by Jack Heath
False alarms were common in the Deck, but the agents didn’t question him. Half ran towards the stairwells, the other half shuffled quickly into the lift. A skinny woman with a nose-stud hung back.
‘Someone should stay with you,’ she said.
Grysat shook his head. ‘Get in the lift, Agent Four.’
And then Agent Four’s face exploded off.
The bullet had broken the sound barrier, so Grysat was spattered with Four’s blood before he even heard the gunshot. He wasted a quarter of a second watching her fall forwards onto his desk before he looked behind her and saw the soldiers storming through the front door with their guns already pointing at his head. He heard the lift doors sliding closed behind him and snapped out of his trance, reached down under the desk, grabbed his Eagle automatic and raised it up, clicking the safety off, all in one smooth motion.
Protocol dictated that he shout ‘Halt,’ ‘Freeze,’ or ‘Drop your weapons’. He didn’t, partly because there wasn’t time, partly because he didn’t think they would take any notice, but mostly because he’d just seen his friend’s head burst.
Teeth clenched, blood boiling in his veins, Grysat jammed his finger down on the trigger. The Eagle shuddered in his hands as he swept the barrel from left to right, one neat slice of firepower through the soldiers. Marble shattered and glass cracked and holes burned into the wood. The noise was deafening.
But the soldiers were unharmed.
Every single bullet had crumpled against a piece of body armour, as though there were magnets behind the Kevlar, drawing the shots in.
Grysat didn’t stop to wonder how that was possible. He prepared to sweep the gun back across them, tear them to pieces before they could get inside –
– and then a round slammed into his chest like a freight train colliding directly with his lungs.
When a bead of mercury is sealed inside a hollowed-out bullet, it becomes even more lethal than a hollow point. As the doctored round is fired, the mercury will slide to the back of the bullet. Upon impact, the momentum will make the mercury explode forwards out of the tip, shattering into millions of tiny particles.
Mercury is very, very toxic, but that doesn’t matter much, because at that velocity, it becomes solid. Anyone hit with one of these rounds will have his or her insides torn apart by the mercury particles.
This was why Agent Four’s face had blasted outwards. And this was what was happening to Grysat. His back was a bloodied colander of tiny exit wounds. His heart and lungs were in pieces. A chunk of his spine was missing.
Grysat didn’t know any of this. But he knew that he was dying.
He suddenly noticed that he was lying on the floor, but he didn’t remember falling. Then he didn’t remember getting shot. Then he didn’t remember getting up this morning, or getting a job at the Deck, or his mother’s smile when she was alive.
They say your life flashes before your eyes, he thought. But in reality it does the opposite. It disappears, huge chunks at a time.
He heard the soldiers running towards him, boots clomping against the floor, but he heard it as if it came from a long way away.
He felt like there was something he had to do, but he couldn’t remember what. It was something important, though.
The alarm. He had to sound the alarm.
The button was on the floor under his desk. His hand was inches from it.
He tried to lift his arm, place his hand down on the button. But the blood wasn’t pumping anymore; his shoulder muscles were very weak and he was starting to get dizzy and suddenly he was blind, too.
Okay, so he couldn’t lift his hand. But maybe he could slide it.
Muscles burning, brain aching, he dragged his arm slowly sideways. He couldn’t feel anything anymore, and couldn’t tell where the button was. And then he heard the shrieking of the klaxon and realised that he’d done it.
Good job, Grysat, he told himself. That was hard work, but it’s done now.
Time to rest.
The soldiers were already setting up the bomb as the receptionist collapsed. They had known that he would die. They’d known he would sound the alarm.
And they knew how to switch it off.
The bomb, a green cylinder the size of an icebox, was actually an EMP generator. When switched on, it would send a shockwave of electromagnetic energy through the Deck, frying the circuitry in every switched-on computer, door lock and electronic device it passed through. It would do more than just shut off the alarm – it would cripple the defences of the entire building.
They set the timer for the minimum: three seconds. Then they watched in silence as the LED screen on the bomb ticked down in front of them.
