The Lab (Agent Six of Hearts)

by Jack Heath

  “I’m sorry, Six, but I’m almost certain that I’ve finally found the Lab. And with it, most of the people who spawned you. It seems that Project Falcon is still in operation.”

  MISSION THREE

  NO CHOICE

  King’s eyes narrowed, searching for a reaction. Six hoped he wasn’t shaking visibly.

  “I don’t think the Lab gave up after the fire that destroyed their facility,” King continued. “There were rumors about them, of course, but I think they went into hiding until the time was right. Now that ChaoSonic owns just about everything—everything except us—the Lab is back, and stronger than before. The Diamonds tell us that they’ve made several advances in therapeutic and medicinal treatment, and they’ve even made some changes to the original genome used in Project Falcon.

  “If they’ve still got a fully mapped genome to work with, then the chances are that they’ve still got data from their first experiments. They’ll probably still have your DNA on file.”

  Six fought his rising panic. It was getting hard to breathe. “What does this mean?”

  “It means a number of things,” King said. “One: They plan on continuing, and they’ll be looking for funds. So they’ll be dealing with some very rich, and therefore very dangerous, people.

  “Two: They’ll be beefing up their security. They’ll have learned from the arson attack sixteen years ago. They’re going to be hard to penetrate, and they’ll deal ruthlessly with anyone who tries. The closer they get to the crucial stage in their plan—presumably, actual gestation—the more alert they’ll be. So we’ll have to move quickly and carefully.

  “Three: They’ll be trying to find and eliminate anyone who has the power, the motive, or the evidence to stop them. And you have all three. And they probably have your DNA.”

  Six’s palms were slippery with sweat. He still couldn’t believe it. The Lab, he thought. They’re coming for me. It’s my worst nightmare come true.

  “So all this adds up to one thing…”

  Six braced himself. I’m going to get thrown out of the Deck, he thought. King can’t risk me staying, so I’m out on my own again, with a ruthless corporation after me.

  “You’re on your own,” King said grimly. “Your next mission is going to be a one-man act.”

  Six’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected that.

  “I need you to take on the whole Lab investigation yourself, firstly because I trust you more than anyone else in this building; secondly because physically and mentally you are better equipped than any other agent here; and thirdly because if any other agents took the job, they might end up discovering your origins, and the Spades could find out. That would be very nasty for both of us. We’d both end up in the Visitors Center.”

  The “Visitors Center” was the Deck’s cell block. The punishment for being a genetically engineered ChaoSonic assassin would be life imprisonment. And the punishment for King, for concealing one within the Deck, would be nearly as bad.

  “I know the risk,” Six said, cool on the exterior but terrified inside. “What’s involved in the mission?”

  King put on his monocle and spread an array of photographs on the desk. He pointed to the first one. “This is Methryn Crexe. Forty-one years old, probably has a vague recollection of the days before Takeover. Senior official within ChaoSonic, pretty influential. He hasn’t got a file here, but that doesn’t indicate good character—the most dangerous kind of code-breakers are the ones smart enough to evade capture. Shady background, inherited a lot of money at a young age when his parents died. They were the founders and owners of a very successful pharmaceuticals company. They died in suspicious circumstances and Crexe inherited the company. He helps to fund the Lab with money out of his own pocket, but he earns it all back when the profits come in. He handles the deals with the other branches of ChaoSonic, so he’s the lead PR man as well. When he’s not running the actual experiments himself, he’s running rings around the spies from other sections of the company, and around us. Got it?”

  Six looked at the photograph. The man within it glared slyly back at him with large, dark eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Next, there’s Kligos Stadil. Age unknown, but I’d guess thirties. Started out as a bodyguard for a ChaoSonic official, then accepted a contract to kill him and found the life of a hit man to be to his liking. He was recruited by the Lab about five years back; Crexe probably pays him enough money to make it safe to trust him. He now controls security for the Lab, which means he’s in charge of sheltering them from all outside parties, including us. Try to avoid his attention—he’ll go down for his crimes later.”

  The picture showed a tall man with a thin, bony face and scarred, scabbed hands. His eyes were covered by greasy strands of a low-hanging fringe. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, but Six never assumed anything.

  “Go ahead,” Six said.

  “This one is Retuni Lerke. He worked for the original Crexe pharmaceuticals company, and may have had a hand in the deaths of the owners. He associates with Crexe in many other ways, but there’s one that concerns us in particular. This man was in charge of Project Falcon—and he’s still working for the Lab, though I’m not sure in what capacity. He’s an expert with most biological sciences. But then, you know that.”

  This photograph showed the first face Six had ever seen. He was older. Thinner. Balder. But he had the same eyes, the same pale, curious stare. This man had designed and created him.

  “Lerke is extraordinarily dangerous. He’s rich, respected, ruthless, and very, very clever. Stay out of his way. Destroy his company, erase his project, steal his data, and smash his job to pieces, but avoid a face-to-face confrontation at all costs. Understood?”

