by Dave Swavely
I was heavily outnumbered, however, so I had to formulate a plan for the best way to move to the control room quickly and efficiently. I did this while I was trotting up the steps to the spent-fuel room at the top of the reactor, adjusting the settings on the goggles for what I was going to do. When I reached the door, I pulled the Trinity from its spot on the back of my shoulder, and practiced switching between the three barrels with my fingers on the controls, so I was ready to do it rapidly. Then I moved the circular tool array to the middle of my back and secured it there. The small detonators I had removed from the generator room were still magnetized to the array and linked to my goggles so I could control them if I wanted to.
As soon as I felt ready, I pushed open the door and shot the soldier inside it who was facing my way the most. Then I rushed the other one as I shot him, so I could catch him before he hit the ground and use his body as a shield. It didn’t work out quite as I planned, and I ended up on the floor with my back pressed against the wall. But I was able to keep the man’s body in front of most of mine, so I could line up my next move with that added protection.
The spent-fuel room was the biggest open space in the plant, with a bluish expanse of water stretching away from me in a long rectangle, and a high ceiling that housed a movable crane for manipulating the radioactive fuel cells at the bottom of the deep pool. In the middle of the long room, stretching above the pool from side to side, was a catwalk on which were two more Red soldiers. They had no doubt chosen that spot because they could see everything in the big room from there, and so they saw me now and started firing in my direction. A few of their initial shots connected, but only with their comrade’s body, and between his Kevlar and my insertion suit I was in no danger from exiting rounds.
I fired the grappling monofilament out of another barrel on the Trinity and watched as it streaked to a spot above the catwalk and the soldiers. The microscopic line was too small to be seen with the naked eye, but the designers covered the flat sides with reflective material so that its location could be detected, especially in the enhanced view of my goggles. The flat sides also enabled the monofilament to be protracted and retracted by the grapple mechanism inside the gun—it gripped those minuscule sides in a way that could never have worked with the two edges, which were the sharpest objects known to man. The razor-like end and edges of the monofilament were what allowed it to enter any substance toward which it was shot, and a “smart head” on the end of the line caused it to turn sideways once it did. That was how the line adhered to the target surface and could hold a large amount of weight, and the head would contract so the line could be withdrawn from the surface and retracted back into the gun. It also allowed the monofilament to be used as a weapon, like a kind of ridiculously lethal whip.
I gripped the gun firmly with both hands in front of the soldier’s body, so I could hold onto it, too, and pulled us both forward and off the ground by retracting the grapple line. When we were suspended above one end of the pool, I stopped the retraction, and we swung across the surface of the pool and under the catwalk, where the two living soldiers were still firing at me. Not for long, though, because the monofilament sliced right through the middle of the catwalk, and they both fell into the blue pool, sinking like stones toward the canisters of radioactive waste at the bottom.
My swing wasn’t even impaired by the halving of the catwalk, and it dutifully deposited me on the floor at the other end of the pool, after I dropped the soldier’s body in it on the way. Another soldier was now coming through the door on that side, so I backed behind the cover of a wall girder while the grapple line released from the ceiling and flew back into the gun. Then in the next second, I switched barrels and shot the guard around the girder. And the second one that came through the door.
I knew that these Reds had alerted the rest to my presence, but I wanted that to happen so many of them would be drawn away from the control room. I wasn’t disappointed.
By the time I reached the elevator shaft between the reactor and the control building, my goggles showed me that a swarm of enemies were already coming up the stairways on each side of the shaft, and that someone in the control room had frozen the elevator at the very top. They had opened all the doors on both sides of the open shaft as well, presumably in case I decided to shimmy down it. Unfortunately for them, however, I didn’t shimmy but fired the grapple line into the bottom of the elevator car above me, jumped into the shaft, and dropped down it at a high speed. The soldiers had figured out by now that they couldn’t locate me with any eyeware they had, because of my suit, so they were limited to natural sight in the dark stairwells. And they must have turned off their comms to keep me from picking up any chatter with my superior scanning tech. So they weren’t coordinating well and ended up making an amateur mistake by trying to shoot me through the doors on the sides of the shaft. The only thing any of them hit were the other soldiers in the doorway across from them—this happened on at least two of the five floors. I could see their forms fall sideways in the goggles window I was using to monitor enemy locations.
This gave me an idea for the bottom of the shaft, so I dropped all the way to the bottom of it and bounced right back up out of sight one second later. Sure enough, the Reds on both sides fired when they saw me, and shot each other there, too. They thought they had me in a killbox, but they were the only ones who ended up dead. And I mean all of them, because while I was suspended just above the bottom floor I grabbed four of the detonators off the tool array on my back and threw a pair into each doorway below me, like grenades. They bounced into the hallways where the soldiers crouched and blew them all to kingdom come when I double-tapped the control pad on the side of my eye rig.