The EMP generator made no sound other than a slight hum as it clicked on. But every light bulb above their heads screeched as it overloaded and shut down. Sparks rained down from the connections.
The lift doors wouldn’t open without a key code. But they knew it.
One of the soldiers stepped over the receptionist’s body, leaned down over the keypad and typed a sixteen-digit string of numbers. The receptionist’s computer beeped as it rebooted – it had shut down when he pushed the alarm, and therefore had not been harmed by the EMP.
The soldier pushed the big red button. The computer buzzed. The lift doors opened.
The Deck agents inside barely had time to raise their weapons before they were blinded by a lightning storm of muzzle flashes as the mercury bullets chopped them to bits. It was over in seconds. The last bleeding limb had barely hit the floor before the soldiers all piled into the lift, still silent.
The doors slid closed behind them.
‘What was that?’ Ace whispered.
Six stared around the corner of the corridor, into the darkness. ‘EMP,’ he replied. ‘Shut off the alarm, and the lights too.’ He took the Raven X59 out of the pocket of his tuxedo, and chambered a round. ‘We’re under attack.’
‘Is this our fault? Were we followed back here?’
Six rewound his memory to the car trip back. No cars following them, no air traffic, nothing suspicious about the car they’d been in. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is something else.’
Ping. That was the lift, further down the corridor. Six heard the doors slide open.
It was against protocol to use the lifts after an alarm had sounded. The occupants, therefore, were probably the attackers.
‘Run,’ Six whispered. ‘Get as far away from here as you can. Warn everyone you see.’
Ace didn’t argue. She slipped away into the gloom. Six edged towards the corner. He needed to know what he was up against. A ChaoSonic special forces team, bristling with combat knives? A battalion of soldiers with rocket launchers and plastic explosives?
A single pair of boots thumped slowly along the corridor. Six frowned, and risked a peek around the corner.
It was a lone soldier. And a very strange-looking one.
He was a giant – more than two metres tall, and at a guess he weighed well over a hundred kilograms, all of it muscle. His face was brutish, with a nose that had more than once been broken and badly reset, and an old scar from a stab wound just under his jawline. He was wearing a Kevlar vest, but no other body armour and no helmet, which was weird. In order of importance, body armour is usually issued for the head, then torso, neck, limbs, and finally the extremities. To have a vest but no helmet was bizarre.
And he had no night-vision goggles. If he or his teammates had cut the power, why hadn’t they thought to bring NVGs? What advantage did they have without them?
The soldier was walking slowly down the corridor towards Six, head bowed. He didn’t have the soft, hurried footfalls of most soldiers, nor the furtive, sweeping gaze. He was plodding like a man on death row.
The last thing was so strange that it took Six a moment to realise it.
The soldier carried no gun.
Nothing in his hands, no holsters on his body – no knives or batons either. Who sends an unarmed man into combat? Six won
dered. Then he thought: Someone trying to create a diversion.
He whirled around. The corridor behind him was empty. No platoon of troops charged up out of the stairwell. Still suspicious, he closed his eyes and listened very carefully. All movement displaces air, and soundwaves are the resulting variations in air pressure. They can be heard because they bounce against the eardrum, causing it to vibrate.
The only sound was the thudding of the lone soldier’s boots. Six’s eardrums were incredibly sensitive; if there was anyone else within a hundred metres of him, they weren’t moving.
Six didn’t know what was going on, but he intended to take no chances. Right now he had the element of surprise, and he planned to keep it that way.
Thump, thump, thump. The soldier had nearly reached Six’s corner. Six shifted his weight slightly, so he was crouched down, resting on his toes and his fingertips. He held the Raven out to one side rather than at the ready – he didn’t want to shoot this soldier. He couldn’t get answers out of a dead man.
Three.
Two.
One!
Six launched forwards as the soldier appeared, flying towards the soldier’s side in a controlled tackle. He raised his forearm, aiming it for the throat, hoping to pin the soldier to the wall.
