One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  Every new hold from the guys below me had the rope bucking against my grip, the motion exaggerated by the pull of gravity. Clinging on grew more and more difficult for every story we descended, the blood from my hands making it virtually impossible to grip. And then the winch gave way, the lock breaking, and the rope unraveled faster than we could climb.

  The ground rushed up toward us. And we plunged down toward it.

  Fifteen.

  Twenty.

  Thirty.

  I screamed as I went down, the steel burning through my grip. The agony was incredible, turning the world to black. It was all I could do to cling on to the rope—right up until the moment it ran out, and there was no more length to give. As we hit the end of it, the entire rig hit a dead stop, the jarring impact almost as bad as if we’d hit the concrete still five floors below.

  My hands were shredded, slick with blood. I didn’t dare to look, knowing I’d see bone. I didn’t even want to think about what had to happen next; assuming we got off the rope, I was going to have to carry Swann out of there with my ruined hands. The pain was excruciating.

  I slithered down another few feet, trying to lock myself off with my ankles before I fell.

  The shaft reeked of burned flesh.

  Ours.

  Below me, Fate kicked out, setting the pendulum into motion. It took five arcs before the rope was moving enough for him to reach out to the lowest balcony, and even as he caught it, our combined weight was working to pull him away from safety. But Fate was stubborn. He didn’t like losing any more than I did. He anchored us in place, allowing us to climb over him to safety.

  Well, dubious safety. We were still five floors up, a long way from where the skyhook was meant to pick us up, and a long way from the pipeline we’d crept into Akachi through. We were in no man’s land. But at least we’d survived a few more minutes. That was something.

  Sometimes a gig gets complicated by circumstances outside of your control.

  Sometimes you just have to make it more complicated because an opportunity arises.

  Sometimes those opportunities seem to be too good to be true for a reason.

  Like this one.

  We opened a door.

  On the other side of it, we found a man who, given the genius of his biomech personality rewriting chip technology, might as well have been God. Mankind spent centuries creating an all seeing all powerful deity capable of magic, of creation, and then spent just as long stripping the invisible one of His powers, but the one thing it had never been able to do outside of a Petri dish was create life. Until now. Aldus Keyes was his name. It wasn’t just about storing information that could be accessed, or developing skill sets the man with the chip interfaced with his brainstem had hitherto been incapable of, or even boosting intelligence with processing power, fusing man and machine in some biomech transhuman. It was all about fashioning a brand new personality. A new man. Giving flesh a soul, if you like, which was, of course, the last bastion of the god they’d created for themselves. We didn’t know that at the time, of course. He was just a white coat. A shield we could hide behind when the bullets started flying.

  Fate gambled that he was our ticket out of the place; that they wouldn’t risk killing him.

  Unlike Fate, I wasn’t sure they’d risk losing him, either.

  He was a small man, with little in the way of defining marks or memorable features; indeed he seemed almost to have rewritten his flesh into absolute and unremarkable averageness in the same way that his discovery was capable of rewriting the insides of the mind.

  He didn’t put up a fight.

  Recalling what had happened to the two other white coats on the landing earlier, that was perhaps for the best.

  Martagan cuffed him and escorted him to the stairs.

  Fate blocked out our escape route, running point.

  I struggled with Swann. I wouldn’t leave him, despite his protestations, but the mess of my hands made carrying him torture. I looked up as we stepped out into the atrium beneath the shattered dome, broken glass crunching beneath my feet. Black-clothed operatives streamed down the levels, the glo-lights on their suits eerie in the shadows. I didn’t need to count them. We were outnumbered. Badly.

  But this was far from over.

  What they didn’t know as they streamed down toward us was that the odds had just tilted dramatically in our favor. Fate grabbed the unassuming scientist by the throat and crushed his windpipe, making it hard for him to answer the question he posed, “How do we get out of here?” Keyes hacked and hocked, trying to get a breath and somehow squeeze the words Fate wanted to hear out past his opposable thumbs. Fate relented just long enough for him to gasp two words, “That way,” and point.

