Gemini Cell

by Myke Cole

  If the cloud cover ever broke. The combat weather team had assured them it was passing, but a quick glance at the sky showed Schweitzer a thick sheet of black cotton. He spared a quick glance over his shoulder to ensure the team was moving, then rose to go with them.

  There was the clunk of a wheel spinning. The watertight hatch on the superstructure’s side opened and light flooded out behind a figure. He stepped out, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dark. His first step put him on the deck, the second slid in the slowly spreading gore from Schweitzer’s kill.

  The man lost his balance, grunted, went to one knee, eyes widening as he took in his fallen comrade. A military-grade shotgun hung from a sling around his torso, banging against the deck. Ahmad was right, able seamen didn’t carry weapons at all, let alone the sleek black killing tool this man bore. They were accurate, deadly. Expensive.

  And loud.

  So close to his target, the superstructure behind the man would ring like a bell if Schweitzer took the shot. Instead, he raced across the intervening deck, grateful for the nonskid surface that gave his boots traction and increased speed. The man was just drawing breath to yell as Schweitzer closed, leaping over the corpse and dropping onto the palms of his padded gloves, kicking out at the man’s knees. The bottoms of his boots connected perfectly, popping the man’s joints sideways and sending his head banging into the superstructure with a resounding crack. It was louder than Schweitzer would have liked, but it stunned him, keeping him from crying out as he fell to the deck, rolling in the blood and fumbling for his weapon. Schweitzer pinned it with one hand, then pivoted off it, bringing his elbow down to impact the man’s throat. The firm flesh yielded, folding inward under the pressure of the elbow guard, closing his windpipe. The man flailed, clawing at his neck, eyes bugging out, making choked, gurgling sounds.

  Schweitzer rolled over on top of him, smothering him with his own body, smelling the blood of the corpse beside him, still warm, feeling it soak into his uniform. The man shuddered beneath him. Schweitzer covered him with his bulk, letting the weight of his body armor, weapons, and gear hold him in place, crushing his forearm down on his opponent’s throat, making sure the airway stayed closed.

  Schweitzer saw movement in his peripheral vision, glanced up.

  Another crewman, this one unarmed, had emerged from the stacks of conex boxes and was staring at him in wide-eyed horror.

  Schweitzer didn’t even bother going for him. He’d never make it before the man had a chance to raise the alarm. Better to stay on top of this target until the job was done, then face this new threat without an enemy in his backfield.

  The crewman crouched to run, turned toward the superstructure.

  Time slowed. Schweitzer could see the crewman’s chest rising, jaw dropping open as he gathered the air to shout a warning.

  “Nope,” Perreto grunted, passing a garrote around the crewman’s throat and pulling the wire tight. The scream didn’t even have time to shift into a choked gurgle, and the only sound the crewman made was the dragging of his feet across the deck as Perreto pulled him into the shadows of the conex stacks and finished the job.

  Schweitzer gave silent thanks and returned to his own target, pressing down until, at long last, the trembling stopped with a sigh, and his enemy lay still.

  Ahmad’s voice came through his earpiece. “Schweitzer, quit fucking around over there. We’re moving.”

  Schweitzer got to a knee and looked up to see Perreto emerging from the darkness, covering over Schweitzer’s shoulder with his carbine. Once Schweitzer had got to his feet and raised his own weapon, Perreto nudged one of the corpses with his boot. “That’s two arrests you’ve cost me.”

  “What’d you do with your guy?”

  Perreto jerked his chin in the direction of the darkness where he’d dragged his victim. “Well, we talked it over, and he’s repented his evil ways. He’s waiting for the end of the op to come home with us and surrender to a federal magistrate.”

  “Cut the chatter,” came in Ahmad’s voice, as they rejoined the team and began weaving through the piled metal containers. The ship groaned beneath them as it drifted around its anchor and the swell began to hit it directly on the beam. The cloud cover was thick above them. When the hell’s it going to clear? With nearly no ambient light, the shadows coiled in every niche and recess among the stacks of conex boxes, putting Schweitzer’s reflexes on edge.