As if he had known Six was there all along, the soldier ducked – and then as Six flew over him, he stood again, slamming one hand against Six’s stomach and one against his face. Trapped by his own momentum, Six was thrown upwards. All the air was shoved out of his lungs as his back smashed against the ceiling, and then he was falling, and he barely had time to get his hands out to break his fall so he didn’t fracture his nose on the floor tiles.
‘Superhuman,’ Six growled, as he scrambled to his feet.
‘Superhuman,’ the soldier said, at almost the same moment.
Adrenaline charging through his body, Six drew back the hand holding the Raven, like he was going to smash the butt of the gun into the soldier’s temple – and then he jabbed forwards with his other hand, driving his fist towards the soldier’s jaw at a supersonic speed.
Unfazed, the soldier caught Six’s fist in his palm, and squeezed.
Now Six was in trouble – he had seen this move before, and even used it a couple of times. The soldier couldn’t crush his knuckles from this position, because the angle of pressure was wrong. But if Six pulled back, that angle would change, and the soldier could break every bone in Six’s hand as easily as squeezing a carton of eggs. If Six pushed forwards instead, then he would be off-balance, and the soldier could trip him, shove him, knock him to the ground. And then the fight would be over – the soldier could kick him to death.
And it went both ways. If the soldier pulled, he could break Six’s bones unless Six stepped towards him. If he pushed, Six’s balance would be compromised unless he stepped away. As long as the soldier was squeezing Six’s fist, he controlled whether they moved forwards or backwards.
Normally, Six would step in, twist his body around, and keep twisting until his hand was free. But by now he knew the soldier was an expert, with genetic experimentation or reflex-enhancing drugs or computer implants on his side. The standard twist-and-release response might just get Six tangled up.
So he kicked, low and hard, straight at the soldier’s kneecap. An unarmed soldier with a broken leg is no threat to anyone, and right now, Six needed the advantage.
The soldier twisted away from the blow. He had to let go of Six’s fist to do it, but it protected his knee – the impact went into the back rather than the front, flexing the joint rather than snapping it in half.
As the soldier spun, his other arm whipped backwards, and his gloved hand wrapped around the barrel of Six’s gun.
Six’s heart raced. A fistfight with an unarmed man was one thing. But if the soldier got hold of the gun, Six would be entirely at his mercy.
Six pulled the trigger. Blam! Then he pulled it again. Blam!Then again and again and again.
He had hoped that the recoil would weaken the soldier’s grip. But to his astonishment, the soldier held still, teeth gritted, gloved fist clenched around the gun, as round after round slammed into the back of his Kevlar vest. Six had been shot before – even with body armour, it hurt like hell. It bruised flesh and cracked ribs and knocked all the air out of you. But the soldier just stood there and took it, five close-range shots to the torso, before whirling around and punching Six’s gun hand. Six gasped as the agony shocked up his arm, and the Raven popped out of his grip.
The soldier stepped backwards, out of Six’s reach, and raised the gun so it pointed at Six’s face.
Six raised his hands. This fight was over.
The soldier remained perfectly still, saying nothing. His face was hidden by the shadows.
Why just stand there? Six wondered. Either shoot me or don’t. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘What do you want?’ the soldier countered.
And then Six ducked as Ace swung the crowbar into the side of the soldier’s head, her teeth clenched and knuckles white. A normal man would have been decapitated by the blow. The soldier merely fired the Raven into the ceiling, one reflexive shot, as he crumpled onto the ground, unconscious.
‘I told you to run,’ Six said.
‘I did,’ Ace replied, panting. ‘I ran until I found this.’ She hefted the crowbar. ‘Then I ran back. You’re welcome, by the way.’
‘Did you see anyone else?’
Ace shook her head.
Six tightened some flexi-cuffs around the unconscious soldier’s wrists, and hefted him over his shoulder. He was so much taller than Six that his hands and feet almost touched the ground.
‘We should head for the cells,’ Six said. ‘That’s the easiest place to defend, and we need somewhere to lock this guy up.’
