“Just us,” said Michael.
“Mr. Taylor, my name is Marette, and this is—”
At their feet, something clattered out through the door. Michael registered what looked like a red hockey puck before it exploded in a burst of light and pain.
Michael came to on the hallway floor. His vision swam with the fading, sparkling radiance of what he now realized was some sort of stun grenade. The door to Taylor’s unit hung open. He could not find Marette. The strangely distant slam of a fire escape door at the end of the hallway caught his attention. Michael pulled himself to his feet and, with one hand trailing the wall to keep his balance, dashed for the door as fast as he dared.
The escape stairwell was lit even worse than the stairs they’d climbed earlier. Michael could see barely one floor above and below, but rapid footfalls clapped upward on a higher level. Through ringing ears—the stun must’ve had some aural component—he strained to judge how far up they were. It was impossible. He rushed up after them.
Moments later he burst out the rooftop door. The stale city air felt fresh to his nostrils after the stifling building. Ambient light pollution cast shadows on the otherwise unlit rooftop, enough for Michael to make out a figure he guessed was Taylor at the far edge. Taylor was rushing to stretch a loose plank across the space to a neighboring rooftop.
Before Taylor could finish, Marette was upon him.
She seized the plank, trying to pry it from Taylor’s hands with her left arm grappled around his right. Taylor threw his weight back against her and elbowed her in the stomach. Marette stumbled back but the plank spilled forward away from them both. It missed the edge of the other building and then tumbled away.
Taylor turned back toward the stairwell, saw Michael dashing toward him, and veered off to another edge. Michael spun to intercept him. Marette clambered to her feet, chasing after. They caught up with Taylor together, seizing him before he could clamber over the side to whatever escape he sought below.
“Let me go!” Taylor flailed. Michael flinched as a boot heel cracked him in the shin. Taking advantage of Marette’s help, Michael shifted behind Taylor to get him into an arm lock.
“Stop struggling!” Michael hissed, pulling Taylor’s arms tighter behind his back. “We don’t want to hurt you!”
“Ow! Sure you don’t!”
“You pitched a grenade at us!” Michael said.
“Let me go!”
Marette grabbed Taylor’s shoulders and shook. “Mister Taylor!” She pressed closer to whisper. “Agent Taylor! We are all AoA! We only wish to speak with you.”
Taylor calmed, yet not so much that Michael felt he wouldn’t try to break free if given the chance. Michael kept his grip firm. “So what if you are?”
Marette pushed her hand behind Taylor, taking his right hand in hers to let their AoA palm chips recognize each other. “There. Do you feel that? Now do you believe us?”
Taylor sighed. “I believe that you’re AoA. Jury’s still out on if you want to hurt me.”
Michael and Marette exchanged glances. “We will return to your unit,” she told him, “and you can explain why that is. Agreed?”
“About two months ago I got the word to go silent, to stay off the Undernet except to receive AoA directives. No sending.”
Taylor sat in the center of the couch built into the wall of his one-room micro-unit. Michael leaned against the tiny sink on the opposite wall, with Marette to his immediate left against the closet. All of their feet nearly touched. Michael had given silent thanks upon entering that he wasn’t claustrophobic.
“I’d get some occasionally. Directives, I mean. AoA orders relating to synthesizing a replacement for that black material stuff on Paragon.”
“Which New Eden has been refining for the past three months,” Marette said. “Admirable work.”
“You know about that?” Taylor asked. His eyes widened in recognition a moment before he swallowed hard. “You’re Marette Clarion.”
Michael tensed, half expecting the man to bolt again. Taylor had gone more rigid than he’d already been. “That’s a problem?” Michael asked.
Taylor hesitated, answering finally, “I’d been told that Paragon was compromised. You and everyone else there, along with at least half of the rest of the AoA.”
Marette frowned. “Who told you? When?”
“Soon after the blackout order. Through the usual channels.”
“Messages through the Undernet?” Marette asked. “Sent by whom?”
Taylor wrung his hands. “Bianca Rucker. My usual contact. Yoshi’s too. If you know who I am, you ought to know that.”
Marette glanced to Michael with blooming alarm. But why?