  The bridge’s windows were dark, but Schweitzer knew that meant nothing. A crewman of the watch was most certainly on duty, hopefully sleeping, his binoculars resting on his belly. He glimpsed the windows one last time, the signal mast rising above it, before it was lost from sight as the towering stacks covered them.

  They moved as if along a rain-forest floor, through a tunnel of rust-flecked steel, stacking on a corner as Ahmad extended a wand and peeked it around the edge, raising her NODs, dropping the minicomputer from her chest, looking down at it.

  She turned back to the team while Chang covered over her shoulder and flashed a series of hand signals. Two contacts. Hard targets. Port and starboard of the hatch.

  Schweitzer acknowledged with a tap on Perreto’s shoulder, which the Coast Guard operator sent on down the line until it reached Ahmad, who nodded and turned back to the corner. She flashed two more hand signals. Anchor position, come up. Buttonhook with me.

  Schweitzer was the anchor, and he acknowledged with another tap, picking his line around the corner. Chang pulled a chemlight off his belt, broke and shook it, sending muted neon red shadows dancing around the team, before throwing it around the corner, sending it careening off the target container and hopefully distracting the enemy.

  As soon as Ahmad heard the clicking bounce, she left cover. Schweitzer moved behind her, buttonhooking around the corner and raising his carbine to take the shot as she came into view and took a knee.

  The chemlight lay on the deck off to one side of the target container, sending its distracting glow cascading over the short space between the corner and the hatch of the target container.

  But the enemy wasn’t distracted. Both men were ignoring the short plastic stick, dropping to their knees and raising military-grade carbines, fitted with modified sights and extended magazines as advanced as the gear the SEALs carried. They looked nothing like the armed seamen Schweitzer had taken out. They wore black bodysuits, NODs mounted to high-quality Kevlar helmets, torsos enveloped in military-grade body armor that would stop most rounds fired into their center mass.

  But Ahmad and Schweitzer were SEALs. They didn’t shoot center mass.

  Their bullets took the enemy in their faces, exploiting the three inches of open target between the top of the armor collar and the brim of the helmet. SEALs lived and died by their Close Quarters Battle training. While most troops on the range were firing at whatever parts of the target they could hit, to pass CQB you had to put rounds in that same three-inch triangle each time, every time.

  The enemy jerked backward as the backs of their heads came off, sending their helmets spinning and painting the target container with blood, gray matter, and bits of bone. The SEALs’ rounds clanged into the container, making a dull ring that probably wouldn’t alert the ship’s crew this far from the superstructure.

  The rest of the team rolled around the corner, carbines tracking for targets, but finding none, the enemy already down and twitching on the deck.

  After a moment, Ahmad let out her breath. “Well, that was . . .”

  Shouts. A voice was crying out behind them, ragged and coughing, but loud enough to do the job.

  Chang rolled back around the corner, returned a moment later. “Your guy, Coastie.”

  Perreto’s jaw dropped. “He’s dead. I choked him out.”

  “Well, you might want to make sure he’s a little more dead next time,” Chang said.

  “Are you absolutely sure you finished the job?” A
hmad asked. “Sometimes they’re just passed out. Did you check his pulse? His airway?”

  Perreto’s muttered curse was answer enough.

  Light flooded the deck. A siren began to wail on the bridge.

  “Fuck!” Ahmad’s voice through Schweitzer’s earpiece. “Get on that hatch!” Anger and frustration surged at the thought of Perreto’s blunder sending the op south. Schweitzer crushed the sentiment, letting cold professionalism dominate. There was no mistake, merely a change in mission parameters. Focus.

  The team took up position around the hatch as Chang moved up with bolt cutters and bit into the lock. It was a fancy cipher job with a reinforced shackle, but the chromium and molybdenum-infused jaws worked through it. Schweitzer glanced along the container’s length as Chang worked the jaws, matching up the scratches, color, and label to the image he’d seen on the minicomputer. This was definitely the right container. He supposed it was possible that there were air vents topside, but he doubted it. That meant explosives, poisons, or fissile material. Maybe some kind of infectious bioagent. The thought of exposure made his stomach clench.

