One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  We didn’t talk.

  Martagan took the opportunity to grab a couple of hours’ shut-eye. I always envied her ability to sleep anywhere. I was too keyed up to sleep. I’d got it into my head that we were headed for a metaphorical as well as physical fall. Swann tapped out an annoying one-note tune on the metal buckle of his harness. I’m sure that in his head it sounded like Ride of the Valkyrie, but in reality, it came across as a piss-poor attempt at Morse Code. Randall Fate was the least calm of us. He fidgeted in his bucket seat, itching to get moving.

  Something was going on here.

  Fate was never nervous.

  The guy was the epitome of the calm, cold-blood, ruthless killer for hire.

  He knew something we didn’t.

  I didn’t like it.

  “What aren’t you telling us?” I asked, bluntly.

  He looked at me like I’d just slapped him with my dick. He didn’t meet my eyes. He looked out through the cargo bay doors to the ant-sized city below. Evasive. The world streaked by beneath us. We’d make Africa in two hours, less if the pilot took us all the way up into low orbit. It was no time at all.

  “I asked you a question, Fate. There’s something you’re not telling us.”

  “You’re right,” he said, finally. I waited for him to expand on his confession. We must have covered twenty or thirty klicks before he did. “There’s a chance—only a chance—that we might not be the only team down there.”

  “You’ve got us poaching another gig?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “Didn’t we get into enough shit the last time?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?”

  “This is our gig. The other team isn’t after the chip.”

  “Right. So what are they after?”

  “Me.”

  “You what?”

  “Barnes put a price on my head after the last job. It’s a lot of money. More than I’m worth, and you know I don’t say that lightly. I think I dented his pride. Now there’s a crew looking to collect.”

  “So, let me get this straight, we’re going in to Akachi looking to steal their prize tech out from under their noses while another team’s chasing us hell-bent on taking you out? Fan-fucking-tastic, Randall. And you didn’t think to mention this before we were in the air because?”

  “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Of course it changes things.”

  “It really doesn’t. Break it down, the mission objectives haven’t changed, all we’re talking about is four more guns pointing our way.”

  “You really are a prick, Randall, you know that?”

  “But you love me, Marco,” he said, offering that rakish smile of his. He’d spent a lot of money on that smile. None of his teeth were real. It was all about image. Fate cared how people perceived him. I didn’t. I never had. I cared about staying alive. I was happy for people to misjudge me. The more they underestimate me, the happier I am.

  “Once upon a time, maybe, but I’m done. If we get out of this alive, I never want to hear from you again.”

  “Let’s just worry about one thing at a time,” Swann said, ever practical. He stopped tapping out his secret message. The sounds coming from the engines changed, deepening. We’d hit altitude. I thought very seriously about throwing Fate out through the cargo bay doors and seeing how quickly evolution would kick in and grant him wings. “You can be all noble and indignant when we’re out of there, Marco. Right now, it’s not helping.”

  “Listen to the man,” Fate said as if Swann’s wisdom was irrefutable.

  “I’m not going to forget this,” I said. They were the last words any of us said before we jumped.

  The ground rushed toward me.

  I counted out sixty-three seconds, the gee’s contorting my face as I fell to earth. The wind battered me with the physical force of a herd of stampeding rhinos. Then on sixty-four I deployed the chute and hit the pressure plate on the cloaking pack, praying both would work. For about three seconds there I was devoutly religious, then I was back to being my good old atheistic self as the arrested momentum of the fall dragged me back up several hundred meters as the parachute opened.

  Martagan was first out of the plane and already about a thousand meters below me, steering herself toward the landing zone.

  There was no x marks the spot.

  We couldn’t jump too close to the Akachi Corp labs; they’d have all sorts of protection in place. The corporations were big on keeping their secrets. They paid top dollar to make sure they didn’t leak. You couldn’t expect to parachute in, land on a conveniently flat rooftop, blow a hole in the roof access door, storm the stairs to the lab a couple of floors down and walk out the front door with something they’d spent billions designing. Even Fate wasn’t that stupid.

