Icarus Effect de-1

by James Swallow

  The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.

  Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record; but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.

  Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the field hospital boiled inside him.

  He knew enough Russian to understand that the men with guns wanted him to kneel down. Carefully, he did what they asked, biding his time.

  One of them would have to come close enough to take the Hurricane from him, and then, if there was a chance

  Something shimmered like oil on water in the corner of Saxon's vision and he turned toward it in time to see a shape emerge out of the air, a glassy, swift figure blurred by motion, abruptly becoming solid, real.

  The military called it "mimeoptical active camouflage"; Saxon wasn't up on the full technical specs for the augmentation, but from what he knew, the system used a matrix of molecule-thin induction wires implanted beneath the epidermis and across cyberlimb plating that when activated, generated a local electromagnetic field that could render a human being into a walking stealth weapon. It was prohibitively expensive and delicate under battlefield conditions, and difficulties with the human augmentation interface meant that it was rarely deployed in combat.

  Full synchrony between the user and the system was hard to achieve; to use it well, you had to be someone with a near-pathological focus of will.

  The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick, silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.

  Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.

  "Go tactical" ordered Namir.

  The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man's forebrain. The guard dropped to the unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.

  One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man's skull with single blow.

  "Move," snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced around, his eyes narrowing. The thirteenth floor did not match the spy photos captured by the intelligence sources of his patrons. Instead of fitted deep pile carpets and bright walls patterned with subtle murals, the surroundings were bare and undecorated. The floor had the dusty scent of old concrete and ozone. Where mahogany doors should have led the way to opulent suites and apartments, there were yawning open frames walled off by ragged sheets of industrial polythene.

  Hermann gave him a quizzical look. "This is not right."

  "No," admitted Namir. "Proceed. And stay alert."

  "Company," snapped Barrett, raising his arm. A group of four more thugs sprinted into view from along one of the radial corridors, each of them armed with a heavy rifle.

  "Take them," said Namir.

  Barrett's right arm came apart on expanding frames, the plating folding back, the hand turning aside to allow the mechanism within to emerge; he tugged an ammunition belt from a hopper in his backpack, swiftly slotting it into the feed maw on the base of the reconfigured limb. From the wrist emerged the triple-head barrel of a minigun. The muzzles spun into a blur, and with a sound like the buzz of a heavy electric generator, the cyberweapon ejected a gout of yellow fire and a storm of bullets. Grinning, Barrett panned the cannon across the corridor, ripping through the flimsy flakboard the guards used for cover, tearing into them, blowing craters in the surface of the unfinished concrete.

  "Advance! Kontarsky's rooms are just ahead." Namir surged forward, and the others went with him. Reaching the space where the grand suite should have been, the Israeli reached up and tore aside a curtain of plastic.

  Inside there was only another echoing, half-built space. Festoons of cables hung from the ceiling or snaked across the floor from drumlike power cells; the room was hotter that the corridor outside, blood-warm and dry.

  "What the hell…?" Barrett scanned the room, his scarred face souring. "This is the wrong goddamn place! He's not here… nobody is here!"

  "Negative," insisted Hermann. "This is the correct location. Kontarsky should be in this room. We saw the thermographic scans…"

  "Why would six men guard nothing?" Namir demanded. He stalked across the open space, his footfalls echoing. Something about the dimensions of the room seemed off; in front of the windows that looked out onto the Moscow dawn, there were long glassy panes arranged in a barrier, running wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The power cords ran to connectors, and as Namir came close, he felt a steady surge of warmth radiating from them.

  "White," he said to the air. "Go to thermal. Target the thirteenth floor. Tell me what you see."

  "I have three unit indicators" came the reply from the sniper. "Silver, Blue, Green. Multiple unidentified targets same locationHe paused, a note of confusion entering his tone. "Youre in the room with them …"

  "No," Namir growled, reaching down to grab a bunch of the cables. "We are not." He gave the cables a violent yank and they tore free from the glass, spitting sparks. The glass panes shimmered and went transparent as power bled out of them.

  Hardesty's gasp of surprise was transmitted over the open channel. "What the hell…? Silver, all unidentified targets have vanished. Repeat, vanished."

  "They were never here," Hermann said aloud. "The panels. They were some form of thermal blind, projecting a decoy image."

  "Real smart," muttered Barrett. "So where is this creep really hidin' out?"

  "Find him " demanded Namir.

  Saxon nodded distractedly, and glanced around the marble lobby. It was gloomy in here, the only light a weak morning glow through the fan shaped windows above the high front doors. Aside from Federova, the area was deserted.

  He glanced back to find the Russian woman down on one knee, rifling through the pockets of one of the men she had just killed. A gasp escaped the guard's mouth as she turned him over, a last breath leaving his lungs as she shifted the body.

  "If the target's not on thirteen, then he's got to be on a different floor, shielded from thermographic scan." Saxon gave voice to his thoughts, following them through. He cast around the lobby. "There are multiple lift shafts. One of these has to be a dedicated express elevator… Here"

  He found a single set of doors off to one side, in a discreet alcove; everything about the positioning of it screamed Restricted Access.

