“Clever,” said Carter. “Checking the digital against the real?”
“Something like that.” Mason saw another face at a different window, an eyeless corpse with a wet gash for a mouth. The overlay showed a window, dark and empty. “The overlay gives me a headache.”
“You could quit.”
“No one quits, Carter. You know that.” Mason walked away from the Suzuki, the bike powering down with a soft whine as the cowl locked into place. “You got a satellite view?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You’re working on it? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Christ, Mason. This isn’t Fisher-Price in space. I’m getting a lot of interference. There are other interests at work here.”
“Metatech?”
“Do you want the satellite, or do you want to know who’s trying to jack it?”
“I want the satellite.” Mason walked up chipped concrete steps to the double doors at the front of the building. An old wooden board lay against the steps, chipped paint advising Vacancy - Apply Within! “Wait. Someone’s jacking one of our sats? Sounds like this might be more of a priority than you thought.”
“You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
“Jesus, Carter. I don’t want that thing pointed the wrong way.”
“Have I ever let you down?”
Mason didn’t reply. Carter probably had detailed stats on it, and — really — it would be bad form to get into that kind of thing with her right now. He laid a hand on the tarnished doorknob, giving it a gentle pull. The wet wood tore, the knob coming out in his hand. He looked at it for a moment, then tossed it aside. Mason stood against the door, pushing it with his shoulder. The door squeaked then groaned low as it opened into the gloom of the foyer. Something moved back in the dark, scuttling for cover. The overlay showed it too, something like a rat but bigger. He reached for the Tenko-Senshin, clicking the weapon’s light on. Clear and bright, the beam played across the room, picking out an old reception desk, the boxes for hotel mail rotting behind it. A rusty bell still sat on the counter next to a heap of mouldering machinery that might have been a till.
“You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and they’ll never find your body!” Carter’s voice was harsh in his ears.
“What the fuck, Carter.” Mason swallowed. “What the actual fuck!”
“I didn’t say anything.” Carter’s voice was normal, calm.
“Yeah. Yeah, you did.”
“Curious. It’s progressing faster than I thought. With your augments—”
“You didn’t just say I was going to die?”
“No.” She paused. “I probably should have, though. Tactically speaking, you’re not in a good place right now. It might have been the EMP.”
Mason played the beam around the rest of the room, picking out a curved stairway leading up. An old man with a rotting face —
The stairway was empty. Mason swallowed again. “I tell you what.”
“What?”
“Don’t say anything to me until I talk to you. Nothing…”
“Unsolicited?”
“Sure.” Mason nodded. “‘Unsolicited.’”
“What if I see something?” Carter sounded doubtful.
“Then you’re just going to have to let me handle it. It’s why old man Gairovald pays me the big dollars.” Mason moved towards the stairway, looking up the well. High above him the roof was broken, faint fingers of moonlight touching the walls. Water was coming in from somewhere, the stairs wet with it. “If I get out of this, I’ll take you some place nice.”
Carter’s reply was quiet, uncertain. “Like where?”
“Nowhere like this place, that’s for sure.” Mason coughed again, something warm and wet hitting his hand as he covered his mouth. He wiped his palm against his pants without looking at it.
“Ok.” Carter paused, then her voice hardened. “Try not to get yourself killed. I don’t want to break in a new partner.” The link went dead.
Mason put a foot on the first step, easing his weight onto it. It creaked, the swollen wood giving easily under his foot. Not that way, then. What kind of asshole did business in a place like this anyway? He looked up again, a flash of lightning picking out a ring of faces looking down at him. The overlay showed an empty stairway. He blinked a few times, wiping his face with his free hand, the Tenko-Senshin’s beam bobbing across their faces, then they were gone. The hair on the back of his neck rose. “Definitely not the stairs. Right.”
Talking to yourself was never a good sign.
He blinked around the foyer again, his eye picking out a door behind the reception desk. It was slightly ajar, a sign saying Staff Only in what might once have been gold letters. Mason walked towards it, his feet scraping and crunching against the debris on the floor. He crouched next to the door, the light shining down at the floor. The floor was scuffed here, as if the door had been recently opened. He let his fingers touch the rough edges of the floor for a moment. Mason leaned against the frame, then pushed the door slowly inward. Concrete stairs went down into the dark. He saw eyes blinking up at him, but the overlay was clean and clear. “Anyone down there?”
Silence. He waited, leaning against the frame. The thing like a rat came back out, scampering across the floor and away. Somewhere inside Mason a hysterical giggle started, and he clamped down on the noise. He pointed the Tenko-Senshin’s beam down the stairs, picking out the peeling paper on the walls. A light switch, green with mold, was mounted at the top of the stairs. Mason reached forward and clicked it a couple of times, the sound sharp against the quiet.
He reached into his pocket for a drone, twisting the sphere and tossing it down the steps. It bounced, a scattering of red lasing out as it tumbled down into the dark. Mason let the overlay fill up, picking out the layout of the room below. He sealed the front of his jacket, shrugging his shoulders as the helmet chattered out of his collar and lapped into place around his head.
