The Valkyrie Project

by Nels Wadycki

  Ana took the money the Agency paid her and used their resources to pursue leads in tracking her brother, but with their alterations to Jrue's brain—and who knows how many others—they had altered Ana's plans. She was not one to put pride or honor or even dignity at the top of her list of values, but they were there somewhere. Closer to the top sat practicality and when Ana began to question what the Agency offered there, her mind overran like the skywalk had overrun with the rainwater that morning with new ways to achieve her goal.

  The heavy heart she had carried on the skytrain out to the funeral turned hard as she stood with the slow, wet chill passing over the proceedings. And as the casket sank into the ground, Ana considered that the only thing to soften it would be reuniting with her brother. She offered conciliatory hugs and words of compassion to colleagues, true emotion straining its way through the cracks in the armor that locked itself around her. Ana wanted to support her team, but she could not focus on the idle work of coping with their loss. Memo was out there, and she would find him.

  What more could be gained from the Agency and her work inside the Continuum? Now was the time to find out.

  --

  Ana had broken several regulations by failing to disclose the bugs in the security and permissions programming that she had discovered when she gave herself access to the data center holding the information on the Sleepwalkers project which had turned Jrue into an unwilling time traveler. As she wound her way through the pattern to open up the loopholes once again, she wondered what the leaders of the Agency would do if constrained by the same regulations under which their agents worked. Clearly they went off some other set of principles, which by itself might have been acceptable up until it put Ana and her colleagues in danger. Better safe than dead? She was not sure how Rani would apply that maxim in this situation, but she would certainly adhere to the idea of taking the field and showing them who lived.

  The elevator ride up had taken all of five seconds, but seemed like an eternity compared to the three subsequent hours Ana spent poring over files in a secret little data lab almost identical to the one that had housed the data on the Sleepwalkers project and her Scarface friend. She constantly checked in with herself regarding the data she was looking at to make sure she didn't fall down any rabbit holes. There was so much information that it was easy to jump into one file to check a fact and end up wandering through a maze of data that appeared related but ultimately led nowhere. With each minute that passed Ana became more certain that the Agency was tapped out of information on her brother and anything that would help her locate him.

  She found the picture that the other agents had brought up the last time she visited the data islands. The only information attached to it told her that he worked for the Continuum. While she did not want to believe that, she uncovered nothing to disprove it, and that meant she needed to get back to the Continuum's home turf and start digging there. Ana didn't like the lead, but to be a real detective, you couldn't ignore a fact simply because you didn't want to believe it.

  --

  The defense seen from the members of the Valkyrie Project, despite being taken by surprise, or perhaps because of it, reminded Memo of a tiger defending its young from a predator who got too close to the cubs in the den. The claws came out, but the feral feline strayed too far from its home and got slashed across the nose. Guillermo Callif hated casualties, but recognized that they were inevitabilities in the course of war.

  There would likely be more when Memo brought a group of unofficial operatives into the Continuum building in downtown Chicago. From the outside, the Spire wore the dress of a high-class residential building in the same way Etienne Saltoun wrapped herself in silk: tall, majestic, and rather beautiful. But there would be no more of Etienne's high-slit dresses, though he enjoyed seeing those; no more of her graceful gazelle lope; and no more of the artful deceptions that made her such a formidable opponent. Whether or not the lovely lady was still around to challenge him again made no difference. Moze's plan to infiltrate the Spire rolled downhill, gaining mass and momentum.

  He intended to find his way up the slash in the hem of the Continuum building's security to a treasure chest of information. As much as Moze liked improvisation and the luck he conjured from it, the plan for the Continuum intrusion relied much less on good fortune than the concoction that brought them successfully through the United State Intelligence Agency with the desired information safely in hand. Going into the heart of the Continuum organization raised the stakes. Their technology leapfrogged the foreseeable future to the edge of the imaginable. With bigger guns came bigger risk, but with bigger risk came bigger reward.

  They rode in behind a shield of forged identities. Guillermo had fashioned most of these himself, not because he was unwilling to cede control of that aspect of the operation, but because he was still in the process of disseminating the knowledge necessary to do the job and no one else had the skill to create something that would stand up to the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the Continuum's systems. The availability of publicly accessible commercial and residential areas meant the Continuum needed several layers of filters and automated processes to conduct on-the-fly background checks. With the correct infrastructure of deception in place, passing the checks was not a problem, but it had to be more than a mere facade. A spaghetti Western set would be torn apart like raw meat in a circle of jackals.

  But Guillermo had been trained by the best, so he could beat the best. He'd done it before and in all likelihood he'd do it again.

  When he entered the gleaming front doors with his newly-minted, lovely but just a bit too young for him trophy "wife" and their just as fresh from the Bar exam "lawyers"—having someone write a pre-nup was a formality, but also a requirement nonetheless for someone of his "wealth"—the eyes of tens, perhaps hundreds, of security devices lit upon them like the ghosts of forgotten eagles perched atop redwoods. The security cameras and remote scans stalked the quartet like creatures roaming under a canopy of trees and the darkness of night. From the greeting at the front desk all the way to the lavishly furnished sample condo to the empty office just large enough for a start-up intellectual property firm, a choreographed dance played out between sensors, data relays, government data banks, and proprietary analytic systems, the information swirling like women in ball gowns from one partner to the next and then back across the floor.