“Agent Taylor,” Marette continued, “think carefully: On what date, precisely, did the blackout order come?”
“September 29th.”
“David, I double-checked this before we arrived: Agent Rucker was killed on September 28th.”
Michael connected the dots. “The surge?”
“Oui.”
“Now wait just a minute,” said Taylor. “What ‘surge’?”
“On September 28th an all-agent emergency meeting signal went out. AoA members across the globe connected to it. It was a trap. Those who attended via neural link were killed via an electrical surge. Almost three quarters of the AoA died that day. I am sorry to tell you that Agent Rucker was among them.”
Taylor blanched. His breathing grew faster, and for a moment Michael feared he might hyperventilate. “That can’t be true.”
“It is,” Marette whispered.
“You’re lying!”
“She’s not,” Michael told him. “That’s why we’re here.”
“But—” Taylor cast frantic glances between them both. The whites of his eyes blazed, trembled. “But I didn’t get any meeting summons! And I’m pretty damned sure Yoshi didn’t! This is a trick! It’s some sort of trick and you’re just—”
Marette raised her left hand, palm open toward Taylor, fingers spread. The gesture alone seemed to stop Taylor’s rant. He settled back, took a deep breath, and wiped a hand down his brow and across his face. Michael caught Marette’s gaze and mouthed, “Alyshur?” She nodded.
“I’m sorry,” Taylor breathed. “I’ve been living here, hiding, afraid to go to work, afraid not to go to work. After Yoshi, I . . . ”
Marette lowered her hand when he trailed off. “Agent Taylor, have you spoken, directly, with anyone from the AoA outside of New Eden since September? We are here in person, and I can assure you that we are most certainly not ‘compromised.’”
“Why don’t you start over from when you got the blackout order,” Michael suggested.
Taylor nodded, seeming to further compose himself. “First we just got more data to feed into the New Eden system. Helpful stuff that guided the black medium’s development. Increased efficiency, processing power, and the like. It made sense, you know? Just more data gained from study of the original material, we figured.
“But then came a few other projects. Directives. New ways to use the technology gained from the material on a cellular level. I guided the New Eden labs into taking up the new projects, got people, resources assigned to them. Sometimes with my own authority, sometimes indirectly with Yoshi’s help if I needed a system hack.
“Other projects in New Eden started up a little while after, branching off what we were already doing. It wasn’t too unusual; New Eden’s a big company, so compartmentalization for security’s sake is a fact of life. The left hand isn’t really supposed to know what the right hand is doing. And back hands and front hands, even. Heck, the AoA uses that set-up against companies all the time, right?”
Taylor shifted to lay down on the couch. Staring up at the ceiling, he continued. “But something about it seemed off. I can’t really explain it. You work in a place long enough and you just get a feel for things, maybe.” He sighed. “Yoshi noticed it, too. Like orders coming through from places they shouldn’t, concentrat
ed in New Eden’s Gibson labs. All perfectly legit on the surface, but having done that sort of thing ourselves, we could see the evidence.”
“What sort of evidence?” Marette asked.
“Hard to explain. It wasn’t direct. You know how astronomers found Neptune by spotting gravitational irregularities in other planets’ orbits? They knew something was out there, somewhere. Same thing here, but it’s not like we could report it within the company. ‘What makes you think someone’s up to something, Mister Taylor?’ ‘Well, because I’ve been up to something myself for years and this all looks exactly like what I do!’ So Yoshi did some cyber-sleuthing, and I did what I could on the real-world side.
“Then Yoshi vanished. Just . . . gone. I got an email from an address I couldn’t trace that just said, ‘Cease looking. Do your job.’ The next day I found a box on my doorstep. Yoshi had cybernetic eyes with custom designs on the irises. Both of them were in the box. I lit out of there as fast as I could, and I’ve been living here ever since, but like I said, I’m afraid not to go in each day. ‘Cease looking. Do your job.’ So I am. And I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
For a moment it seemed that Taylor was going to say more, but nothing came. “What sort of things did these new projects cover?” Marette finally asked.
“Nanotech,” he said. “There was some increased activity on existing bioengineering projects, too: recombinant DNA, transgenics. But most activity was nanotech, for medical applications.”
