by Nels Wadycki
Klaxons crashed around them. Aerin covered his ears, but Ana was more composed. Her training allowed her to remain stoic despite the blaring alarms. Aerin considerably less so.
Ana turned, grabbed the handle affixed to the transparent panel of the door, and pulled. She figured it wouldn't do much good and unfortunately she was right.
Aerin was spouting mild-mannered curses like he'd suddenly acquired a very juvenile case of Tourette's. She turned back to him.
"Don't worry. We'll be out of here in a sec. It's not like they're going to fry the room with us inside."
"I know," he said. "But that was the only sample. No offense, but you guys didn't bring back a lot to work with. And now we'll have to go through the Ionizer."
Ana should have taken offense, but now that her incoherent rage had dissipated, all she managed was a shrug. Besides, she didn't really mind the Ionizer; it made her scalp tingle pleasantly like someone was moving their hands just at the end of her sensory range, and left her skin feeling well polished.
It was a few minutes and a couple degrees warmer when Ana became aware that the ventilation system had been shut down. She had known that would be the case, but her thoughts had been occupied by an increasing concern over the toxicity of the black liquid and the fact that they had seen no one pass the wide swath of transparent walls that made up the door side of Aerin's office.
Aerin filled the warm air with words that bounced off of Ana unabsorbed. As the temperature rose another degree he realized he wasn't getting through and said, "Ana, what's the matter?"
"No one has been by here." She swung her arm across the bank of everything-proof glass. "Not since the alarms went off."
"Well, that seems reasonable if the office is locked down."
"But the spill was just in here."
"Sure, but that stuff might have gotten into the ventilation. All the sensors have to be checked and cleared before anyone is allowed to move between zones. Don't worry. I've dealt with hazardous materials before."
He looked at her and realized that hadn't really comforted her and asked, "You're not feeling ill or anything are you?"
"No, just a little warm."
She lowered herself to the floor next to one of Aerin's lab tables and leaned against the wall. She stared at the doors while Aerin sat down next to her.
"Of course," he said, "the vents are closed to prevent the spread of any gas or airborne dangers."
"I know," Ana said with a touch of irritation. "I've gone through the Ionizer before."
"Right, but this stuff is foreign material. Nothing in our database was matching my initial testing. I'm sure that raised the security a few levels."
"Unknown substance?" Ana hoped she could at least distract herself by debriefing Aerin for a bit on his testing, initial as it may have been. "Any sort of identifiable characteristics?"
"I had just started running through sub-compounds when you"—he hesitated—"came in."
Ana let it go, happy to have something to divert her attention from the rising temperature and growing sense of isolation.
"So," she started again, "any matches there?"
"There were a couple possibilities, but"—he gestured at the terminal that he'd been working on—"my terminal is locked down now. I am not really sure about any of them."
"But you remember them?"
He gave her a look that would have registered as "Are you freaking kidding me?" anywhere on the planet.
"There were some traces of a couple sub-compounds, but nothing that was within any sort of confidence range that I would be willing to trust. The closest thing that it resembled would be Southern Hemisphere petroleum, but like I said, even that would only reach a similarity of about five to ten percent."
"So," Ana drew the word out, "a fuel of some kind. Maybe."
"Barely even maybe."
"And they—whoever they really are—were just digging this out of the polar cap down there."
"You tell me."
Ana thought back to the giant hole that ran who knew how deep into the planet. "I mean, that hole was deep. It was clearly some sort of mining operation. They were drawing it from there, and taking it somewhere." Her mind jumped back to their present situation. "Are we going to have go down there and get more?"
"That's a possibility," Aerin said.
"A probability," she responded.
"Well," he said, "I am honestly not sure how much good obtaining another sample would do. At this point, I would be more interested in tracking the extracted substance to see where they're taking it and what they're doing with it."
"Sure. If we could see what they were doing with it, then we'd know what it was for."
Aerin looked a little hurt. The comment must have come off more sarcastic than Ana had intended.
"Sorry," she said. "I just meant that, yeah, that is definitely the best way to proceed. If more chemical analysis won't yield any further data, then we're better off taking a risk following their supply chain than taking a risk trying to get more to bring back."
The hesitant genius looked relieved as he nodded his head in assent.
"Unfortunately," he said, "since it was a completely unknown substance, there's a lot more red tape to clear than if the scanners were able to identify it—even if it were a known toxin or chemical weapon."
"I know," Ana sighed. She hadn't dealt with an actual unknown compound before—the Agency had seemingly catalogued the entire world—but she knew how the security process in the building worked, and like most of the other heavily documented processes, it favored caution.
With her previous anger-fueled adrenaline rush dissipated and the increasing heat in the room soaking into her muscles, she was fighting to stay awake. Aerin noticed.
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"Yeah," she said. "I just haven't slept since we brought that stuff back. I was supposed to be in the Hotel four hours ago. Before you sent me off to listen to false witnesses."
It was the first time she'd called him out directly since arriving. And of course Aerin was his usual stammering self. "Ana, I know. I'm sorry. Really. I wouldn't send you to some place that far out of the way if I didn't think there was something to it."