“There’s no one down there, Mason.” Carter’s voice was all business.
“I thought I told you not to talk to me.”
“Your heart’s getting significantly elevated. I was concerned.”
“You were what?” Mason put a foot on the stair case, starting down.
“Concerned.”
“You got the satellite up?”
“Not yet.”
“I’d be more concerned about that.”
Carter sighed. “I can do more than one thing at once.”
Something with a gash instead of a mouth reached for him from the dark below. He blinked twice, feeling his heart kick in his chest. “It seems worse, here.”
“The satellite is worse here?”
“No. The—” Mason coughed, feeling something like phlegm in his throat. “Stuff.”
“Stuff? What are you, five years old?”
Mason leaned against the wall, his forehead resting against the peeling paper. He breathed in deep and slow, his hands shaking. He felt a little stab of anger at Carters’ words, then he grinned as the anger pushed back the fear. “Thanks, Carter.”
“What for?”
“Keeping it real.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But really.”
“What?”
“‘Stuff?’”
Mason continued down the stairs, the beam of light pushing back the darkness in the basement. Water trickled from a crack the ceiling, the old concrete chipped in spidery lines. He played the beam along the cracks.
“You getting this?”
“Yes.” There was a pause, then Carter cleared her throat. “I don’t think those cracks are that old.”
Mason followed the cracks as they seemed to converge, stepping past a support beam. He paused, looking at the beam. It was charred and black along one side, the side facing where the cracks in the ceiling were converging.
That’s when he saw the body. It was covered with a layer of carbon, barely recognisable, black from head to foot, t
he corpse curled up in a foetal position against the floor. Water had mixed with the ash, a pool of dark stretching out around it. Mason checked the feed. The body was there in digital too.
“I think we’re getting warmer.”
Carter snorted. “Don’t you think that’s just a bit in bad taste?”
“What? Oh. Right.” Mason’s mouth tugged at the edges, the expression more habit than feeling. “Bad choice of words.”
“Accurate, though. Find it, Mason. We can’t afford to lose this one.”
They came out of the darkness at him then, eyes milky from the grave. There were seven of them, their shambling gate bringing them into the Tenko-Senshin’s beam. Their grasping hands reached for him. The feed —
Mason pulled the trigger, the scream of the weapon deafening in the basement. The blaze of the flechettes, bright and angry, stabbed across the floor between him and the walking corpses. The heat from the weapon sparked and kicked at the air, and one of the corpses started to burn from the heat even as it was pulled apart, falling in pieces.
Then they were gone. Flames licked up from the floor, where something had fallen as it burned.
“Mason!” Carter’s voice was loud in his ear. “What—”
“The feed, Carter.” Mason coughed again. “They were on the feed.”
“I don’t—” She stopped. “That’s impossible.”
“You can see them, can’t you?” He walked over to the burned patch on the ground. It was an arm, cut and torn from the Tenko-Senshin’s barrage. He poked it with a gloved finger. “And you can see this.”
“The dead don’t walk, Mason. We know the hallucinations are just… They’re an effect, from the rain.”
“This look like an effect?”
“No, but… Wait. What’s that?” Mason’s optics flickered once, twice, then a reticule highlighted a section of an arm. “That tattoo.”
Mason leaned forward, poking the arm with the barrel of the Tenko-Senshin. The tattoo was typical military-style, the falcon, globe, and anchor faded with age. A barcode was etched underneath, the six-digit service number faded to illegibility.
“Give me a second,” she said. “I’ll enhance that.”
Mason’s optics flickered again, picking out the barcode and service number. A section popped into relief, image enhancing algorithms kicking in. A sound was coming down the link from Carter. “Are you… Jesus. You’re humming.”
“Yeah.” She went back to humming. “I love my work. What can I say.”
“It’s hardly the time, Carter.”
“Oh. Right.” She stopped humming, and a chime sounded. “It doesn’t matter, we’re done. That arm belongs to… John Smith.”
“I’m not in the mood.” Mason rubbed a hand over his face. “His name’s actually John Smith?”
“Yeah. From Nebraska.”
“John Smith, from Nebraska. What’s his arm doing here? And when did he die?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” A military service record started to download to Mason, the pages flipping over in the top right of his optics. “According to the Marines, he’s not dead.”
Mason nudged the arm, then stood up. “Looks pretty dead to me.”
“Well it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Carter.”
“Yes, Mason?”
“I’m a field agent. I didn’t study sociopathy.”
“Sociology. I’m a sociology major, Mason. Amongst other things.”
“Whatever.”
She sighed, then paused for a moment. “It’s got nothing to do with sociology. It’s just logic. The reason why… Specialist Smith doesn’t have a deceased date on file is because you only just killed him.”
“Specialist?”
“Career Retention Specialist. It’s in the file.”
“He was… Wait. He was in HR?” Mason looked up at the darkness around him, then let the Tenko-Senshin’s beam fill the spaces between the columns with light. You’re babbling. Get your shit together. Only little kids are afraid of the dark.
“It’s the Marines, Mason.”
“Christ. I thought they shot people.”