  We were fifty klicks from the Akachi facility.

  It didn’t appear on any maps.

  Hell, we only had Fate’s word to go on that it even existed.

  Fifty klicks was a safe distance, theoretically. But it meant we had serious ground to cover once we made landfall. The drop site was bleached bone-white by the incessant hammering of the sun. It made the glass and steel construction work on the other side of the ghettos stand out like a rash of black tumors. There was a manmade lake two klicks from the main site, with thick forestation around it. That was our target. Between us and the target a sprawling shanty town that had grown and grown until it was more than twenty klicks end-to-end. Even from above the poverty was painfully obvious, as were the missing rooftops on most of the dwellings. The aim was to come down close to the sprawl and pick up quad bikes that Fate had bought and paid for through a fixer back home. According to our intel, there was a manmade lake close to the Akachi facility, with underwater access to the main site via sewerage tunnels. I didn’t fancy swimming two klicks through crap, but it was better than the alternative, being a sitting duck out on the open plains. We’d got breathing apparatus in our kit that just clipped on the nose and meant we could breathe for a good hour, hour and a half, without needing to open our mouths. I didn’t ask where Fate had got his intel. I assumed he’d been drip fed it by his contact at GenX, meaning it was good but incomplete. That was how we had to work most of the time. We didn’t exactly go in blind, but we hardly ever saw the whole picture.

  We came down hard, hitting the dirt and rolling. First things first, we needed to ditch the chutes. We couldn’t risk them being found and someone putting two-and-two together. I bundled my chute up, looking around for somewhere to bury it. The ground was hard-packed dirt and bedrock. There was no way I was going to get away with scooping up a few handfuls of dust and shoving the chute down into the shallow hole. “How long has that cloaking pack got left on the charge?”

  “Long enough,” Fate said, liking the way I was thinking.

  We gathered the four parachutes together, making a nest out of them, and nestled the cloaking device in the center of the pile, then stepped away. Outside the narrow circumference of the force field, I couldn’t see the chutes. It would have to do. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. It was already tortuously hot, the air thick and unbreathable with the stench of humanity drifting off the sprawling ghetto. Fate had coordinates for the rendezvous point where we were supposed to pick up the quads. We’d come down close to five klicks away from it. That meant running in the heat that was only going to get fiercer the longer we waited.

  He gave the signal for us to move out.

  Breathing hard, sweat dripping down the back of my neck, I was the first to reach the edge of the world.

  The shanty town rose up in all of its squalid grandeur ahead of us. It was weird how what had obviously been temporary had become permanent. Homes that had never been finished now housed their third and fourth generation of poor. Rats scurried ahead, keeping to the shadows along the sides of the shanties. There was no running water in these places; central wells had been sunk down to the water table, standpip
es offering the only water for miles around. That gave the place its own special stench, too. It was far too human.

  “Two streets over,” Fate said, checking our position against the global positioning satellite.

  Kids, all slack skin and bone, were already out in the streets. A pair came toward us, hands cupped, begging. I shook my head. That didn’t stop them. One of the boys was stupid enough to get too close to Martagan. She cuffed him around the ear and sent him scurrying off back toward the safety of the anonymous buildings. I heard voices. Raised. Angry. The kid came out again, hands cupped, obviously sent back out to face us and not come back without something to show for it.

  They trailed in our wake, following us through the stinking streets until we reached the lock-up where Fate’s fixer had sorted out our transport. Everything is for sale, especially in places where they can’t afford to eat half the time. Most of the guys around here were skimmers. They scavenged waste from the Akachi facility and repurposed it for a profit. Everything that wasn’t broken could find a new life, even stuff that was broken could be turned into something else by a creative skimmer if he put his mind to it. Evidence of that was all around us. We were walking through streets that were living proof of the skimmers inventiveness. A guy in tribal costume shuffled out of the door, waiting for Fate to cross his palm with silver. “Mabeziela?”