"There was something to it," she replied. She was too tired to maintain a sarcastic point of view when she knew that Aerin was right. It was her guilt that had driven her there, that had made her want to believe, that constantly clouded her judgment when she had to evaluate anything related to the brother she had lost.
Ana leaned her head on Aerin's shoulder. She would have had to practically double over to do it if they'd been standing, but since much of her height came from long legs, they were closely aligned when resting on the dark, but still warm, floor. The back-to-back missions had drained her; she'd been up for almost forty-eight hours now.
–
Ana woke up to the sound of Aerin communicating with Justin through the office door. The volume of Aerin's voice indicated the door was still locked.
"The concentration outside your office wasn't high enough to indicate any sort of threat," Justin was saying. "But since this is the point of origin, they're being more cautious."
Always caution. At least at home. Out in the field, the rules were not their rules. Most of the time the rules weren't her rules either, but that was what made it exciting. That was why the Valkyries wanted to spend as little time as possible in this impeccably constructed, overly well-appointed building.
Ana got up and joined Aerin at the door.
"How much longer?" she shouted. "I need to get somewhere where I can sleep for real."
"Not long now," Justin said. "The stuff the lab collected from the vents doesn't seem to match any sort of biological indicators."
"I could have told them that a while ago," Aerin muttered.
Justin was right, though, and the cleaning crew showed up in their protective gear a few minutes later. They shooed Justin away before opening the door and escorting Ana and Aerin to the Ionizer.
&
nbsp; 4.
MORE IMMEDIATE
The easy part was compartmentalizing failed missions. The hard part was forgetting them. Ana's father had always advised her to fail quickly, learn from your mistakes, and try again.
"The scientist's name is Lukas Huang. Yes, it sounds like an experiment in combining the differing intellects of two distinct but powerful cultures."
Malcolm paused.
"That was a joke."
Aerin laughed. Ana and Marisol just smiled politely.
The images of the children still visited Ana nearly as often as the memories of the man with the bandaged head and broken legs. They would fade in time, only to be replaced by other equally confounding and frustrating pictures.
"Anyway," Malcolm continued, "we have confirmation from an independent source that Huang is going to be selling some sort of bioweapon to an agent of the Continuum. Now, since we still have no intel on personnel or operations within the Continuum, your secondary goal should be obvious. The most important thing is to stop them from obtaining the weapon, but if we obtain any sort of information on the buyer, that would be a huge step forward."
Ana saw an enemy cloaked in shadow, a night stalker at the end of a pedway. He was making plans to kidnap children and to drive famished workers over freezing terrain until their feet bled or they collapsed. Would that spirit of darkness also torture people, break their legs, and steal pieces of their brains? A voice echoed into the cold black. "Memo, is that you?" Her vocal cords strained with the words.
--
The house was a squat four stories, designed to look like a ranch home from the days when there was enough land to have a sprawling one-story home spread across the landscape with perhaps three or four stairs in the whole thing. Ana and Marisol had no blueprints or floor plans to rely on, but they knew there would be more steps than that to climb in the odd building, which looked from the air like a stack of bricks that had been knocked over, some pieces chipped off in the fall, others lying askew next to the main block, the only one still in its original place.
The Agency had not located the person in charge of the security design for the chaotic mansion, but the security staff had done their best to give them an idea of what lay in wait ready to protect Lukas Huang.
The house was accessible from a private drive that wound its way up the hill, guaranteed to be lined with cameras and other sensors that would warn those hiding inside of their approach. So the pair of Valkyries flew by like an express train at rush hour, slowing down a few kilometers past the entrance of the discordant fortress.
As they worked their way through a field of corn that abutted one side of their destination, Marisol asked, "Why was it that we couldn't just go up to the front door and ring the bell?"
Marisol's question was a combination of rhetorical, comical, and painful. The corn had been bred and modified to be hardy so it would stand up to increasingly harsh winters, and that added sturdiness carried over to the stalks and leaves that whipped the Valkyries in the face and slashed at their arms and legs. Ana and Marisol's arms and legs were well covered, but they had not worn protection for their heads, and while the rough leaves didn't draw blood, they left stinging abrasions, the pain recalled with every gust of wind that crashed through the field trying to break down the hardened crop. With the rising corn acting as something of an inverse moat, the campesinos up in their bastard version of Falling Water probably never worried that someone might try to find their way through to surprise them.
Ana tripped and nearly wound up on the hard-packed dirt between the tight rows of corn. She looked back and spotted a barbed tripwire. So she was wrong. Evidently someone did anticipate intruders sneaking through the field. The wire was low, a harvester wouldn't have to worry about simply rolling over it, but it sat just high enough to catch a human right around the ankles.
Ana pointed it out to Marisol.
"Guess we're going to have to be a little careful here on in."
"Oh good, ’cause I was just thinking that the corn had stopped trying to disrobe me."
"Just be glad it's not any warmer out here."
"Why? We'd be sweating more in these suits?"
"No." Ana smiled. "We could get buried by popcorn."
"And I left my salt and butter gun back at headquarters."
