gotten away with that whole thing? Walken could not believe it. In point of fact, he did not believe it. As he proceeded toward his goal, he prepared himself for the Koreans to be tipped off by vengeful Yathi, a mob of armed soldiers to bear down on him at any moment, for Kim to be assassinated, and for the whole thing to go up in a colossal explosion of failure. It wasn’t paranoia, after all, if they were truly out to get you. The occasional sputter of old-fashioned fluorescent bulbs overhead served as a proxy for the racing pulse no longer had.
But his worries proved unfounded. Walken’s suit seemed to eat any hint of spare radiation thrown his way, any kind of scanner beam, and he walked unchallenged past the guard booth at the corner of the last corridor and down to the door of the biomedical block. The transparent alloy doors consisted of slabs so thick they managed to slightly distort the view beyond like flat fisheye lenses. Beyond, an airlock led to the labs. The doors on the other end looked like the same clear metal, such that he could see vague figures in white cleansuits moving around in the labs. According to his data, Kim would be in there, mid-shift, ready to be extracted.
But how to do it? There had never been any formal plan. The variables surrounding Kim would not allow it, nor did the need to get him out of there without causing too much trouble. He certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone if he could help it. Walken recalled the map in his head. Multiple ducts led into the lab, emergency vents and that sort of thing, but none larger than the size of his head
Options? An armory on this level, but he disregarded it as irrelevant. Laboratories covering chemistry, materials, and energy. Another negative. He wasn’t a scienti
st, and he did not have the necessary skills to do anything productive. Whatever he might do in there was liable to hurt a lot of people. He wasn’t a hack artist, either, more a devotee of brute force, nothing like what Bobbi could do.
He looked into the airlock again, at the components and pressure nozzles lining the walls. Near the doorway, a row of gray, cone-shaped muzzles jutted from mounts in the ceiling. He recognized those devices from across time and memory, all those years ago in a Baltimore hospital, from the entry arch of an ICU in which Annie slowly turned into a gibbering, life-sized porcelain doll. Walken reached out to them with his mind, signaled the most dire thing that he could think of, and data shadows began to scream warning.
The whole level exploded with sound as Walken tripped the radiological alarms.
People knew that the reason nuclear weapons were no longer included in most state arsenals anymore was the de facto supplanting of the nation state by the corporate one. In a world where the preservation of property was a priority, nukes just didn’t have a place anymore beyond energy. People still remembered the blasted remains of Mecca, however, and the glass plains that made Iran a land of ghosts. They remembered the horror that befell Pakistan and northern India when the radiation cloud blew over them. Deep in the human psyche a special place for radiation poisoning existed now, far more sensitive than it had been a century before. The alarms warned that the Devil walked among them, and he must be contained.
Time held its breath. The sirens seemed to steal all motion with their shrill screaming. The cleansuited figures beyond the airlock door froze for a split second before the moment exhaled, and with it came a calm, firm voice piped in through unseen speakers.
“There has been a radiological emergency within this facility,” the woman’s voice droned placidly, a dreamlike synth job foretelling doom. “Please move in a calm and organized fashion to your designated contamination safe point. Repeat, there has been a radiological emergency…”
A few moments of silence beyond the doors, then a flurry of motion, white forms blurring like a wall of oncoming snow. The airlock slid open and a line of scientists and technicians came boiling out, not running, not quite, but in a line suggesting a centipede in digestive distress. Were there really a radiation leak of some kind, their suits would protect them to a good degree. Walken had taken this into account, and gave them all a wide berth as they burst forth from the lab. He looked closely into the large, well-lit faceplates of their plastic suits, marking each face as it came. Men and women, all pale with shock and fear, yet controlled enough not to make it a total shitstorm. And yet he could see no Kim.
Concern settled into Walken’s brain. Had he been in a different section of the laboratory? Was he out sick? As the last scientist made her escape, Walken faced a moment of horror in which he thought perhaps his actions doomed the entire operation. But the woman looked back over her shoulder for a moment; Walken followed her gaze to a lone figure working feverishly at the consoles.
Kim the hero, trying lock things down so the others could escape.
Walken could not help but smile as he strode in through the airlock, which sealed shut behind him. He entered the laboratory. Filled with biomedical devices, it looked more like a crèche for bizarre metallic insects, examination tanks and surgical arrays with a hundred manipulators each crowding the space along machines he could not hope to identify. It reminded him of Knightley’s lab, though magnified by a hundred times and filled with gear a generation or so behind. And there stood Kim, dealing with computers, flipping red switches with angry labels like ‘SPECIMEN DUMP’ and ‘EMERGENCY INCINERATOR. ‘He lingered there, watching the man work, admiring his cool in the face of what could otherwise have been certain death. He stepped close, close enough so that the cameras would not pick up his voice but the suit’s audio circuit would.
“Kim Jin Woo,” he said in his smooth, toneless baritone. “I’m here to collect you.”
