The Liquidation Order

by Jett Lang

  Jack nodded his approval. “Smart acid.”

  The straight and narrow death sentence of metals and metalloids. They’d be through in less than a minute.

  ※

  A world of old, blinding fluorescents opened up. The two assassins stepped into the light; their Winnow’s poised, their faces concealed beneath their hoods. They’d waited in the dark and looked inside the room for answers, and decided, at last, to travel through, casting hesitation aside. It was an expansive basement, empty and echoing, lined with white pillars. No armed guards, no nightmarish beasts. Their short exchanges and quiet footfalls seemed too loud. They concentrated on the location of a power box that would dim the oppressive glare, would allow them to see where they were, and where they had to go.

  Jack, some distance ahead of her, ended up finding the dimmers. She caught up with him as he demonstrated the drastic reduction in brightness, counter-clockwise, clockwise, and back again with a bored amusement and a stupid half-smile. He was a five-year-old who had just found a marvelous toy to annoy his babysitter with.

  She batted his hand off the dial, and he laughed himself away from her. In the wake of their argument, he was acting more and more like Five-Nine, simply imitating human behavior rather than actually understanding the humanity underneath. He was closing himself off, shutting her out, and had been since he sat on that concrete bench. It was the weight of his conscience slumping his shoulders, and she had refused to help with the load. Wayne was still her target. She wasn’t sure who was Jack’s.

  Fluorescent strips buzzed above her as she walked, alone, to a red-painted metal push-door to her right. Not an autodoor like in every other high-class building she’d seen, but a regular fire door, minus the alarm warning sign. She didn’t trust this in the slightest. She studied the door in front of her with a circumspection born of past mistakes. There was nothing off about it, not that she could discern from this side. When she pushed, it gave with hardly any resistance at all.

  Fine. It was just a door, then, not a trap.

  Queen heard Jack’s footsteps echo nearby and decided to go ahead without him. She swung the way open and peered inside with her gun before her, and like so many complexes she had visited in her days of liquidation, the stairwell had that characteristic appearance of ominous banality. The low glow of the square LEDs embedded along each step and landing adding a certain greasy veneer to the stairs, railings, walls. It seemed if one were to take this endless ascent too rapidly, without a careful step and knowing brace, they could wind up sliding right over the rail and into the narrow pit between the stairwell, falling forever, past even the point from where they had begun.

  “Schematic says we gotta go down,” Jack said next to her, staring over the railing. “Came out on sublevel thirty, not forty. We ain’t near deep enough.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said without wanting or waiting for him to say anything else. She closed her eyes and referenced what she remembered about the schematics. He wasn’t wrong; they needed to descend if they were to find the backup generators. Twenty levels down and they would find them, unguarded. If the other team did their job right and cut the camera feed on that sublevel, then she and Jack would simply plant the electrical charges, bringing the whole underground structure to a powerless state. Even Wayne’s office.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if the old man wasn’t here?” Jack said. “She mistimed the operation, and he’s off at a vacation hotspot, sippin’ on Long Islands and soakin’ in the sun? Wouldn’t it be funny? I think so.”

  His voice tapered off on the last utterance. For one frightful instant, she believed this was more than a joke, that it was in the realm of possibilities for the daughter to be misdirected by a father of superior experience in subterfuge. Queen had, up till now, worked exclusively on the side of fathers and mothers troubled by their ex-loved-ones and subordinates. This was new ground for her. Dangerous ground, she reminded herself. Something to bear in mind if she was going to continue working for Syntheia.

  “Wishful thinking, Jack.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for hopin’.”

  She had something vile to say, but what use was it?

  There were no cameras to speak of along the grey, dim-lit walls, though she supposed a facility like this could afford to conceal them from the wandering eye of visitors. Every five flights she looked over the edge and saw they were nowhere nearer to the bottom than when they had started. She knew that was insane, that there must be an endpoint to these subfloors. The schematics didn’t account for anything below the generator sublevel, and no one had offered any other information on the subject.