  He forced the discomfort down. Intel hadn’t said anything about bioagents, and while that didn’t mean it was so, Schweitzer had no choice but to trust them. He was a professional. Professionals didn’t get a vote. They did their job.

  Hatches began to bang open on the ship’s superstructure, and Schweitzer heard shouting. He looked up at the still-solid blanket of clouds. They were still out of the air-cover window. There was no way that Martin could have missed the commotion. Even now, the coxswain would be muttering prayers, bringing his small craft alongside the ship’s bow where the gunnels were higher off the surface of the water, but closer to the action if the team had to make a sudden break for it.

  Which was looking pretty damn likely. Perreto echoed Schweitzer’s thoughts. “This is going to get interesting.”

  “Shut up,” Ahmad said, as Chang finally got the lock free, and the two of them set to wrenching at the hatch handles. “Focus.”

  The locking bars groaned, shed rust, and finally slid aside and the doors swung open just as the first enemy appeared. They had climbed up the backs of the container stacks opposite the team and now aimed down from the high ground, dialing in their sights and firing off a few experimental rounds, probing range and cover. Some of them were crew in T-shirts and jeans, but more were kitted out like the professional-grade operators Schweitzer and Ahmad had just taken out. For all their gear, they lacked SEAL training, and their shots flew wide despite the fact that the team was hemmed in around the target container. Many of the crew fired their assault rifles in three-round bursts, muzzles dancing wildly. The setting was effective for making enemies keep their heads down, so long as you weren’t hoping to actually hit anyone. Schweitzer never used it.

  The SEALs returned fire single shot by single shot, each one unerringly finding its target. The first few men were plucked from their perches on top of the stack, the rounds drilling neatly through the three-inch box that SEALs were trained to target. But, as more enemy came pouring around the corners, Perreto and Chang’s fire was drawn off to keep their flanks clear, leaving only Ahmad and Schweitzer to engage to the front and cover the container in case Schweitzer was wrong and it did contain living threats.

  Within moments, they both abandoned the tight target box and let their shots roam in the interest of being able to put more bullets in more people more quickly. Schweitzer shot one of the enemy operators in his gut—miserable aim by his standards and likely stopped by the body armor, but the force drove the man off his feet and he tumbled from the top of the stack, shrieking, to slam into silence against the deck below. Schweitzer’s eyes tracked and moved, sighting targets and shooting them, his hand mechanically releasing his empty magazine and shuffling it over two inches so the full one, duct-taped alongside, could move into the gun’s smoking ammunition well with barely a second lost before the carbine’s bolt slid home, and he was shooting again.

  Bang. Target down. On to the next. Move. Bang. Target down. On to the next. Move again.

  Part of Schweitzer ran through his killing drill. Another part marveled at the number of the enemy. The ship’s hold must have been crammed with a small company, at least a large platoon. In this business, you lived and died by the details. The tiniest slipup could bring down hell. Schweitzer had run op after op alongside Perreto. The man was a master at his trade. And even masters lost the bubble from time to time.

  Schweitzer just wished it weren’t this one.

  Bullets whined off the deck around him. He could make out Ahmad as he lowered his weapon to slide around her. Her eyes were completely focused, her face slack with concentration, the only indicator that she was in the middle of a gunfight was a thin runnel of sweat working down the outside of one ear.

  Corpses lay atop the stacks, at the corners where the team had entered. Bang. Target down. Move. Beside the dead man, two others were unsnapping a tripod and mounting some kind of larger weapon atop it. Schweitzer’s roving eyes didn’t settle long enough to figure out what it was, but it couldn’t be good.

  “Schweitzer.” Ahmad glanced up at the impenetrable cover overhead. “Check that container. Nothing living in there, blow it. Give us five minutes for egress.”