  Guillermo was not concerned that someone would figure out he was not planning to buy any of the available real estate, not as a lakefront investment property nor as an office space for his latest business venture. The trouble, as usual, came in accessing the more heavily fortified floors of the building.

  The realtor and security guard found that out when they discovered the tranquilizers lodged in the side of their throats. The security guard was a bigger man, so he was treated to a second once the first had seen him safely to the ground.

  A few moments later, the Gold Team—having won the name not by a flip of the coin this time, but because they were the ones with the riches—signaled the Blue Team—also appropriate as it was the color generally used for visualizing the flow of data connections and interactions—to dive in to the network tap they had established for their part of the plan. In the hall outside the exorbitantly priced office space, Guillermo heard a snick as the claws drew back on the locks of the door at the end of the extravagantly, yet tastefully decorated corridor. The stairs were open.

  The four member of the Gold Team shut the door behind them just as chimes sounded to announce the arrival of more after-hours guests. Guillermo hoped it wasn't another prospective buyer, because while they'd stashed the unconscious bodies in the supply closet of the office, anyone who opened that closet door was sure to find them.

  No time to hesitate, then, as the group made their way up five flights of stairs. At the door to the twenty-fourth floor, they stopped, taking a moment to reset the amount of oxygen in their brains and lungs by sucking in a few deep breaths and letting the air out in a ste
ady flow. Short bursts of intense activity were an easy way to get into oxygen debt which was a gateway to bad decision-making.

  Guillermo let the Blue Team hiding in the bowels of the building know that they were ready for the next step.

  The lights on the panel shifted through a series of binary combinations then all flashed in unison. Guillermo held up a mock communicator, its bare-bones components programmed to fake an interaction with the invisible waves of conversation from the security like a psychic communing with the dead in a room full of people by calling out, "I'm getting an 'A'; like an 'Ann' or an 'Al'…"

  The lights on the panel changed colors a few times as they reacted to the device's faux extra-sensory perception.

  Guillermo's own ESP sensed that the four "technicians" in the lower levels were firing slow bullets of sweat from their skin, reciting some Hail Marys and Our Fathers to get the code to work.

  The lights stopped their shuffling dance but the door remained locked. Memo worried that the security routines had seen through their psychic's preparation, puffery, and peacocking. The mating dance had failed to sufficiently impress the female bird of paradise. Then the lights started up again, bouncing on and off with renewed vigor.

  Guillermo sighed, exhaling a huge lungful of air, and realized that even after their race up the stairs, he had been holding his breath.

  After a few more seconds, the cryptic light mambo came to an end and a pulsing green circle appeared. Memo hoped that Codar hadn't done anything sloppy in coming up with what must have been an improvised routine programmed in mere seconds, and injected to get the door open. Most of the regular Continuum agents might have clocked out already, but Guillermo knew their security force never dwindled. They would swarm like frenzied bees if they got even the slightest inkling that someone was trying to steal their honey. In this case, the honey was Androkal and the stingers were probably electrostatic rails, though with the Continuum, you never knew what was in store.

  The Gold Team surged through the door and skittered down the hall, not quite running, but certainly not walking. The musty smell of the stairwell dropped away as soon as the door shut behind them, replaced by what Guillermo could only classify as an absence of smell. There was no such absence of sound, though, even after hours, as doors slammed and people carried on conversations. Luckily those were far-off echoes compared to the insistent buzzing of the bright overhead lights and the hum of electricity just beyond the duroplast paneled walls.

  Through one of those walls lay a data vault that held the location of the facility that the Continuum called the Transportation Center. Through anecdotal clues and somewhat unsubstantiated analysis, he had narrowed it down to the area of the entire Greater States. Without any satellites at his disposal, Guillermo had no idea if that meant they'd built it in the middle of an abandoned cornfield or the middle of an abandoned oil field.

  Behind another one of those walls was a vault that safeguarded doctored samples of Androkal that Ana and Etienne had stolen from Triton Labs. Guillermo knew little about what had been done to make it usable, but the accompanying documentation would clarify that. It fueled the Transportation Center, but Memo knew there was more out there, so finding the Triton-brand Androkal fell a bit behind finding the actual location of the Transportation Center.

  The quartet of Gold Team members passed several empty conference rooms outfitted with dark, polished wood tables, around which sat what appeared to be real leather chairs. The rooms that followed were dark, no outside exposure, and held metal tables presumably for interrogation. Not a floor layout he would have chosen, but they pressed on, leaving him to wonder if that had been the original design or the result of a hasty decision.

  A message alert tickled the skin of his wrist, bringing him back to the mission. Memo looked down, and a mixture of shock and exasperation leapt from his mouth in a puff of hot air.

  --

  The sound of boots approached. Secret mission or not, the interruptions and distractions just never stopped coming. At what point would it all get too ridiculous to bear?