  "Use it," Namir ordered. "Well track your locators, vector to you."

  "There's no call button here," he noted, finding a glass panel set in the wall. "It may need some kind of key, or maybe palm print recognition-"

  A heavy, wet crunch sounded behind him, and a blade edge clanked against the marble; then Federova was sprinting to his side. In her fingers she carried something fleshy that left a trail of red droplets all across the tiled checkerboard floor.

  "Never mind," Saxon reported, as she pressed a severed hand into the panel. "Red has, uh, improvised."

  The elevator gave a hol
low chime and opened itself to them.

  It let them out on ten, right in the line of fire from a pair of security-grade boxguards. The machines were steel cubes the size of a washing machine, inert in a monitoring mode; but when their sensors detected something that did not match their programmed security protocols, the mechanisms unfolded like a complex puzzle, extruding weapon muzzles and targeting scopes. They were the smaller cousins of the large, vehicle-size versions deployed by the military or law enforcement, but they could still be lethal.

  Saxon rolled out into the lavish corridor, bringing up his machine pistol as he moved. Federova launched herself from the elevator car on those racehorse legs of hers, so fast she was almost a blur of motion. The boxguards dithered, the simple machine-brains of the basic robots hesitating over which target to attack. Saxon used the moment to his advantage, coming up in half cover behind a cockpit leather armchair. He aimed with the Hurricane and squeezed the trigger, marching a clip of armor-piercing rounds up the frame of the closest boxguard, ripping it open. It stumbled into a wall and collapsed.

  Federova was on top of her target, and she took off the machine's primary sensor head with a spinning crescent kick. The robot reeled, and the dark-skinned woman rammed the muzzle of her machine pistol into a gap between its armor plates, and fired point-blank.

  "Tenth floor" Saxon reported. "We're splitting up to search for the target." He looked toward Federova, who gave him a curt nod and set off down the southern corridor.

  "Copy, Gray" said Namir. "We're coming to you. Isolate and neutralize."

  Saxon chose the northwest arm of the Y-shaped corridor and moved forward, low and fast, from cover to cover.

  Something moved ahead of him, and he saw a squat, thickset shape roll out from a shadowed alcove. It was an ornate machine, plated with steel and sheathed with ceramic detailing-an elegant hotel service robot modeled on some arcane, pre-twentieth-century artistic ideal of what an automaton should be. It moved on fat gray tires, turning like a tall tank. A speaker grille presented itself to Saxon and spoke in Russian, then

  Farsi and finally English. "This area is off-limits to guests," it declared. "Proceed no farther."

  A fan of green laser light issued out and scanned the hallway, catching Saxon by surprise. The machine caught sight of his drawn weapon and reacted instantly. Ceramic panels opened up to allow the vanes of a pulsed energy projector to emerge. "Mandatory warning delivered," it said.

  "Deploying deterrent."

  A throbbing wave-front of force hummed from the robot and blasted down the corridor. Saxon went down as the pulse threw freestanding tables and flower vases into the air with the force of the discharge. The rush of the knockdown effect was powerful, like the undertow in an ocean wave.

  He leapt from where he had landed, firing as he went. Bullets sparked off metal and inlaid wood, marring the elegantly worked surface of the machine. It fired again, dislodging pictures from the walls, blasting open the doors to empty rooms.

  Saxon's free hand closed around a cylindrical object on his gear vest and he tugged it free with a jerk of the wrist. By feel alone, he found the primer tab and pulled it. The weapon buzzed in response and Saxon threw it hard, diving for cover behind a damaged door.

  The Type 4 Frag-k grenade clanked off the casing of the robot and bounced to the carpet beneath it; a moment later the explosive core detonated, blasting the machine off its supports and into a smoking heap.

  Bursting from cover, Saxon raced through the cloud of cordite smoke and the humming after-note of the explosion. He took down the door to the corner suite with a kick from the heel of his tactical boot and pushed through, leading with the Hurricane.

  Inside, the room was wide and devoid of angles, all soft furnishings and bowed windows. A thick layer of metallized plastic sheet-doubtless some kind of sensor baffle-coated the window glass, bleeding out all the color and warmth of the dawn rising over Zubovskaya Square. Saxon found the power feed for the baffle and disconnected it.

  Off to one side, folding panels opened out into a range of rooms bigger than the house Saxon had grown up in; on the other side of the suite, a second bedroom had been gutted to accommodate the racks of a compact server farm, an orchard of data monitors, and a complex virtual keyboard.

  A man in a dark jacket rushed Saxon from a doorway leading to the bathroom, the lethally compact shape of a Widowmaker shotgun in his hands. The machine pistol in Saxon's ready grip chattered and the thug took the burst in the chest, crashing backward onto the tiles in a welter of blood. He ejected the clip, slammed a fresh load into place, and crossed into the bedroom.