  She wasn’t exactly flying blind, but she didn’t care for important details being left out. Was it a new construction, an old abandonment? The schematic offered no clue. Fifty sublevels. That was that. But it went beyond fifty. Syntheia must have known that, and she had taken it upon herself to not burden Queen with the knowledge – it wasn’t crucial, not to Syntheia’s plan and certainly not to a pawn. Things had changed, though. Queen felt an urge to know more than she had previously on assignments, especially ones of this magnitude. The old man she’d been sent to kill may know more than her less experienced employer by leaps and bounds. Maybe Jack was right. Maybe they should be working for Wayne.

  It’d been minutes since she heard anything but clattering footsteps, echoes dying before they really began.

  “Hey,” she said. “About what you said.”

  “About what?”

  “You know: Wayne not being here.”

  “Just speculation. Seems to me like he’d be smarter than to let his daughter go full rampage mode on his main base, don’t ya think? I mean, people like Wayne aren’t untouchable for no reason. Plenty of whackjobs out there want a go at them. Doesn’t end well.”

  She sucked her teeth, considered his words. He went on.

  “You don’t think it’s odd that she’d isolate us from the other team if she actually wanted us on the payroll after this expedition? Meet and greets are standard fare, and if she was so sure of herself, then why not be open about who we’d be workin’ with in the future? We got no idea what these people look like, not even the pilot who shipped us here.”

  “’Shipped us here.’”

  “To die,” he said. “Syntheia wines and dines us, gears us up, makes us stay in our little guest room. Fattenin’ us for slaughter.”

  “This is a test. We haven’t proven ourselves yet,” Queen said, hating her own defensiveness for an employer she did not truly understand, and hating Jack for casting doubt.

  “I’m not buyin’ that. I’m not buyin’ that at all.”

  “Then why are you here? You can turn back.” She laughed. “Unless you’re still serious about us mounting some rescue for Wayne.”

  “I’m here because this is it, sister. We go where we’re told, or whatever’s left of our bankrupt reputations swirls down the drain with us.”

  “If you don’t want to be here, then go, but don’t sabotage this for me.”

  “Because we did so well escapin’ the last time. None of these lessons are stickin’ to you, Queen.”

  She clutched the railing and took step after concrete step. “I’m done talking to you.”

  “Our lives are so tightly controlled that we think someone who loosens our chains is our friend,” he said. “We’ve swapped keepers, and that’s about it. There’s nothing else we can do but hope that our keepers aren’t tired of us or in trouble themselves, else you know what happens.”

  She ignored him, but he kept up.

  “You don’t want to talk, but I know what you want to say: ‘So then, Jack, why don’t you stop bitchin’ and start runnin’, and haven’t we been over this about ten thousand times?’ ‘We have,’ I’ll say. Yet – and here’s the funny bit – you haven’t recognized that everywhere we go is marked and tracked. They don’t tell you that little bit in the surgery contract; that part’s in invisible ink. And you’ll say, ‘Then let�
�s take the tracker out.’ Good idea, but you know where they put the sucker? Smack dab in the middle of the brain.”

  She heard him tapping the side of his head as he followed her down the stairs.

  “Nestle it in there, nice and snug so nobody but a skilled surgeon can get it out. One guess who has all the skilled surgeons. Here’s a hint: It ain’t village people. Ain’t tribes warrin’ over water and women in the desert. Ain’t forest people with a knack for slave tradin’, neither.”

  “You’re lying,” she said, but her skin was prickled and her heart pounded. She squeezed at the rail guard: The one thing she could count on as tangible, secure. The embedded LEDs above and beside them maintained a half-brightness that gave the shadows a sickly gleam. She was distantly aware that she was gripping the railing too hard.