  “This way?” Fate demanded.

  The man nodded desperately. He really was a wretched creature.

  “Then this way it is. You first.” He pushed the scientist a couple of steps ahead, using him as a human shield, as we made our way toward the ground floor and an enormous foyer with ice sculptures that existed purely because they could, to serve as a way of Akachi reinforcing just how rich they were compared with their poor neighbors. The sculptures were representations of animals that had long since ceased to roam the Serengeti. They took up positions beneath, behind and between them, the huge glass doors behind them locked down. They were inches from freedom. But those doors weren’t moving for love nor money.

  Things were about to get really crowded down there.

  “Tell them we’re walking out of here, Mister Scientist Man,” Fate said. “Nice and easy. We don’t want any itchy trigger fingers.”

  “Stay back,” the man shouted, his call filling the foyer. There was nothing timid about his voice now. They listened to him. Fate saw that, realized exactly what it meant and was already processing the next stages of our exfiltration.

  “We can’t do that, sir,” one of the security force called back.

  “Yes, you can. I’m telling you to do that, and you’re going to do what I tell you.”

  “No can do, Professor Keyes. Our orders are that these men don’t leave the facility alive.”

  “And I’m giving you new orders, soldier. Open the doors. This doesn’t have to turn into a blood bath. You know who I am. You know what I’m worth. It’s all about money. It always is with these people. You have their faces, their bioscans, everything there is to know about them is at your fingertips. Use it to bring me home. I’ll walk out here with these men. Your job is to find me. Understood?”

  “Negative, Professor. We can’t let that happen.”

  “You have no choice,” Fate barked, his voice filling the cavernous space. He turned to the scientist. “How do we get through the doors?”

  “I don’t know,” the white coat said. “Not now the building’s on lockdown. It’s a smart building. It’s protecting itself.”

  I believed him. Luckily for all concerned, I knew exactly how we’d get through them. “I do,” I said, tapping the one remaining frag bomb on my belt. Can’t open a door? Make a new one. Why complicate life?

  What I hadn’t considered was the damage done to the tower’s frame by the two previous fragmentation bombs I’d detonated in the last couple of minutes, one of which had taken a huge bite out of the side of the tower and changed its structural integrity. The engineering and mathematics behind these super towers is nothing short of wizardry. The thing is, screw with one side of the equation, the ramifications will just be exacerbated on the other. Meaning, quite literally, that by taking a chunk out of the side of the tower from around the twentieth to thirty-third floors, I’d undermined the basic physics that kept the building upright.

  Another well-placed charge and the whole thing was coming down around our ears. One thing I’m getting very good at is blowing shit up. It’s a gift.

  The problem was I couldn’t just place the charge against the glass and back away. There was nowhere for us to take cover. Letting a frag bomb off in close proximity was like buying
a lottery ticket where there was a prize every time. Most of them, of course, involved various gruesome deformities and reduced life expectancy.

  I thought very seriously about taking out a couple of the snipers the security detail had lined up, figuring that I could lay their corpses over the frag bomb and dampen the effect of it a little. The truth was it wouldn’t do much apart from spray out bloody ‘rain’ across the foyer.

  There were, however, ice sculptures.

  But that would mean risking turning our backs to the trigger happy security detail.

  And, to be honest, something the Professor had said had got me spooked: we were in a smart building, on lockdown… and it was protecting itself? I really didn’t like the sound of that.

  In the end, it wasn’t my decision to make.

  I saw guide ropes hit the ground and realized another crew was rappelling down the front of the building to cut us off from escape. That hustled me along. With Swann still clinging to my back—I couldn’t hold him because of the damage done to my hands—I crab-ran to the nearest sculpture, a towering fish salmon-leaping out of a spray of water, something much bigger rising up behind it to feast, and using all my strength, put my weight behind it and pushed it across the marble floor to where I intended to lay the frag bomb. I repeated it with two more—a phoenix rising from crystal blue flames, and what appeared to be a slowly melting unicorn, up on its rear legs, kicking the air. The three between them ought to be enough to shield us from the blast.