  Mikhail Kontarsky, his face lit by sheer animal panic, recoiled from the keyboard console and fumbled for a nickel-plated heavy-frame automatic pistol lying on top of one of the server pods. Saxon brought up the muzzle of the Hurricane and aimed it at Kontarsky's chest. "Don't," he told him.

  The Russian wasn't the man he'd seen in the briefing picture anymore. That grim face and distant gaze were gone, replaced by raw terror. He gave a brittle nod and held his hands to his chest. "Please," he began, his voice heavily accented. "You must not stop me."

  Something in Saxon's peripheral vision shimmered, and he realized that beneath the panes of complex, scrolling data on the screens, there was a recognizable shape, the ghost-image of a human face, peering out through layers of static. "He's here to kill you, Mikhail," it said. The voice was toneless, sexless, flattened into a brittle machine-timbre that was utterly anonymous; the only thing that could be considered any kind of identity was a data tag showing a name, Janus.

  "You told me I would have more time!" Kontarsky spat, his lips trembling. He gave Saxon a pleading stare. "Please, I have to finish what I started, or-"

  Saxon took a warning step forward. "Touch that console and it will be the last thing you ever do, Minister."

  "Mikhail" said the video-masked figure. "This is bigger than you. We need the data on the Killing Floor, you must complete the upload-"

  Saxon sneered and put a burst of rounds through the big screen, silencing the voice. Kontarsky howled and stumbled backward. "Enough of your pal." He grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him forward, propelling him out of the room.

  "No." There were a dozen other monitors in the gutted bedroom, and screens in the main part of the suite; each one flickered into life, repeating the image of the static-shrouded face. The word repeated over and over as each one activated. "No. Not yet."

  "It's over," Saxon told him, ignoring the voice.

  A flash of resentment and defiance crossed Kontarsky's face, and he struggled in Saxon's grip. "You're not here to arrest me… You're not a policeman! What authority do you have?" The moment passed just as quickly, as the man's eyes fell to the machine pistol. "Please, I beg of you.

  Do not kill me. I only did what I thought was right!" "He is not a criminal" insisted the voice. "You cannot judge him."

  Saxon's jaw stiffened. "You're part of a global terror network!" he spat. "You're part of Juggernaut! And the people you sold out to are responsible for the deaths of my men!" The anger was coming back, and he felt the burn of it. "Operation Rainbird." He snarled the words at the cowering man. "You know that name? You know what happened out there? They were soldiers, doing their jobs-it wasn't even their damn war!" Saxon clubbed Kontarsky with the butt of the gun and sent him stumbling into the door frame. "Now move! I'm taking you alive! You can answer for what you've done!" He glared at one of the screens. "Are you watching this? Because we're coming for you next."

  "N-no, no, no… That's not true," Kontarsky stammered, turning to the monitor. "Please, Janus!" he implored the video-ghost. "Help me …"

  But the image's attention was on Saxon. "Do you know what you are doing, mercenary?" He thought he detected a faint edge of reproach in the words. "Do you know what master you serve?"

  The question made Saxon hesitate and he shot Kontarsky a hard look, hauling him up to his feet, pushing him forward into the middle of the room
. The man staring back at him was pale with fear, his eyes betraying no duplicity, no deception. "I don't know anything about your men," he whispered. "You must believe me!"

  And for a moment, Saxon did. He was a good judge of liars; he'd met enough of them in combat and elsewhere, and he knew the look of a man too afraid to lie. And if "Rainbird" meant nothing to him, then "Green light."

  Saxon heard the voice over the general comm channel a split second before the plastic-coated window crackled with fractures. Hardesty's bullet entered Kontarsky's head through the nasal cavity, blasting bone and brain matter across the wood-paneled walls. His body fell, jetting red, collapsing across a rosewood table.

  When Saxon looked up again all the screens were dark.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Silver Springs-Maryland-United States of America

  The autocab let her out at the curbside outside her apartment block, and Kelso glanced back to watch the driverless vehicle nose its way back into traffic, the sensor antennae along the hood of the car feeling the air. The fare from the airport had claimed the last of the money on the discretionary credit chip Temple gave her. The flight back had passed in a blur, Anna's gaze turned inward, passing the time with the ebb and flow of the same emotions over and over again. She felt disgusted at herself for her weakness, angry at getting caught, sad at the thought of letting Matt down, numb and furious, full of regret and fear.

  But mostly she felt hollowed out inside. All the work, everything she'd done in the endless days and weeks of her clandestine investigation, now was unraveling all around her. She had destroyed her career for the sake of something that only she seemed able to see, for a truth that no one else wanted to face.

  As she walked the short distance to the lobby of the building, the question echoed in her mind. Was it worth it?

  Inside, she thumbed the entry pad to her apartment and ignored the glow of the messaging system, dropping the packet she had carried all the way from the 10th Precinct on the sofa. In the living room, the television activated automatically, blipping to the local Picus News affiliate preset. The screen showed a report about the upcoming National Science Board caucus on human augmentaion; the conference was getting a lot of heat from the pro-human, antienhancement lobby, and it seemed like every day a new busload of protestors arrived in the capital.