  “They’re not allowed to do that. The contract states–”

  “They can do anythin’ they want. They influence the politics, they make the laws. You’ve known how this shit works since you started gettin’ a paycheck. They don’t pay stupid people, they hire people like us. We do their business, keep the cogs lubed and operatin’, and what do we get? Money to shut us up. But we’re just pieces that can be traded or thrown aside. And pieces don’t have a say in the matter. It’s ‘yessir’ and ‘nosir.’ That’s the extent of it. One option for employment, one option for death. That’s it. That’s all we get.”

  She hastened her pace, forgetting whatever rebuttal she had on the tip of her tongue and trying, in vein, to outrun his speculation. How many flights were left? She checked the edge, but the edge told her of the fall to infinity, to chaos and confusion. She opened the schematic in her mind again, eyes half-lidded as she read over memorized sublevels. Two flights left, then the generators.

  She had to separate herself from Jack’s conspiracies, had to stay on task.

  Jack laughed as she took the stairs two steps at a time, her trepidation over falling gone in the wake of her need to get away from him. To think. Even as she fled, the pieces were falling into place. Syntheia had known where they were. His laugh was both crazed and gratified; a laugh that needed no companionship but knew it had hers.

  She leapt the last four steps, flung an emergency door outward, and pulled it closed as she darted past the threshold. His laugh was in the stairwell, dampened by the red-painted steel of a door that was an exact copy of the one twenty stories above. Behind her, the generators murmured among themselves in a great, humming choir. Square LEDs were inlaid along concrete that exuded a constant chill. She needed to hold the door shut, to barrier herself from the laugh. There was no manual lock. The mechanism controlled remotely, the dossier had said.

  The laugh was replaced with a gentle knock and a gentler voice.

  “Don’t be like this, baby. Haven’t we been havin’ fun together, you and me, goin’ all around, fuckin’ and takin’ lives? Good times, I’d say, for people like us.”

  “Get a grip, Jack. We have a job to do,” she said, trying to sound surer than she was.

  “Oh, it’s always about the job with you.” He knocked louder, transitioned into war-drumming that shook the door and her. “Always talkin’ about the job.”

  She gave the door a loud knock of her own, talked behind her teeth. “They’re going to hear you.”

  “Good,” he said, and continued the savage beating of the red entrance. “I hope everyone hears me. I hope they come runnin’.”

  She pictured him on the other side of the door, bringing his arms to bear on the cold, coated metal, wanting to break it off its hinges for no reason other than to spite her.

  “What do you want?” She tried to keep her voice level, but it was almost shrill. Almost afraid. “Is this about Wayne? The ‘greater good?’”

  She heard him choke back a laugh. “If you don’t know by now, then I ain’t tellin’,” he spat. “So why don’t you just open up and we can get this over with?”

  She wanted to believe he was talking about the job. Every part of her screamed that he was talking about her.

  The banging subsided at once. Jack started to tug from outside. There was no way for her to jam the push-door, and eventually he would overpower her. She squared her duffel against her back and ran between the generators. She couldn’t hear the door open, but she was certain it had, the stairwell air seeping in. She moved fast. Electronics hummed all around, but there was no peace in losing herself in the noise – not when she knew what was chasing her.

  Jack hollered above the din. “Is this what you want? Is this really all you want?”

  Queen ran faster, went farther in. She switched between the aisles of immense metal at random intervals, looked back to see nothing except what was there before: white-sheened floors, generators raised on platforms. So much like the server rooms at her old work, where the technician had a tendency to wear too much cologne and talk energetically about the races.

  How appropriate that she recalled that last detail.

  “You gotta stop and appreciate our situation, you know?” Jack was closer, but the humming made it hard to determine where he was calling out from. “I let you live for some naïve idea of love. Because you were young, and talented, and I thought you deserved a chance. And what do you do? What do you do? You don’t trust me. You don’t choose me. What bum fuckin’ deal is that, huh? Sounds to me like you’re a whole lotta talk. Sounds to me like I shoulda been done with you after our first roll under the sheets.”