Michael blinked. “So, healing?”
Taylor sat up and nodded. “Maybe. Cellular reconstruction. Maybe some anti-viral. With Yoshi gone, I can’t get close enough to be sure. They’re calling it Project Quicksilver.”
XLVI
AS SOON AS THE DOOR opened, Jade grabbed the emerging bloke by the neck, jolted him with the taser in her right hand, and smashed her auto-pistol against his forehead with her left. Somehow the brute shook it off enough to seize her by the shoulders. It wasn’t enough. Caitlin grabbed for the closing door and saw Jade’s knee launch into his groin. Jade smashed the weapon into his forehead a second, a third, and a fourth time. He finally crumpled.
A hulking mass of muscle strung together with tattoos and leather, his fall nearly pulled Jade down with him. Instead, she danced to one side. He pitched forward, sprawled face-first into the grimy concrete walkway, and nearly spilled into the river of Northgate’s sludge that ran beside it.
“Well,” said Jade with a wink, “I got him before he made too much noise.”
Still holding open the door a crack, Caitlin glanced through and spied only a long, gloomy steam tunnel. “Our hooligan friends are surely making enough noise to cover it.”
She could hear them from here in fact, nearly two blocks away: three street punks she’d paid to holler and attack the iron door of the tenement basement where the mincemeat Easy Jack performed his unlicensed surgeries.
A major element of Felix’s secret compulsions, Caitlin had come to Easy Jack intent on demanding answers the man would likely be unwilling to give. Caitlin usually favored more delicate means of gathering information, but there were always exceptions. She intended Jade to take a major part in forcing out those answers. Yet Jade had reminded Caitlin that only an idiot would live on the edge of The Dirge and let people in his front door without putting them in a vulnerable position when they entered. Also, Jack was good enough to afford some hired muscle of his own—a theory that a call to Rue fast confirmed.
Also confirmed, Easy Jack did maintain a secret exit: a solid metal door with no exterior handle along the walkway beneath the Dirge side of the Decker Street Bridge. The door led to a tunnel through which he came and went. Jack presumably had some manner of opening the door—likely a remote or radio key—but Caitlin hadn’t been able to penetrate it herself. And so they had applied the hooligans to the situation, in the hope of drawing out either Jack or his hired muscle, intent on ambushing said hooligans, through the secret exit.
Jade took the door from Caitlin and drew it open. “Nice idea,” she whispered before slipping inside, weapon still drawn. Caitlin followed.
The dim, narrow tunnel smelled of mold. Jade hustled down it as they’d agreed. If the tunnel held any motion detectors or cameras, they’d trip them anyway, so caution was no use. Caitlin just hoped Easy Jack felt secure enough with a secret entrance and hadn’t laid any traps along the way.
They traveled what must have been a full block before they reached a T-intersection. “Left,” Caitlin whispered—an educated guess. Jade led the way around the corner where the passage ended a few paces later in another door, sealed by a keypad lock.
Jade put her left palm against the door. Lights blinked along the back of her hand and fingers. “I’ve got one person on the other side, about twenty feet back. You any good with keypads?”
“I can try,” Caitlin whispered back as she glanced about for hidden cameras. “Though now that we’re in this far I’d wager this might be a better time for your more direct solution.”
“You’re the boss, boss.” Jade tugged a collapsible pry bar from her jacket, opened it, and rammed it between the door and the frame. “Michael’s right, these jimmies are all kinds of useful.” She heaved on the bar. The frame groaned and then cracked, but the door held fast. “Hold onto this, will you?”
Caitlin grabbed the bar and pulled it back with all her weight. Jade readied her auto-pistol, lifted one booted foot, and kicked. The door burst inward onto a room bathed in antiseptic light. Closed gray cabinets and shelves strewn with containers formed a ten-foot passage. Beyond that lay a wider space that held an empty operating table festooned with restraints. Just behind it, at a desk sat Easy Jack, his head silhouetted against a computer screen where he’d turned around in his chair to watch the door.
Jade rushed in. Jack’s eyes gaped. He dove for cover behind a nearby counter island, grabbing a weighty auto-pistol of his own off the counter.
“Gun!” Caitlin shouted.