  The chieftain nodded. “You are late,” he said in broken English. “I had almost given up on you.”

  “We’re here now. Are the quads fueled and ready?”

  “As agreed.”

  “Good. We were never here.”

  “Of course,” the chieftain nodded, opening the door wider and ushering us inside.

  The quads were hidden under grubby tarpaulins. Fate pulled back one of the covers to inspect the bike. It wasn’t what I expected. Yes, it had four wheels. Yes, it would probably cope with the terrain. But it appeared to be the bastard child of ten different write-offs from a chop shop welded together, all rusted plates and scavenged parts. “It works?” Fate asked.

  “What do you take me for?” the tribesman countered, reaching down for the throttle and yanking on it to gun the engine. The quad spluttered a couple of times before the engine caught, but then it roared to life as he twisted the throttle a couple of times.

  Satisfied, Fate followed the tribesman into the backroom to conclude their business.

  The muffled report of the gunshot, the muzzle pressed up against the man’s temple, meant they’d come to an arrangement about silence that wasn’t exactly mutually beneficial. We had to move fast. We stripped the tarps and mounted up, gunning the engines. Fate hid the chieftain’s body under one of the tarps.

  We left dust and a dead man trailing behind us.

  The shanty town was already beginning to wake up. The roar of the quad’s engines didn’t do us any favors. They were hellishly loud in the pre-dawn quiet. The good thing was that the locals associated the noise with raiders so didn’t come looking to see what the noise was all about. That was part of our disguise. In order to really sell it, Fate guided us back through the streets and out into the desert region rather than through the streets of the shanty towns’ sprawl. We were going around the outside, like desert raiders would. It was faster than trying to traverse the clogged streets of the makeshift city overflowing with festering garbage and the detritus of life. The place was a warren of hardship and hunger, growing more and more desperate the closer to the center you grew. If someone thought we were worth it, they’d sell the little knowledge they had. That made the whole in-and-out gig so much harder. Especially with another crew hunting us. The quads could handle the worst of the terrain, the broken rocks and cracked paths and everything else the land threw at them. The heat and suffocating air would be worse. And the higher the sun rose, the more grueling they would become. It was all about speed now.

  We rode into the sunrise.

  There was a forested region two klicks from the lake.

  That’s where we ditched the quads. The sun was still a couple of hours from being overhead. Ideally, we’d have gone in at night, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The obsidian glass of the Akachi lab was a marked contrast to the poverty we’d left behind. It screamed Big Money. The only thing it was lacking was the big corporate logo slapped across the huge dome that caught and reflected the sun like a prism across the desert. Both the lake and forest were manmade, meant to drive home just how rich the men behind this secret lab were. I got the point. It was hard not to.

  We didn’t need to talk. We understood each other. We’d been to hell and back. When you’d done that a few times you didn’t need words. You just knew what the other person was doing and acted accordingly.

  We pushed the quads into the trees.

  Swann had the kit bag. Everything we’d need to breach Akachi’s security. I took the breathing apparatus from him, clipped it in place over my nose, and plunged into the water, sinking in over my head. It was a sheer drop with concrete banks around us more like a huge swimming pool than a lake with a gently sloping shore. Ten feet under, it was darker but clear, the water around me rippling with a blue-green tinge. I breathed out a slow stream of bubbles, hoping they’d be drawn toward the pipe if the lake was servicing the facility, then kicked off, swimming toward the far shore.

  The others followed.