  Fate didn’t move. He had the barrel of his gun pressed hard into the Professor’s temple, using the white coat a human shield, his free arm wrapped around the smaller man’s shoulders, pinning him.

  Beside him, Lisl Martagan had all angles covered.

  The first men came into view, bouncing down the glass superstructure, as I set the final frag bomb in place and backed away.

  The next ten seconds were the longest of my life.

  I knew, right around the fifth, that there was no way the ice would absorb enough of the blast, and would instead hurl lethal dagger-sharp slivers at us, perforating our bodies like a pin cushion. With three seconds left, I knew I had to run, but with Swann clinging on to my neck, a literal monkey on my back, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  With two seconds left I saw the red dot on my chest.

  And with one second left, I threw myself to the deck, beating the bullet and the blast by milliseconds.

  Instinctively, I put my hands out to break my fall.

  Mistake.

  Big fucking mistake.

  I screamed, but the air and sound were sucked out of my lungs by the detonation.

  I felt ice rip across my legs—not my back, Swann had that covered. I heard the whimpers of pain in my ear as the shards bit through his exospine. But he was breathing, and I was breathing and in my book that was a win. We had a gaping hole to walk out through. Who needed more?

  We walked out of that place, Fate shoving Professor Keyes ahead of us, which in Fate’s world made the mission a success. I’m a little more glass is half empty when it comes to getting shot at, blown up, charring the skin off my palms and otherwise having a bad day, myself.

  My brain was rocking to the tune of tinnitus.

  Something didn’t feel right.

  It was in the foundations, rippling like an earthquake. The ground couldn’t be trusted.

  “Move!” I yelled, no idea how loudly because I couldn’t hear anything.

  I didn’t need to.

  I could feel it.

  My frag bomb had blown out the load-bearing glass wall, and combined with the damage done up top and internally, the metal skeleton couldn’t hold and was twisting out of true. That’s a fancy way of saying the entire thing was coming down.

  So much for a quick in-and-out.

  The money men at Akachi Corp had just moved our gang of four right to the top of their Most Wanted list.

  We staggered out into the oasis and kept on going, eyes on the sky.

  The skyhook was coming.

  Part Two

  The Death Of Fate

  Fate found me in a Beetle den in Old Tokyo.

  I wasn’t in a good way. The op to re-skin my hands had been a success, but the meds were like old friends. Friends who really didn’t know when to take the hint and just fuck off. It wasn’t a seedy place. The girls, modern equivalents of geishas, I guess, moved in and out of the private rooms, all beauty and grace, bringing the delicious hit with them. Some patrons would go for twofers, combining guilty pleasures. Everything was for sale, after all. Me, I just curled up on the red velvet couch and stared at the walls, scratching my arms and sweating—and swearing too. Lots of that. Inventive stuff and fused body parts and rodents, that kind of thing. That was the climb down. I hated that. You’d think after all these years the scientists would have done something useful like crack the mystery of a controlled high, non-addictive, non-degenerative, non-anything exciting basically. But even if they did, people would still crawl to dens like Missy Tohe’s.

  He came banging on the door, all apologies and promises.

  I didn’t want to listen.

  “One last job, Marco. You owe us. We’re a team. We can’t do it without you.”

  “Haven’t I heard that before?” I said, scratching. My skin was crawling, and not just from the drug. Being around Fate did that to me now.

  “This is different.”

  “It was last time, too.”

  “You owe us, Marco. I don’t care if you’ve found religion or just want to lose yourself in this shit for the rest of your life, right now, today, you owe us. You’re part of this. An emissary from Akachi turned up at our door—”

  “You killed him, I take it?”

  Fate shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. They don’t want to hurt us. They want to hire us. We’re the guys who brought down an entire secret high-security facility in Africa, dude. We’re fucking legends at their place. We’re the guys who didn’t just steal their fancy Neurochip, we stole the scientist who created the damned thing. And now they want to hire us to bring him back! You’ve got to love it, right? We broke their system, they want us to fix it. Delicious irony.”