“They do. And they have an HR department to make sure they retain people who are good at shooting.”
Mason blew out a nervous laugh. “Well, I guess that makes sense.”
“I know you don’t like HR, Mason, but this is a bigger issue, ok?”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re like dealing with a child. A retarded child. The atmospheric effect? You remember.”
“Sure. The effect. The rain.”
“Right, the rain. We figured it made you see things.” Carter coughed.
“It does.” Mason nudged the arm with the toe of his boot. “I saw a dead man walking.”
“No,” said Carter, “you didn’t. You saw a live man walking, and then you made him a dead man. It becomes even more imperative that we find the technology for the Federate. You need to get to that buyer, and acquire the asset. To use your word, this is powerful ‘stuff.’”
Mason chewed the inside of his lip for a moment, looking around at the bodies. Some were still burning. “They looked dead. They were attacking.”
“Wait. I’ll show you.” Carter spun back the tactical overlay to the time that Mason opened fire. “See?”
“Ah, Christ,” said Mason. “I just shot a bunch of homeless guys, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Carter. “But that’s not the interesting bit.”
Mason walked amongst the remains of the bodies. “What did Specialist Smith get kicked out of the Marines for?”
“Discharged.”
“What?”
“They call it ‘discharged,’ Mason.”
Mason sighed. “Ok, Carter. Discharged.”
“He was attacked.”
“It’s the Marines. Gonna happen.” Mason gestured around him. “He just got attacked again, after attacking me.”
“You should read the file.”
“Pretend I don’t have time for that.” Mason heard something out in the darkness, turning to point the Tenko-Senshin at it. There was nothing there.
Carter flicked the file through, the discharge papers dropping into Mason’s optics. “He was trying to performance manage someone, and got hit in the head with a chair. He couldn’t walk properly after.”
“So I just killed a cripple? Way to make me feel better, Carter.”
“The point is, Mason,” she said, sounding exasperated, “that before, we thought the rain made you see things.”
“It does.”
“Right. But it also makes you see different things. Things that are actually there can appear different. That’s assuming,” she said, “that you believe you saw dead people attacking you.”
“You’re not supposed to read my psych reports.”
“I get bored at night.”
“Most people sleep.”
“Most people aren’t quite as high-functioning as I am.” She sounded just a little too smug for Mason’s liking. “So. Which is it? Did you just gun down a bunch of homeless guys in cold blood, or did the rain make you think a bunch of homeless guys were actually dead guys?”
“I need a drink.”
“Later.” Carter coughed again, then her voice turned more formal. “You should finish your sweep.”
Mason nodded to himself, then kept walking through the darkness, towards the centre of — what? The beam of light from the Tenko-Senshin picked out bits of detritus on the ground, a lump of fallen concrete here, a mouldering box there. He passed another charred support column, this one cracked and broken in the middle, rebar showing through the breaks.
The light played over a smudge on the ground, nothing more than a smear of carbon. “I’m pretty sure that used to be a person.”
“A person?”
“An illegal.”
“It’s not illegal, Mason—”
“You know what I mean. There’s no implants.”
“Or the f
ire was very hot.” She paused. “I think you must be close now. Be careful.”
Mason’s light picked up something in the darkness, another support beam, blasted and twisted, concrete chunks missing in the darkness. Beyond that, the floor sank into a smooth depression, the curve looking like the bottom half of a sphere. The concrete had been pushed down and cracked, as if something round and tremendously heavy had sat there. The ceiling was broken in a loose ring.
“There’s no debris.” Mason played the light up to the roof, noting where the top of the object must have punched through to the floor above. Water trickled in over the edge.
“I see what you mean. Where did the roof go?”
“I’m guessing this is the centre of the blast. Whatever it was.” Mason played his light around the edge, picking up the remains of some scorched cables. He followed them back to the remains of a re-enforced case, the charred and twisted top about waist height. An Apsel logo was still faintly visible on the leeward side. “Wait. What the…”
Carter paused for a heartbeat, two. “Is that a… Is that the Federate’s logo? Is that our logo on that box?”
Mason grabbed the edges of the lid, pulling hard. With a creak and a flaking of carbon, the box opened. There wasn’t much left inside, mostly melted metals, burnt plastics, some glass.
“What is it?” Mason let his optics kick over to thermal. The innards of the box were cold, lifeless. If it was Apsel tech, it had been burned out by whatever had happened here.
“I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a reactor.” She was humming again.
“Sure,” said Mason. “Back to my question: what is it?”
“See if you can find a serial number.”
“Come on, Carter. Look at it.”
She sighed. “Fair enough. Wait a moment.”
Mason started to lift fragments out of the box. His hand came up against a piece of metal, mostly intact. He brushed a thumb against the carbon scoring on the side. “Check this out.” He held the metal at arm’s length, pointing the beam from the Tenko-Senshin at it. The light picked out the Apsel logo, and the words APSEL FEDERATE — ATOMIC ENERGY DIVISION.
“That’s — it’s us. You came here following a reactor signature, and you found a box of junk. Junk we made.” Carter sounded almost confused.
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