“Got it!” Rather than dash around the counter’s side, Jade vaulted it and vanished out of sight. Glass broke amid a struggling grunt. A single gunshot exploded before Jack’s auto-pistol spun across the floor and came to rest beneath the operating table. Caitlin scrambled forward to snatch it.
By the time her hand seized the grip, Jade was on her feet and staring down at Jack, who lay sprawled against the side of the counter amid toppled surgical instruments and broken glass. Jade clutched her own weapon in both hands, smirking. Jack glared back in a mix of rage and alarm. A fresh cut wept along his cheek, his only visible injury.
Caitlin got to her feet and started to lean against the operating table but then thought better of it. She tugged the magazine out of Jack’s auto-pistol and cleared the round in the chamber. “Hullo, Jack. You’re going to be answering some questions for me.”
An image flashed onto the screen of a room barely a few paces wide. In its center, bolted to the avocado linoleum floor, sat a weathered dental chair, and in that chair sat a young man. Close-shorn hair, dyed green, covered his head. Multiple piercings adorned both ears. Blood soaked the left side of his white “wife-beater” t-shirt, which matched the look of the bandages cut away from a bullet wound in his left shoulder. His right arm was a steel gray cybernetic. He grimaced in pain, and his body twisted in the effort to bear it. The camera looked down on the man from its place in the upper corner of the little room.
Caitlin glanced behind her to the now empty room where the footage had been shot. The event she and Jade now observed had occurred a few weeks ago, if Easy Jack was telling the truth.
“Come on, doc!” the patient hissed. “Somethin’ for the pain!”
Easy Jack came into frame a moment later holding a six-inch long canister and a syringe. “Quit whining,” Jack said. “Pain killers are extra. And anyway I can’t give ‘em to you until the treatment’s in your veins.”
The patient grimaced again. “I’m good for it! How long?”
Jack unsealed o
ne end of the canister and slid the needle in through the rubber cap to draw a dose of silvery liquid. “Not long. This shit works quick. Just a bit more pain, and that wound’ll seal right up, good as new.” He finished filling the syringe, and then nodded to someone out of frame.
Caitlin’s breath caught as Felix entered the room, moving to the patient. The angle hid his face, but there was no mistaking him. He began to fasten restraints around the patient’s wrists. “For your own protection,” Felix said. “Sorry.”
The patient nearly pulled away, but acquiesced. “You ain’t gonna do me wrong, are ya, Hiatt?”
“It’ll be fine,” said Jack. “You want fast healing, you’ll get it. But it’s a shock to the system. You’re lucky to get the opportunity! This shit’s new!”
Felix finished securing the straps and turned to leave. Caitlin’s heart jolted as she caught sight of his face before he vanished out of the frame: a mask of anguish. His jaw quivered with what looked like barely contained rage in a way she’d never seen before.
“Hiatt?” called the patient. “Where you goin’, man?”
Jack brought the needle to the patient’s left shoulder. “Brace up; this is gonna sting.” The needle pierced the skin. The patient grimaced as Jack pushed the plunger down. When the entire dose of silver liquid had finally slid into the man’s body, Jack pulled the needle out and walked out of the frame without a word. Off screen, the door closed with a clang and a click.
The patient’s eyes darted between his shoulder and the observation window before his entire body jerked at once. “Ohhh, gawd this hurts! Fucking—” His jaw clamped down mid-curse. He stared again at the wound, which now had begun to shimmer silver in its depths and around the edges. The camera zoomed closer, and Caitlin saw the liquid rebuilding the flesh before her eyes. The patient’s struggling eased, and, soon after, the wound closed. He began to breathe again.
“Well, hey!” he cried. “That’s fuckin’ sleek! Pain’s even starting to—” At once he flung his head back and screamed: a nightmare wail that nearly pierced Caitlin’s eardrums. Silver cracks appeared along the newly healed arm in a blood vessel pattern, and then split open. The silver flowed from the splits, spreading, shimmering, almost bubbling, as the piteous bloke thrashed and screamed. The silver continued to spread. Unable to turn away, Caitlin watched his arm deflate and dissolve into a pool that covered the chair.
A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) Page 26