  “Or they just want to make sure we’re killed this time,” I said, ever the optimist.

  “Seriously, man, you could buy yourself a small island, the kind of money they’re offering. Swann won’t go in without you. Reckons you’re his good luck charm.”

  “Or his donkey,” I said, but I smiled this time when I said it, which Fate interpreted as a sign of weakness.

  “Yeah, well, Martagan’s less enthused, but she thinks the same way I do, we’re a team. All for one, one for all. We started this together, we end it the same way. Or we don’t do it at all.”

  “Then I vote for not doing it at all.”

  Before he could answer a sunken-eyed girl came in with a silver tray to offer Fate a hit. He declined with a pleasant enough smile, but she insisted, “You want to be here, you pay to be here,” so he gave her a few bucks for a hit and passed the stuff over to me. “Call it an early Christmas present.”

  I took it off him. I’m not proud.

  She left us alone again.

  “You don’t see what’s wrong with this?” I asked the moment the door closed behind her. “We’re biting the hand that feeds. That’s never smart. You’re talking about going into GenX, stealing the Professor right out from under their noses. You don’t need to be a Flatliner to know that’s not going to end well.” Flatliners were a new breed of tech warrior, willing to stop their own hearts to enter that in-between place. By dying they basically become part of the machine, ghosts in there, capable of all sorts of very scary shit. They only have a couple of minutes to do whatever hack they’ve been sent in to do, but in those two minutes they’re capable of pretty much anything, or so I’ve heard. I don’t claim to understand it really. Guns and violence I understand. Wanting to literally become part of some giant hive-mind machine? Not so much.


  “That’s the beauty of it, we set up a meet with our guy at GenX, and then we just walk in the front door, no need for anything fancy. No cunning plans to circumvent security. They’ll greet us with open arms. If we do it right, we won’t even need to fire a single shot. They won’t expect us to turn on them.”

  “But why us? Why should we get involved?”

  “Like I said, we’re the team that took Akachi down, they want to hire the best, that’s us.” So they’d pandered to his vanity. Made sense. It’s exactly what I would have done. I unwrapped the little sachet of Beetle and rubbed the gel into the thin skin on the inside of my elbow where the veins were closest to the surface. No need for needles or any other junkie paraphernalia. “According to their guy, it’s personal for them. It isn’t just about losing the tech, which was a major body blow, obviously. It’s about what GenX intend to use it for, that’s what’s really got their panties in a bunch.”

  “I’m going to regret asking, aren’t I? But what do GenX intend to use this miraculous discovery for? Not to end world hunger I assume?”

  “Stage one is destroying the existing power structures around the world, taking down rival corps, and replacing them with GenX controlled systems. It’s insidious. All pervasive. Think about it. Every platform linked back in some way to GenX. Every terminal. Every machine. They’d control the world. It’s bad enough as it is now, a few rival corps basically telling when we eat, when we drink, when we shit and when we sleep, but if it’s only one, it’s so much worse because it opens the way to stage two.” I listened to his paranoid bullshit. I’d heard it all before, or variants of it, at least. Fate gobbled up this conspiracy theory stuff. “And that’s when they start brainwashing and re-programming everyone, from the lowest echelons of society on up. That’s why they wanted to get their hands on the Akachi chip that Aldus Keyes invented. It’s not about reprogramming criminals so they can reintegrate into society and become useful. It’s all about control, and where better to start than in their base of operations, where the buildings themselves have been uprooted and cleansed and stripped of all disease and decay? Yep, that’s the plan, they’re going to turn every single one of their employees into a genuine motherfucking corporate drone. Are you really going to sit around and let that happen? Don’t try and tell me you are, Marco. I know you. You’re a fucking idealist. This is the kind of shit that makes your blood boil. Embrace your anti-establishment soul, my friend.”