  Schweitzer spun and moved to the container. Cold air slapped him in the face. The interior was refrigerated, the chill blotting out the thermal detection of his NODs, turning the green contours black and leaving him blind. But it didn’t matter, in this cold there was no way there was anything alive in here. Refrigeration meant bioagents, and he felt his skin crawl with revulsion as he pulled the charge from his pack and took a knee, swapping magazines again before turning to fire without the aid of night vision. He didn’t need it. The lights from the bridge silhouetted his enemies perfectly, making them stark black shapes against the gray sky. Bang. Target down. Move.

  He turned back to the container, the shadowy interior coming into focus. The scratched, rust-bucket exterior was a lie. The interior walls were clean white plastic, the floor built from shining cross-hatchings of skidproof stainless steel. Stainless-steel racks lined the walls floor to ceiling. Two more dominated the center, with rows in between just wide enough to admit two people walking abreast. Vents in the floor and ceiling fogged cool air into the space, wafting over Schweitzer’s shoulders and out past the open doors, mercifully cooling his neck and reminding him of how hot he’d gotten from fighting under all that gear. Somewhere, a motor churned, probably the refrigeration unit.

  The racks were lined with corpses.

  They were laid out toe to head, perfectly preserved, save where stitching marked a bullet or knife wound that had been sewn carefully shut. They were shaved of all hair, blue lips and closed eyes looking bruised even in the darkness. Their waxy skin stretched taut over solid frames. Nearly all the cadavers were male, and all had been elite athletes in life. Tight muscles bunched beneath the dead skin, as if the bodies would notice the intruder at any moment, springing off their racks, reaching, dead hands eager to punish the intruder.

  For a brief instant, the cold darkness in the container swamped him. The shadows coiled in the recesses of the racks, thick and malevolent, reaching out to him. He could hear the creaking of the metal as the bodies shifted nearer, hear the hissing of their rancid breath as they reached . . . He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

  Schweitzer felt himself in the midst of a current, a tide of energy eddying around and through him. His nostrils filled with unfamiliar smells: the chemical reek of embalming fluid and something else: a musky odor of ancient spices, a burned-sugar stink of bridled power.

  And then he was back to himself, shaking his head to clear it.

  He had run at least three different ops that intercepted bioagents. He had seen compressed cylinders, metal racks filled with vials, even powders compressed into the shape of children’s toys.

>   But dead bodies? He’d never heard of moving anything that way.

  The feeling of supernatural unease lingered. If there’d been candle stubs and pentagrams, he’d have thought he’d stumbled onto the set of some cult ritual, hooded priests raising the dead. Killing men in a hopelessly outnumbered gunfight hadn’t bothered Schweitzer at all, but now he felt the slow crawl of terror up his gut again for the second time that night. And for the second time that night he tipped his hat to it and got back to work.

  He bent to set the charge as the flank Perreto was defending collapsed and the Coast Guardsman backed into the container mouth. Perreto’s carbine had either jammed or run dry, and he’d transitioned to his pistol, letting the long gun dangle from its sling, slapping his thigh as he backed up. He was grinning, as he always did in a gunfight. “My scintillating personality just doesn’t seem to be cutting it here.”

  Schweitzer felt the current in the nervous humor. Perreto knew he’d fucked up, was already beating himself up over it. Not good. It couldn’t be fixed now, and the man needed his head in the fight.

  An enemy crewman charged around the container corner with a machete, screaming.

  “Police officer!” Perreto shouted as he shot him in the face, then kicked him in the chest, sending him reeling into the man behind him, one of the enemy operators. Perreto shot that man in the chest twice, sending him sprawling while the Coast Guardsman changed magazines. “You’re all under arrest,” he finished. “If you surrender, your cooperation will be noted.”

  Schweitzer fumbled with the charge as another enemy took one of Perreto’s rounds in the shoulder when he tackled the Coast Guard operator into the container. The two men sprawled, knocking the charge out of reach, forcing Schweitzer to go back to his carbine to prevent the enemy from pouring into the team’s backfield.