  Six looked at Lerke. From the day he had first awakened, he had seen that face on the other side of the glass, looking at him with pride, awe, smugness, concern, and, sometimes, chilling glee. Six had no intention of going anywhere near Lerke—if anyone was going to try to dissect Six, it would be this man.

  “Those are all the names I can give you for now,” King said. “I’m hoping you’ll bring me back some more after your first assignment.”

  “Which is?”

  “To get all the information you can about what they’re doing at the Lab, ideally with photographic evidence. Once you have the information, we can analyze it and work out the best way of short-circuiting what they’re doing.”

  “And just how am I supposed to get this information?” Six asked.

  “Simple,” said King. “By breaking in to the Lab’s headquarters. We need to find the Project Falcon lab.”

  Six controlled his shock. “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “Deadly,” King said. “There’s no one else who can take them down. And if we don’t, clones of you will be sold to the highest bidder and used as bodyguards and assassins. Then the City will be far beyond anarchy. It’ll be totalitarian fascism, because the rich will decide who lives and who dies.”

  He locked eyes with Six. “This isn’t easy. I know this mission sounds insane on the surface, and I know neither of us wants you to die. But I also know that we have no choice.”

  Six glared across the table. King was right, of course. Just like Hoz, when he had kept running alongside Six even though every muscle had screamed at him to collapse.

  Recognizing a lack of options was often a matter of life and death.

  Six was still edgy in the shower at home. The news about the Lab had rattled him badly. Even as he scrubbed the grime and dried sweat from the day’s mission off his skin, he kept pausing, thinking he could hear faint noises in his house.

  It’s just nerves, Six told himself. My ears are playing tricks on me; there’s no one in my house. Just the same, he got out of the shower and toweled himself off quickly. He didn’t let the towel cover his eyes at any time, for fear that if he closed them, when he opened them again he would be looking into the reflective goggles of a Lab security agent. Or a grinning scientist with
a needle.

  Or a clone of himself, one who was trained to kill rather than protect…

  Six knew he should rest, so he would be best prepared for the mission tomorrow. But he wasn’t tired. He knew that if he went to bed now, he’d simply lie awake all night, afraid to close his eyes for fear that his past would sneak up on him with a bloody scalpel.

  He wandered down to the training room, where he had replaced his homemade training droid with Earle Shuji’s demonstration bot.

  “Can’t sleep,” he explained unnecessarily to it. “Is it all right with you if we do some combat drills tonight?”

  “Yes,” the bot said. “That is all right with me.” It gestured at the flat screen on Six’s wall. “I have been studying your practice routines. Most of them are excellent.”

  Six wasn’t comfortable with the level of intelligence the bot displayed. Although it had saved his life earlier that day, it was still just an electronic appliance.

  Six slipped into a fighting stance. “Let’s go, Harry,” he said.

  THE SEAWALL

  “The next flight over the Seawall is at 12:20 pm.” The squinty-eyed woman behind the counter pointed at a metal chair. “Take a seat.”

  Six remained standing. Looking out the window of the charter office to his left, he could see the Seawall—a huge, intimidating monolith that blocked the horizon for as far as he could see.

  ChaoSonic had put the wall there. From their point of view, too many of their consumers had escaped the continent via the sea, never to return. They had usually left by ship or submarine, so they could escape the notice of ChaoSonic.

  The big corporation had put a stop to it—a rather unsubtle one, Six thought. They had built an enormous wall, a hundred sixty meters high, all the way around the City. Then they had drained out all the seawater trapped inside. What had once been a beach was now a grimy but profitable parking lot, and what had once been the only escape route for refugees from the ruthless company was now just another dead end.

  Now ChaoSonic truly had a captive market.

  Six had been seven when the Seawall was built. For those first seven years he had almost been able to see the horizon through the fog, and then suddenly, over mere weeks, the sea was gone, replaced by the giant concrete structure.

  Soon, you could hardly even see that, unless you were close. The fog got worse, and had pretty much obscured everything.

  Now the only way you could leave the City was by plane or helicopter, and they were all tagged. ChaoSonic knew exactly where you were going the moment you checked in. If you ventured too far out, they shot down your plane. They insisted that it was entirely possible to leave, of course, and that the planes were actually being shot down by terrorists on the other side of the Seawall. But the chartering companies got the message when they started to lose aircraft in vast quantities: Don’t leave the City. Everybody stays here.

  So they changed their flight plans to go only from one side of the City to the other, except for a few designated trips to artificial offshore islands, from which ChaoSonic made all of the profits from sales and accommodation. And airlines continued their rigorous checks to make sure you were who you said you were, and that you didn’t intend to go too far out.

  Except here, Six thought. This station only took you to one place—a small mining rig just outside the Seawall, one of many such offshore facilities and miniature towns. Hundreds of oil miners checked through this station every day to get to work. The terminal Six was using didn’t bother checking for ID, firstly because they would do it at the other end, and secondly because there was no plausible reason to go there unless you worked there. ChaoSonic didn’t care about people going to this rig—there was no way you could possibly leave the continent, given that the chopper only had enough fuel to get out to the rig and back. Once you were there, the only other way of leaving was via speedboat. This could get you to some of the other offshore facilities, but a single tank of fuel wouldn’t get you anywhere near any of the other continents.