I had taken a bit of a chance that my passage could be blocked from that blast, but fortunately I was able to pick my way through it quickly and then progress to the control room by way of a cat-and-mouse game with the remaining guards. They couldn’t scan me, but I knew where all of them were, and I said another prayer of thanks to American technology. When I had almost reached my entry point to the control room, I dropped a bunch of detonators into two hallways on the side of me where most of the remaining soldiers were, and then cut them off with a big explosion that made it feel like the whole building might come down.
A side benefit of this was that General Ho panicked and sent some of his forces out the other side of the control room, perhaps assuming that I’d be where the explosion wasn’t, or maybe just to find out what was going on. But he should have kept them with him, because I found it rather easy now to blast a wall open remotely with some more of their detonators, drop through the ceiling on the other side of the room, and have the Trinity next to Ho’s head before anyone in the room could do anything about it.
“I am unarmed,” the Chinese general said in perfect English, raising his arms halfway and showing me both sides of his hands.
“Everyone out,” I said to his remaining staff, and I added the Chinese word for “Go”—one of the few I’d learned—in case any of them didn’t understand. They all scurried out, the lives of generals being especially sacrosanct in a militaristic and autocratic system like the PRC.
“You all right?” I said to Talon 2, who was strapped naked to a chair nearby, horrible wounds on his torso and the parts below it, and pools of blood on the floor under him. He could only grunt in response. He wouldn’t be having any kids without some major reconstructive surgery, but at least he was still alive.
“I have many armed men out there,” Ho said, gesturing to the open door that his staff had exited through. “They will be regrouping and coming for me soon. Your friend can’t walk, so you will not be able to carry him and hold me hostage. You will not be able to escape in that way.”
I looked at Ho’s bloody hands, and then down at my nearly dead friend.
“You’re right,” I said, and shot Ho in the head.
I did so because I didn’t have time to tie him up, or watch him while I rescued my fellow office
r. It was him or us, like all war. And this Red bastard definitely deserved it.
I untied my friend and hauled him over to the insertion coffin that Ho’s soldiers had brought to the control room for him to inspect. I stuffed him into it as tightly as I could, face up, and did the same with myself, right on top of him. Once I located the controls with my hand and synched them to my goggles, I had to toss my tool array and the Trinity out onto the floor in order to get the cover to close on our two bodies. But eventually it did, after some squirming, and I was now ready to burn all the coffin’s remaining power for its secondary function as an extraction vessel. I just hoped there was enough to actually get us out.
I extended the fins on each side of the sleek black vehicle and hit the thrusters, softly at first because I needed to maneuver out of the room and through a few hallways to get outside the building. I used the laser from the tool array on the front of the coffin to cut through a locked door, and then left it on to clear out the Chinese soldiers who were coming down the last hallway toward me. The lasers had run out of power by the time I punched through the last door to the outside, but fortunately the thrusters had not. I pointed the nose of the coffin at a 45-degree angle toward the eastern sky, as gunfire from more approaching soldiers clanged off its surface, and sent it soaring up and away from them like a punted football with blue fire coming out of its tail.
In my eye rig, which was linked to the front camera of the coffin, I could see blue sky for a while, then blue seawater after the HUD informed me that all propulsive power was depleted. Fortunately there was enough electricity left to activate the coffin’s floater ring, or it would have sunk like a stone and literally become a coffin. But as it turned out, we drifted on the surface of the water until we were retrieved about twenty minutes later. In the meantime, the Taiwanese army easily wiped out the remaining Chinese and reacquired the power plant.
Back in my room at the cottage, I didn’t watch the last part of the holo, of course. There was nothing to see except salt water, so I turned it off and remembered some of the things that had happened after that.
The first thing that came to mind was rather random and insignificant, and it was the jokes that some of the sub crew made about me and a naked man being stuffed into the tiny coffin for a half hour in that position. I told them off and put a quick end to such so-called humor, partly because I was angry at the suffering of the man who survived, and also because the man who didn’t survive had actually been gay. Talon 1 had been a good soldier, and now he was a hero who had been tortured to death for his country. So I refused to tolerate any jokes that day, even though we had won the battle.
The other memory I had was that a senior officer told me that Admiral Carter had to be talked into picking us up, because he was so bothered by my insubordination, and probably knew he wouldn’t be able to fully prosecute me because of the outcome. I found out that bastards come in white as well as red, when Carter swore to me in private that he would do everything in his power to make it hard on me if I stayed in the service. And when he was promoted to Defense Minister because of the success of the Taiwan operation, I knew he could make good on those threats. So since I couldn’t shoot him in the head like I did to Ho, I left the British military and ultimately England itself, ending up in the Bay Area working for BASS. But before I left my home country, some of the less political people near the king told him that I was the reason for the success in Taiwan, and Noel I did deign to knight me for my “distinguished military service.” Knighting was much more common these days than it had been in centuries past, but I still appreciated being thrown that royal bone.