The sirens cut out at a keystroke, though alarm lights still stabbed amber fingers across the laboratory floor.
“Yes,” the man said in a voice equal parts tired and annoyed. “I have been waiting for you. I must admit, the measures you’ve taken to get me are very inconvenient indeed.”
The answer caught him off guard. “I am sorry. My job’s to get you out of here without alerting anyone to my presence. An accident seemed the best way to go.”
“It’s perfect,” Kim said tartly. “Assuming you can keep the alarms going. I must admit that it was a novel, if psychologically brutal, way to go about it.” His hands never stopped moving across the consoles. “Of course they will make some damned state hero of me, assuming we can pull this off.”
“What can I do to help?” Walken looked across the laboratory. “If I drop the camo, they will see me, but―”
Kim let out a huff. “Just…make sure that nobody comes back here to save me from my suicidal act of reckless heroism. I need to dump this data. The instruments seem to think there’s six thousand rads bleeding in here. I want to be out of here before they realize that this isn’t so.”
Walken nodded. “All right.” He went over to the airlock door and reached out to the sensor system, willing that it kept going, imagining a rising scale of radiation. Marvelous, really, how the machines inside of him translated thought and desire into actionable code.
The lights spun on, scattering needles of angry yellow across the laboratory, until finally Kim announced he was ready. “I am finished with this awful place. Let’s get the corpse out and then we can get out of here.”
The words made Walken’s head snap around. “I’m sorry?”
“The corpse,” Kim repeated in a tone reserved for particularly dull children. “I cannot leave traces. Did you bring explosives?”
“I…what?”
“Did you bring explosives?”
“No!” Walken flailed a bit, ignoring Kim could not see him. “Why the hell would I need explosives? I just said that I came in here to be stealthy.”
“Yes.” Kim sneered. “Stealthy. A basewide radiation alarm is a terribly subtle thing. I don’t suppose that you killed anybody getting to me, did you?”
Walken shook his head.
“You’re invisible.” Kim said. “If you’re doing anything with your hands, I can’t see it.”
“Oh.” Walken felt more and more stupid as the seconds ticked on. “No, I haven’t killed anyone. No mysterious bodies to find later on.”
Kim nodded. “Good. Excellent. Well you’re going to need to get the clone out, and then put it in a clean-suit. I’ll have to blow up the lab.”
Walken stared at the scientist. His mouth worked like a landed fish’s. “Is that something you know how to do?”
“You don’t need to be a soldier to be able to destroy things.” Kim paused to smile.” I’ve learned how to do all sorts of things while trying to plan my escape. Like blind the security system, or at least put it in a loop. You can stop hiding if you like. Right now they’re watching me heroically run around like an idiot trying to secure as much data as possible.”
Walken did as Kim suggested. He stood by a mirrored pillar studded with machines, so he could see his reflection. In the bright light of the lab, his suit looked something like a black-tinted version of an anatomical model, wearing a bondage hood set with gleaming black eye-lenses. “Interesting techniques for a scientist to learn. Where is this body?”
Kim looked up at the sound of his voice, and frowned slightly as he saw Walken standing not far away from him. “Interesting suit. I wasn’t expecting a commando.”
“I’m not military or anything.” Walken shrugged. “I’m just what we had on short notice.”
Kim’s brows arched. “Unlike the equipment.”
Walken shrugged. “True.”
“Anything to further the plan,” Kim said.
“That’s about the size of it.” Walken nodded. “I used to be a cop.”
“Good.” The scientist gestured to a bank of what lo
oked like morgue slabs in the far end. “You no doubt know how to handle a corpse. Drawer twenty-seven. Fourth row down, sixth from the left. Access code is two-four-two-seven-seven-nine.”
Walken left the other man to his work, walked down to the end of the laboratory, and dialed in the code to the indicated drawer. It hissed open, a slab gushing vapor, containing the mirror image of the man who worked to gather materials elsewhere in the room. Walken looked down at the cloned remains, contained in a body bag unzipped to the navel. Six years ago, he would have been trying to shut this place down, or at least intercepting products from it that might be used against the American people. Now that sort of thing just didn’t apply anymore. It struck him how easily he had come to accept it all.
He zipped up the body bag and hefted it over his shoulder. It barely registered as he brought it over to where Kim assembled chemical storage cylinders into chains. “I’m not really sure how you managed to grow a clone of yourself. When did you have the opportunity to do this?”
“We use biological clones as test beds for the new implants.” Kim connected the cylinders with chains of flexible conduit, linking them by the valves in their heads. “My latest one recently died, and they were unable to replace it. That’s because I sabotaged it, of course, and because I had another one growing in a gestation tank that the system had marked as needing maintenance.”
“Sounds a little too neat,” muttered Walken.
Kim snorted. “Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Every now and again, with a little work on your part and the help of a digitized consciousness well on its way to virtual omnipresence, if not omniscience, the bounds of possibility can be wildly stretched in your favor.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 24
