That shouldn't be possible, but a lot of impossible things were happening today, so I surfed the wave of disbelief a bit further.
"So then what?"
"We rebuilt the system as best we could, from the ground up."
"What did you do with the prisoners while Pause was down?"
"Transferred them to the Stream." Emilio shook his head, still dealing with the weight of the calamity that'd occurred. "What else could we do?"
Great. A couple days away from the high-security fences of the Pause feed and, no surprise, Malcolm created a nanocomp hack. Nothing could stop the prisoners from manipulating Pause's sub-system to an extent—these were some of the greatest hackers the world had ever seen after all, but their reach remained limited precisely because Pause was kept more than an arm's length away from the Stream where, once loose, Intuits like Malcolm could do unprecedented amounts of damage.
Add time dilation to the mix and Malcolm would have experienced years of free time within the Stream, exploiting weakness and planning his next move.
"What about video surveillance?" Raines asked, picking up the slack I'd dropped along with my jaw. "This place is crawling with nanites. Someone must have caught a glimpse of the mystery man."
"You're welcome to the footage, but you'll find nothing." Emilio turned his palms to the ceiling and shrugged. "Save yourself the trouble and take my word. We experienced a prison-wide blackout around the time of the man's arrival. I have no means of proving he was here, save a few eyewitness accounts from myself and a couple guards."
I let that simmer. The logistics of an operation of that scope, at Pause no less, defied my understanding of the Stream.
"Optic Nanos?" Raines pushed forward despite the road blocks and dead ends, determined to tug at the fraying string of this mystery's sweater until she came up with an answer. "One of your guards must have optic upgrades. We pull video footage from their nanocomp—"
"You don't get it." Emilio rested his chin in cupped hands and shook his head. "Whoever did this is out of your league. You should let it go. Walk away and live out whatever remaining time they leave you."
"I'm already a dead man," I said.
"Death might be preferred to the alternative," Emilio said. His eyes drifted to the wall as if he could see beyond to the rows of prisoners trapped within their own minds.
"Wait." Raines threw her hands in the air. "You're saying whoever came here, wiped your computers, and arranged for Malcolm's release also has the ability to hack into personal nanocomps and delete information at will?"
"Precisely."
"That's impossible," Raines said. "You bett—"
"Actually—" I prepared to share my experience with Malcolm from earlier, but a woman's voice squawked over the room's intercom.
"Warden, we've initiated a freeze on your Life Tracker. Is everything okay, sir?"
Emilio glanced at the numbers on his forearm and then his hand moved to the button.
Colors blurred, leaving the Warden at the focal point of my narrowing tunnel of vision, but even with implants boosting my speed, he was too far away. I couldn't cover the distance between the wall and desk fast enough to stop the Warden from thumbing the intercom and saying, "Freeze my wife and daughter's accounts as well."
And poof, our leverage vanished.
A second later, muffled voices from the other side of the door were followed by the pounding of flesh on metal. The door wouldn't hold them long, and if I had any intention of still breathing after it fell, we needed to get gone.
"We should go," I said.
I grabbed Raines by the wrist and yanked her from the chair before realizing I didn't have a clear destination in mind for our escape. When I turned back to the Warden he stood behind his desk with a vortex pistol clutched in his bird-boned hand.
Shit. Take your eyes off the ball and everything goes to hell.
Raines raised her hands and stepped between myself and the Warden. More pounding from the door. Some words from Raines. Everything muddled and unintelligible.
Emilio and Raines were locked in a staring contest bordering on séance. Fragments of their conversation rose over the racket caused by the guards learning to play drums through demolition.
"Is there another way out?" Raines moved forward, a foot shy of the Warden.
I recognized that sentence, but I was a billion percent sure the Warden wouldn't answer.
Astonishment doesn't explain how I felt when Castille lowered his pistol and extended a spindly finger towards the tapestry beside his desk, nor how I felt a moment later when the room filled with the loud beeping of a Life Tracker approaching zero.
A sound we shouldn't have heard.
Emilio Castille opened his mouth to protest, but nothing escaped except the shock a man feels staring into the face of death.
Three beeps rang out, each punctuated with a silence both fleeting and infinite.
On the final beep, something buzzed, a rattle in the hands of a toddler. I'd heard the sound before and it made my stomach curdle each time. The Warden's Life Tracker hit zero. Dutifully, his nanocomp detonated a microscopic explosive implanted on the day of his birth.
Emilio's muscles fired in unison. He seized. Bones cracked and cartilage snapped against the force of contraction.
Stringy tendons bulged against folds of skin in the man's throat as a soft gasp slipped through clenched teeth.
He stood frozen; the tension of the seizure held him erect long after the clarity of life had fled from his eyes.
When the muscles relaxed, he crumpled.
Raines skirted the desk and knelt beside the Warden an instant after he hit the ground. She searched for a pulse she'd never find.