  A fire-orange volley shredded an overhead LED to pieces, its guts sparking out onto the white floor to her right She dodged to the left-most lane, didn’t break her stride.

  “No answer for that,” he said, raw and low.

  She looked over her shoulder again; he wasn’t there. But he was near, he had to be. He was trying to herd her. Another orange burst confirmed this. Shards rained down ahead of her. She changed lanes three more times, and the shards continued to waterfall overhead. The bastard was tracking her flawlessly. How was he doing it? Did ten years of experience put him this far ahead of her?

  “She’s runnin’, folks. Look at her go!” he bellowed in some twisted attempt at showmanship.

  He loosed his ammunition generously and precisely, each time taking out a chunk of lights or silencing one of the colossal generators, directing her movement toward the destination he desired. Every move was a near-collision or evasion of a melted spray of steel, aluminum, and yellow-blue rain. As long as the room was, and as numerous as her cover points were, Queen would reach an end sooner than she liked. Whenever she stepped too far out of line, Jack’s reminder was there, tearing up a corrugated flank of steel in the lane next to her or bringing down a light ahead.

  “Awh, she ain’t speakin’, folks! The pretty little number is an expert on the silent treatment! Who’d have guessed after all that talk, talk, talk?”

  She should turn and go after him, but she had no doubt that in her panic and with her unsteadied hand, she’d kill him. Kill someone she genuinely cared for. She didn’t want to give the feeling a name, but it ran deep. Deep enough to stop her shooting back.

  Another burst of broken machinery. Another change in direction.

  You’re being an idiot. If you don’t kill him, he’s going to kill you.

  She stopped running. Put both hands on her weapon. “Jack.”

  The bullets that were scheduled to arrive did not, the destruction at a momentary lapse.

  “What is it, Queen?”

  The words stuck in her throat. She fought to summon them, but stood there, dumb. Soundless. She glanced down at the Winnow clutched in her hand as if it might reveal a truth. It did not.

  “How’re you gonna soothe me?”

  He was there, all at once, standing with his weapon holstered at his hip. His hood was pulled back. Black eyes, black hair, black armor. He shook his head, as if he sensed the intent in her. As if her eyes were windows into it. When he approached, her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered on the concrete.

  “Wh
at do you want?” she whispered. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “Do you want me gone?”

  “I want everything back to the way it was before.”

  “You can’t have that.”

  Despite their near-identical height, she felt infinitely small. Small, and powerless.

  “Is it true? They implanted us with trackers?”

  He nodded. “It’s how Syntheia found us. The slaver doctor in Grey Wolf saw it on his scan, but he couldn’t identify it. Bet he told the guy who sold us, why they let me go so cheap. They didn’t want my kind of trouble.” He tapped a finger against his head. “Our kind of trouble.”

  She had never seen her own medical reports. The doctors of New Paradise were not obligated or permitted to disclose information, only to advise on necessary treatment. She had assumed it was a security protocol to protect her employer. Even with the ambiguity, she had a difficult time believing they would implant her. Was her training not proof of her loyalty to the company? She tasted bile in the corners of her mouth, felt cold all over. The welcome, icy numbness of resolution. Of simplification. She shrugged her duffel off her shoulder and rested it upon the ground. Clicked on her flashlight.

  “What are you doing?” Jack said.

  Queen unzipped the top of her bag, removed one explosive brick. “You’re right, we should do something that matters,” she said, surprised by her own calm. “But there’s no solution in this base. Once we get back–”

  “If we get back.”

  “–we’ll talk to Syntheia about getting the trackers taken out. Or whatever she can do.”

  “‘Whatever’ she can do, is fuck everythin’ up for everyone.” Even as he spoke, he knelt and pulled out a charge.

  “We can’t change what’s going to happen to Wayne. The other team is already in place. There are more of them, and we have no idea what hardware they’re sporting or how well they use it.” She met his gaze. “We can’t save Wayne. But we can try to save ourselves.”