  It took a couple of minutes to find the eddies that in turn led to the drain, and beyond an iron grate, the pipeline that led into the heart of the facility. Swann moved to the front, placing a controlled c4 charge on the grate then swam back a safe distance before triggering the remote detonator. The explosion was almost silent, muffled by the incredible press of the water, but that only made the shockwave more pronounced, rippling out toward us like a great invisible fist. The sheer force of the blow hit hard, driving us back as we kicked and struggled not to be swept back into the high concrete banks behind us, and then echo of it was bullying us toward the opening and the twisted metal where the grate had been torn from its foundations by the explosives.

  I swam through the opening, careful not to snag myself on the spears of metal.

  The light went out within two powerful breaststrokes as the others entered the pipe behind me.

  I triggered the glo-light built into my suit, turning the claustrophobic pipeline a sickly shade of green, and kept on swimming. Behind me, the others did the same.

  I hate water.

  Have I mentioned that?

  I’ve never been the strongest swimmer, and two klicks in a pipe too narrow to properly finish any of the strokes made it all the more uncomfortable. It was claustrophobic. Air bubbles steamed up in front of my face. There were no air pockets above me. I was all too aware that my breathable air was running out, even if there was an hour or so left. We were swimming into the unknown, no matter Fate’s assurances. We had no idea what was waiting at the other end of the pipe. After about ten minutes I was pawing along the sides of the pipe, using it to propel me forward and relying on small kicks to keep me moving. I didn’t trust Randall Fate. I wouldn’t have led it past him to have sold us out to save his own skin. It was all about the money with him at the best of times. These weren’t the best. My breath metallic in my throat, I pushed off the wall again. There was nothing to say that we weren’t swimming toward a whole host of bullets. They wouldn’t do a lot for my buoyancy.

  There was a change in the quality of light up ahead.

  The end of the pipe.

  That, or I was about twenty meters from the afterlife.

  I pushed on, my shoulders burning from the effort. There was a second iron grille between us and the light. We wouldn’t be able to use c4 this time, the vibrations from the charge would set off pressure sensitive alarms and bring Akachi’s security forces running. I motioned Swann forward, trying to make myself small so he could squeeze by above me. He had a high-intensity arc burner in his hand. The beam of the burner was no more than ten centimeters, but the heat it generated would cut through sheet stee
l like butter. The iron rebar was tougher going. The arc burner’s blade had the water around it bubbling to a boil in seconds making it hard for him to keep his hand in place long enough to cut, but he was a stubborn bastard, and after a couple of minutes the grille fell away into the agitated broil, and we were through.

  I followed Swann out, clambering up onto an aluminum deck. The room around us was vast, all concrete and steel piping, with the hissing and venting of steam providing cover for our entrance. The water was part of some sort of cooling system for the gigantic generators powering the plant. Martagan and Fate emerged from the water behind us. We took stock, dripping onto the deck. There were blast doors to the left of us, glass doors to the right. The blast doors were marked with a biohazard warning which did nothing to instill confidence in me.

  The glass doors opened.

  So much for the element of surprise.

  I hesitated for a split second, seeing a techie step through. Swann didn’t. No guns. We couldn’t risk the noise being heard. His exospine meant he was capable of inhuman speed in short bursts. He was beside the man and ramming the arc burner up under his chin into his brain and catching his corpse as it slumped before I’d even finished turning toward the open door. He dragged the dead man to the side and propped him up against the wall. Swann pressed a finger against his lips and motioned for Martagan and me to go through the door and make sure the way was clear.

  “Ladies first,” I said. It wasn’t chivalry. It was self-preservation. She was faster than me in close combat and not remotely squeamish. She broke right, I broke left, with Fate following behind us making sure no one was on our six. It was a control room, though what it was actually controlling I couldn’t begin to guess. There were gauges and dials and digital readouts and an array of screens with different charts and reports scrolling across them. It was all gibberish to me. Swann moved across to the readouts, then moved down the line of the machines. He was looking for which part of the complex was drawing the most power, which the least, and all the variants in between, I realized, figuring that would take us to where we wanted to be. It was a smart way of thinking. The labs themselves would almost certainly be driving the show.