‘Who is he?’ Ace asked, staring at the giant.
‘I don’t know,’ Six said. ‘But if there are many more like him, we’re in big trouble.’
Nai kept her eyes trained on the stairwell door. She hadn’t moved since she arrived, and wouldn’t move for as long as it took – but her contact, the Queen of Spades, was supposed to be here by now. Her father had assured her of it. The QS was supposed to enter the basement through the stairwell door at precisely 1.30 am, give her the disk, and leave again. Then Nai was supposed to wait another ten minutes before sneaking out through the hole she’d drilled in the ground of the alleyway outside.
Those ten minutes were nearly up, and the QS hadn’t arrived yet.
The lights had gone out a few minutes ago, drenching the car park in shadows. Nai couldn’t work out if that was a good sign or a bad one. Had the QS taken out the lights to reduce the risk of anyone seeing the exchange, or had someone else switched them off so they could sneak up on Nai?
Nai gritted her teeth. She hated situations like this. If she left, she would fail her mission – and Lerke wouldn’t have sent her to collect this disk if it wasn’t important. But every minute she stayed, she was in more danger. Her enemies were too close – literally looming over her, somewhere on the floors above. If the QS didn’t show up, it was probably because she had been compromised. It wouldn’t be long before agents came down here looking for Nai. And then she’d probably have to kill some of them to escape, and then the whole Deck would be hunting her, and she wouldn’t get the disk and she would still fail her mission. Lose lose situation.
Two more minutes, Nai decided. Then she would call Lerke and tell him she was aborting the mission. He would understand.
The fire door opened.
A Deck agent marched through, cradling an Eagle automatic. Nai instantly drew her Hawk 9 mm pistol, took aim at his head, rested her finger on the trigger – and then the QS entered behind him. She smiled, in a way that Nai found unsettling. Two more Deck agents followed her. Spades, Nai gathered from the insignias on their fatigues.
‘You’re late,’ Nai said, reholstering her weapon.
‘I ran into your brother,’ the QS said.
‘Literally, I hope. Like, with your car.’
The QS raised her eyebrows. ‘How interesting. You two don’t get on? I would have thought you’d have lots in common.’
Nai grimaced. She wasn’t interested in talking about this. ‘You know why I’m here.’
‘Yes. Do you?’
Nai hated mind games. ‘Just give me the disk.’
‘There’s no disk.’
Nai felt a chill wash through her. She wondered if she could reach her gun and shoot all three Spades before one of them got her. Probably not. ‘Then what are we trading?’
The QS put her hands in her pockets. ‘You.’
Nai had no idea what that meant, but she didn’t like it. Maybe she could still get what her father wanted. In her experience, threats were more powerful than negotiation. ‘Hand over the disk,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll kill you.’
‘Oh really?’ The QS looked amused.
‘I could take down those amateurs,’ Nai said, gesturing at the Spades, ‘with my eyes shut and my hands cuffed behind my back. The only reason you’re still alive is that my father vouched for you. Give me the disk, or I’ll slaughter you and bring him back your lying tongue.’
‘Your father sold you to me,’ the QS said. ‘You’re going to be my next body.’
It took Nai’s brain a fraction of a second to process what she’d just heard, and realise what it meant. Vanish, she thought. The QS was not who she appeared to be.
Nai’s guts started to feel like she was in a lift whose cables had snapped, and she was plummeting into the darkness.
‘He traded you to me,’ Vanish said, ‘in exchange for Six’s life.’ He eyed her curiously. ‘How does that make you feel?’
Father would never do that to me, she thought. He’s lying. Her hands tightened into fists.
‘Feels good,’ she said. ‘I thought you were a highly trained Deck agent. Now I know you’re just a crazy old man in an unfamiliar body. That’ll make it much easier to kill you.’
‘You can answer my questions later,’ Vanish said, drawing a pistol from the folds of his coat. ‘Right now, you’re going to put your hands on your head and turn around.’