  A trio of armed agents whipped around the corner. The black metal guns coordinated well with their dark suits—for the men and women both—set off with black belts and matching black boots. Their professional business attire was spattered with what might have been red paint, but in their line of work almost certainly wasn't. It was fresh enough to make Ana pause. As her foot landed she hoped the hitch in her step went unnoticed. She didn't know them, and they didn't know her, and she didn't want to give them a reason to notice her.

  Whispers flared up behind her, bits of compressed air relieving the pressure of silence. They must have been as concerned about looking conspicuous as she was. In a normal situation, someone trying that hard to deflect attention would have had a bearing on her mission. People with blood spatter were always involved and there would have been no point in ignoring it. But she had arrived at the Spire with a single-minded focus on plowing through the hostile territory to get what she wanted and get out. Doing to the Continuum what the Valkyrie Project invaders had done to Ana and her friends would be the best revenge she could get.

  The thought of getting revenge on the group that had stolen the data distracted Ana just enough that she didn't sense the man behind her until the butt end of his gun sliced through the air next to her head.

  Ana managed to angle her body far enough away that it only hit the back of her shoulder. It was still a solid hit, though, and only a solid cord of muscle absorbing most of the impact kept it from crashing through a bone.

  Ana parried a blow, stopping the man's forearm with her own. She tried to hit him just below the ribcage, but he twisted and her fist collided with solid bone. There was a bit of armor there as well, but it felt thin and loose, definitely not the high-tech stuff Ana had gotten when she joined the Continuum.

  Blood spatter, shifty looks, and shoddy under-armor? She was not dealing with Continuum agents. Which, of course, begged the question: were these the same men and women who had attacked the Valkyrie Project?

  No time to answer as the man's off hand rocketed toward her jaw. Ana leaned back but still caught his knuckles on the end of her chin. Clearly intended as a knockout blow, the hit jarred her and the tendons burned where it wrenched them from the end of her jaw bone. Her vision stayed clear, though, as Ana fell back against the wall behind her, one hand out to steady herself against the hard flat surface. An idea popped into her head and Ana reacted, putting it to work before the man in front of her could land another blow.

  She lifted one foot and shoved it against the wall to propel herself in the opposite direction, into the chest of the man. He toppled backward with Ana coming down on top of him. She got her elbow around and underneath her so it jabbed into the man's stomach and crushed his solar plexus and part of his diaphragm as well. He gasped as the sudden breathlessness overtook him, but he still struggled against Ana's attempts to pin him.

  She wanted to interrogate him, but given the amount of resistance, she figured it would have to be a more physical questioning. Not that she was in a position to ask any questions at that moment. So she asked herself: why had he not killed her already? Perhaps more important though: where were the other two people who had been with him? Each fighting their own battles? That seemed like a poor allocation of resources to split up when they could have leveled her in a second as a trio. If they'd gone on without the last guy, why send him back at all? Ana had been perfectly content to let the shady characters pass her by a minute earlier.

  The man knocked her off, and Ana rolled over a few times. She bounced back to her feet like a cat, claws out, gun from its holster inside her jacket.

  Her attacker pushed himself up, stumbled a bit toward the wall and then righted himself. Instead of the butt end of the gun the caveman had used as a club, the business end was pointed at Ana.

  "Who are you?" she asked.

  "I could ask you the same thing."

  "You already know who I am
or you wouldn't have attacked me!"

  "Ah, clever girl." He smiled, but the pain in his stomach stole half of it, leaving him with a grimace. "You might just be as smart as Moze always says you are. You're certainly as feisty."

  The words were barely out of his mouth when Ana said, "Moze? Where is he?"

  "Now who's got the upper hand?"

  "You've always had the upper hand! You attacked me, remember?"

  The half-smile that remained on the man's face flipped to a full-on frown. He had no reply.

  "I hope Moze is working with smarter people than you or he might be dead before I can make you tell me where he is," Ana said.

  "Make me? Ana, dear, you must have lost your wits when you heard his name."

  She had, in fact, been so focused on him that her mind filtered out the sound of footsteps behind her and the soft exhale of breath that came just before everything went dark.

  --

  Kicking offspring out of the home was not an uncommon practice in nature nor among humans. Some animals, and humans, maintained a close connection with their babies—they would always be babies—while others tended to forget as soon as their young were out of sight.

  But when the decision was made for the parents, and their children were removed from their care before either was ready, the psychological bond created was one of the most powerful forces the world was capable of forging.

  Guillermo sometimes wished that his near-surrogate parent sister had not been burdened with the durosteel link that drove her after him like a mourning parent. But since he had returned and seen her pull sword from stone when others scoffed and said it was impossible, he knew that the force of will she possessed, honed by years of practiced determination and demonstrated in every chapter of the story she had so far written, was exactly the intangible, indescribable weapon he needed. The problem then became the way to heat the iron so it could be transformed from an automatic weapon capable of dealing pain and death and wreaking indiscriminate havoc to be forged into a sword of destiny with the singular purpose of saving the world.