As I stood up from my chair in the cottage bedroom, and looked around to bring myself back to this reality, I felt the ebb of adrenaline that had coursed through my body while I watched the holo from Taiwan, and the remnants of the anger that had fueled me back then. I also felt some guilt and regret now at shooting General Ho in cold blood like that, something I didn’t even come close to feeling when it happened, nor at any time when I was in the military. I don’t know if it was being out for a while or getting married or having children or what, but the process of being desensitized as a soldier had started to reverse itself in recent years. So now I had the worst possible combination of feeling bad when I hurt people, but still being able to do it rather easily and effectively.
Right now that anger and guilt was directed at the fact that even after reliving the whole episode in Taiwan, I didn’t feel any closer to understanding why Zhang Sun hated me enough to expend this amount of resources to kill me. Nor did I have anything that could be used against him, as Terrey hoped I would find. The search that was running while I watched the holo, supplied with images of those close to General Sun, failed to identify any faces of family members that had died in my assault. It only registered General Ho as a close associate, which made sense because Sun was his immediate superior. What made it more frustrating was that in the back of my mind, I felt that there was something in the holo that pertained to my situation. But I couldn’t place it, and I didn’t know if it was just because I was thinking along those lines to begin with.
I thought of talking to Saul’s ghost again, but remembered the frustration I had with it last time, and the fact that its programming wouldn’t reveal anything the old man didn’t want me to know. I needed to talk to someone living who might know more than I did, even though Terrey had told me not to spend much time on the wider net, or talking to anyone that was not a part of our secure loop. Stanford Glenn was someone like that, and there was another “splinter” in the back of my mind when I thought about my last conversation with him. So I resolved to ask Terrey if I could risk a call to him, and if the triplets could make it secure.
But for now I was ready to get some sleep. I was surprised by how late it was, and downright shocked when I thought back at everything that I had witnessed in just one day. A sniper attack, the fire in the base and outside of it, and the recording of the Taiwan operation—even watching all of that was exhausting. I thought of my house guests, however, for the first time in many hours, and stepped out of the room to check on them. Angelee and the boy must have been asleep in their room, because all I found in the living area was a note on the table from her, carefully placed next to a plate of dinner she had made for me.
I ate half of the food and put the rest in the refrigerator, thinking the whole time what a great wife the little lady would make for someone. Then I climbed into bed and set the alarm so I would be up in time to prepare the double for his big trip to the city. But if I had known what was going to happen in another bed that day, I would have stayed in mine.
33
FINALLY
I woke up before the alarm went off and lay in the bed for quite a while, thinking through the day to come. It would take all my meager management skills, working at their highest efficiency, to pull off what the double needed to do with BASS in general, and one Internal Security Officer in particular.
As I got up to take a shower, so I could be alert as possible, I could briefly hear the faint voices of Angelee and Chris in another part of the house. They were dutifully not bothering me, and I was so distracted with what I had to do that I didn’t think of going out to greet them at all. In my mind, the girl’s misplaced hopes about me were working out beautifully for both of us, because I was confident that she would stay right here and gladly provide anything I needed, and it was also the best thing for her and Chris to be staying here right now. I did feel bad that she would have to be let down at some point, but hardly had time to worry about that now.
When I came out of the shower, I first called Terrey to make sure that he would take care of all the security concerns, so I could focus on my ride with the double.
“Live forever, man,” I said when he came on.
“Never die young, mate,” he said in return. “I love this idea, it kills so many birds. Michael Ares makes a public appearance, but not too much of one. You appoint a spokesperson, so she can
talk about things and give us a credible reason to keep the double out of the public eye.”
And my almost-affair with Tara will finally be ended, I thought to myself. But I said, “Yeah, it should work out well, as long as Jon doesn’t get killed. I’m hoping you can handle the Protection Guaranteed part so I can concentrate on what he’s saying and doing.”
“Absolutely, my boy. Me and the Trois have it covered. Or I should say the Deux, since Go is still recovering and getting worked on by the Cyber Hole tech when he’s done with Min. But we’re more than up for the task. We’ve neutralized the assault team, sniper, and bomb methods, so we just have to prepare for the other ones that have been used in the past, and be as ready as we can for anything new. Poison: We simply won’t let Jon eat or drink anything while he’s at the castle. Accidents: We’ll have BASS clear any other aeros out of the sky while he’s on the way, and on the way back. Betrayal: We can never totally eliminate all possibilities of that, but we’ll be with him the whole time he’s in the castle and limit his interactions there. Except he will have to talk to this Sheila you’re promoting to the spokesperson job. Are you sure she couldn’t have been turned against you?” He was referring to Tara, of course.
“Yes,” I said with a chuckle. “Very sure.”
“Oh, you clever boy,” he said, showing how clever he was himself, by picking up my unintentional vibe. But then he got back to business: “And we don’t have to worry about the members of the Protection Team, of course, because they know that the double is not you, and they have no idea where you are.”
“Why do you say it that way?” I asked. “Is there an issue with somebody?”
“No, no. We did it right. You picked ’em, and they didn’t have any connection with you. We’re good.”
“Terrey…,” I said, raising the last syllable.
“No, really, mate. If I had anything substantial, I would tell you. But I don’t want you to get paranoid. Just trust me, we’re good.”