They trudged on, more attentive to their surroundings and potential traps contained within. The pair encountered no more man-made obstructions until they found their way to what might have been considered the real moat if Huang's fortress had been a bit more like an old-fashioned castle. A large ditch stretched the length of the cornfield, only a few meters across. It sat there spitting dry dust when the occasional breeze came through. They could cross it without a problem, but it would put them in a position where a sniper—or even just a half-decent shot with the right weapon—could take them out with ease. But no one knew they were coming.
Ana scanned the banks of windows and the roofline of the house as the two of them held close to the edge of the cornfield. She spotted a second-floor window open just fifty meters or so toward the rear of the house. She pointed it out subtly to her partner and confirmed with Marisol via a quick nod, then they spread out a bit before starting across.
Just as they reached the low point where the ground began to rise up toward the house, the wind died and Ana heard a keening whine. A moment later, several slugs bit into the dirt to her right, cutting a line straight down the distance the two had created between them. The dry dusty ground was heaved into the air, and Ana could tell they were large-caliber bullets. She and Marisol were lucky that the system operating the hidden artillery had such terrible aim. But Ana didn't take the time to consider that luck nor the aim of the machine as they took off in a sprint to the house.
Running full-out, Ana was able to judge how far they'd have to make it before the angle between them and the house grew small enough that the turret could no longer reach them. As the bullets drew closer, the angle got steeper. While the clean-cut soft grass that covered the run up to the side of the house required more effort to speed across than the hard-packed ditch, it only meant that just the balls of Ana's feet touched the ground as she pushed to cover more distance with each step.
Their saving grace was that the miniature fortress seemed to have only one armed weapon along its vast length which was capable of reaching them. And since there were two of them, Ana realized that it could not decide which target to focus on. Then a thought, much more unnerving, occurred to her: perhaps there was a human controller behind the gun who was playing cat-and-mouse with them. She leaned against the outer wall, sucking air, thinking about someone watching them scramble in fear from bullets that were never intended to connect with anything but the ground.
"Where did that come from?" Marisol asked in between breaths.
"Looked like fourth floor from the angle."
"I didn't see it up there before we left the field. Did you?"
"No, but more importantly, how come it didn't hit us?"
Marisol looked pensive. As pensive as she could after sprinting a hundred meters.
"Broken aiming system?"
"That's what I thought too. But what if someone is messing with us?"
"Then we'll pretend to run for our lives and at least we'll still have them."
Ana smiled.
"All right. Let's get going then."
They skirted the long edge of the house to the window that Ana had spotted before they crossed the dry moat. No one had come along to close it on them and the two Valkyries scaled from the first-floor window to the second. They found themselves in a large wood-paneled room that seemed as though it might collapse in on itself from the sheer weight of the wood attached to the walls and ceiling. Ana and Marisol flanked to either side of the room and met at the door.
"Where to?"
"Prepping for a weapons deal with the Continuum? I'd be in the lower levels."
"Okay. Let's head down."
--
Ana and Marisol had yet to find another living person when they got to a stairway leading down to a third sub-basement. Ana had not wanted to leave the other levels behind without having gone through them more thoroughly, but Marisol was convinced that Lukas would be hiding out lower.
"Any important lab will be below ground level," Marisol said. "Better protection from any outside attacks."
Ana knew it was a fact, not just an educated guess. In spite of her desire to explore, she followed Marisol down. Any further time spent on the upper levels would just be casting about for clues to the Continuum that she had no real reason to believe actually existed in Lukas Huang's increasingly haunting compound.
The second sub-basement had been lit like a fourteenth-century dungeon, and the third was no better. Ana wondered if they might not encounter a real-life dungeon before they found Lukas.
The corridor that led away from the stairs came off as grimy, but as the two Valkyries passed through a pool of light, Ana saw that they were spotless, the metal brushed to look stony, creating shadows that came off as craggy and dirty in equal measure.
After fifty meters of dark hallway punctuated with creaky doors that opened on deserted rooms, the sound of a song caught Ana's attention. Another few steps and music backing the voice became audible. She tapped Marisol, who had been in the lead, on the shoulder and pointed to her ear. Marisol nodded in response and drew her gun.
Dim light bled from the crack under a door that looked just like the others they'd passed. The singing dropped volume and the voices of two males cut in. Ana held up two fingers and Marisol nodded again. They waited a moment longer. The voices stopped and singing rose into the foreground.
Ana raised a boot and slammed it into the door. It wasn't locked, so the door, while heavy, swung open easily with the force of her kick. She and Marisol swept into the room, their backs sticking to the walls as though they were on a wire that bounded the perimeter.
The walls were much like those in the hall, a disturbing mix of shadows, echoes, and mirages. In the middle sat a terminal with three large high-def monitors, a man in a chair in front of them. On all the screens, a woman sang the same song the Valkyries had heard from outside. A motley assortment of couches ranging from shabby to opulent sat around the centerpiece of the electronics setup. The furnished area in the center was surrounded by dead space of gray cement floors. Ana saw no other entrances or exits. There was also no one in the room besides the man in the chair.