  Six didn’t mind. One of those other facilities was the Lab headquarters, and that’s where he was headed.

  “Your chopper’s here,” the squinty-eyed woman said. “That’ll be eight credits.”

  Six had wondered about visiting the other continents. There was little reliable information about what lay out beyond the offshore facilities, and even less about how to get there, but Six was sure it could be done somehow. Now, as he looked out of the helicopter window at the ocean below, ignoring the miners and drillers and oil-refining workers, he pictured himself in a speedboat with plenty of spare fuel tanks, drinking water, and freeze-dried food. He was gunning the motor and watching the spray at the back of his boat kick up into the air. He didn’t know where he was going—he was holding a map that was blank except for the City and millions of kilometers of emptiness. But he knew that somewhere in that emptiness there were other landmasses, and with enough fuel, he was bound to find them sooner or later.

  He came back to reality when the helicopter touched down on the concrete at the oil rig. As the blades wound down, slowing to a halt, the miners all clambered off.

  Six waited until the last man was on the ground before climbing out himself.

  He took a deep breath, ran over to the edge of the landing pad, and jumped.

  As he plummeted through the air, towards the big blue sea, he suddenly felt like a child again. There was no Seawall between him and the ocean. Once again, he could almost see the horizon.

  When he hit the water sixty meters below, his feet pierced the surface like a knife and he slipped right in. He plunged to a depth of nearly eleven meters before the traction of the water and his own buoyancy slowed him to a halt.

  The sea was very dark at this depth—like an oil painting of shadows and silhouettes, drenched in murky navy blue.

  Something bumped his leg. He looked down and his eyes widened.

  Immediately he started swimming upward, and a few seconds later he had breached the surface. A shortfin mako shark was not something he wanted to interfere with.

  Sharks were some of the oldest creatures in the world, Six knew. They’d had more than four hundred fifty million years of evolution to perfect their physical design, but had remained largely unchanged for at least seventy million years. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that sharks similar to the ones of today had preyed on oceanic dinosaurs.

  Six himself had some shark DNA—his strong skin and regenerative cartilage were thanks to this. Sharks had outlived the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, and now that the Seawall had gone up and people in the City had given up fishing, it looked as though they were going to outlive humans, too. Six couldn’t stand up to that kind of grim, tenacious perfection. The sharks had his respect—he would gladly step aside for them.

  The shortfin mako was an average-sized shark, but very aggressive and predatory, and not averse to the taste of human flesh. Six swam in breaststroke to avoid splashing too much, towards the speedboat he knew would be tethered to a support strut of the rig. The bulletproof bodysuit that Jack had given him was surprisingly lightweight, and he found he could move easily across the water.

  Once he’d hot-wired the speedboat and set out for the Lab, it was almost like his fantasy. There was food, fuel, a map, drinking water, and a fin of spray behind the boat.

  I could live out my dream right now, he thought. I could forget the Lab and go looking for the new world in a way that no one has really done for hundreds of years—with a blank map, an empty horizon, and no concept of what I’ll find.

  But then his thoughts closed in on themselves. It was possible that there was a world out there untouched by the violence and greedy corruption that plagued the City—but on the other hand, maybe there would be another Seawall waiting for him. Maybe every continent of the world was the same: an urban industrial purgatory run by corporations and populated by captive markets.

  This is why Six never went out to sea. As long as he never looked for it, t
here was a chance that paradise was just over the horizon.

  Looming out of the fog, standing on a red steel spiderlike structure, was an enormous slab of cement with grimy windows and rusty fire escapes clinging to it on all sides. There was a construction site attached, containing a few cement mixers and a crane. Rising up, impaling the concrete chunk of the building, was a glittering glass tower with smooth rounded sides and a flat top. The building resembled a dirty concrete monster that had been speared with a polished glass sword.

  The Lab’s headquarters.

  An office building on a rig. A huge rig, big enough to have streets and shops on it. Six could see pedestrians walking along the edges, cars driving past behind them. Though these things were common now on offshore facilities, Six still found the appearance strange.

  He examined the structure of the building carefully. No apparent security. Concrete at the base, glass at the top—not unusual, as far as modern architecture went. It fit in well with the other buildings on the rig; grey and green seemed to be the dominating colors. The building was too short to be a tourist attraction, but too tall to be a hotel. It had no sign or label anywhere on it.

  Perfect for illicit purposes, Six thought. The structure had nothing at all to draw attention to it. In fact, for a moment Six wondered if he had been given the wrong coordinates and address. But the building fit the blueprints he had seen. This had to be it.

  I’m going into the lion’s den, he thought. If they catch me, and figure out who I am…

  He started thinking about the needles. The surgery. The knives and drugs and the ever-watchful machines that would hold him in place with clamps and chains. He breathed deeply for a moment, fighting the rising panic. He had to do this; there was no other way.

  He tethered the boat to one of the support struts underneath the center of the structure. Using magnetic hand clamps, he climbed up the strut about thirty meters to the metal ceiling. The water lapped gently below him; besides that, he could hear nothing.