Warden Emilio Castille was dead.
CHAPTER NINE
Winging It
"What the hell did you do?" Raines asked with a quiet certainty that somehow I'd screwed up.
"Me? Nothing."
She looked up. The hard lines carved into her face over the course of the last decade softened, offering in their place a glimpse of the young woman she'd once been. The person she'd been before the world taught her pain and loss.
The lines returned.
"I didn't sign up to kill innocent people, Tom."
Emilio Castille wasn't innocent by a long shot, but focusing on that detail wasn't going to change Raines' state of mind.
"You didn't kill anyone," I said. "None that I know of, at least."
"Then what's that?" She gestured to the corpse at our feet.
"That wasn't you."
"But I let you—"
"Hey now, I didn't do this either. Time Vice froze his account, remember? You're looking at somebody else's handiwork."
An explosion at the door shook the room with its concussive force. The pressure shifted. My head pulsed like an overinflated balloon stretching its thin prison, waiting to be popped.
I expected to see guards rushing through a smoky haze of flaming debris, but amazingly the door held.
An ambient ringing, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, reverberated down the halls of my ear canal. "Any idea how to get out of here?"
Raines pulled aside one of the tapestries behind the desk, revealing a smooth panel of wall that looked less like an exit, and more like a dead end. She ran a hand along the textureless surface.
"That's the door," she said, dropping to a knee beside the desk.
"Then what are you doing down there?"
"Trying to find the button that opens it."
"What if he accessed the controls remotely?" I said, feeling more pessimistic with every passing second.
"Then we'd be shit out of luck, wouldn't we?"
A second later, Raines grabbed the Warden's limp body by the wrist and dragged it a few inches closer.
"You find it?"
"Yeah, biometric scanner. Make yourself useful, grab his feet."
I did, and together we positioned the Warden with his top half lying beneath the desk. Raines pre
ssed Emilio's palm to the underside and the wall melted, revealing a long brightly lit corridor that presumably led to freedom.
Which only left the small detail of getting off the floating fortress.
The Pause clientele were too white collar, and sleepy, to stage many riots, but whoever designed this prison with enough foresight to secure my escape had my undying gratitude.
Chalk that up to Mistress Luck looking kindly on me for once.
The sound of splintering metal drew my attention to the door and the guards on the other side trying to bring it down.
A small hole appeared in the center of the divide. If taken in conjunction with the sound, it meant they'd unleashed a mean little nanite that, for all the shiny parts and technology, simply boiled down to a sophisticated termite.
The hole expanded outward, consuming the door. In another minute there wouldn't be anything left to stop the breeze. A guard with a silver-visored helmet poked his head through the opening. His rifle followed shortly thereafter, but Raines was ready and firing, driving the man back into his hole.
I scanned the ground for Castille's pistol, but found nothing. There's something to be said about bringing a knife to a gun fight, but coming empty handed is decidedly worse.
"Come on," Raines said, firing once more before spinning on her heels and disappearing into the tunnel.
I ran after her. The blunting effect of adrenaline wore thin and muscles, long left unused, ached with exertion. When the hall terminated at a flight of stairs I doubled over and sucked in air. Lactic acid pooled in my muscles and burned where it leaked into my bloodstream.
Raines eyed me with a curious mix of amusement, pity, and disdain, a potent trifecta of human emotion.
The stairs, poorly lit by a handful of dulled bulbs, wound a tight spiral towards the surface. Raines flitted up the steps two at a time.
I did some creative reconfiguring of my nanocomp and coaxed my brain into donating a fresh batch of adrenaline. Like tossing buckets of water on a forest fire, it wouldn't solve the underlying problem, that I'd abused my body for the last decade, but it was something.
At the summit, Raines knelt beside a door propped open an inch, studying the world beyond.
"What do you see?" I asked.
"Two Kestrel-class copters parked fifty yards out, a pair of guards near the furthest of the two, and a mechanic working on the other. They look bored."
"Element of surprise counts for something. Any chance you can fly one of those rigs?"
Muffled voices from below suggested the guards had discovered our escape route.
"Probably not," Raines said, "but I'll try."
She pulled her pant leg up and handed me the small vortex pistol strapped to her ankle. It was smaller than I preferred, but with more stopping power than my fists it was hard to complain.
"Don't kill them," she said.
"Not sure they're playing by the same rules." I tightened my sweaty palm on the rubber handle of the pistol. "But I'll try."
I turned the intensity of the pistol to its lowest setting and nodded. Raines kicked the door off its hinges and I leaped out. Aided by the speed nanites, the world moved in slow motion.
A sunburst of light ricocheting off the side of a Kestrel blinded me. Retinal afterimages sparking across my eyeballs made it difficult to get a lock on the targets. I strafed three steps left to clear my vision.
My nanocomp sensed the struggle and compensated. It corrected for the over-saturation of white, dimmed the edges, and brought a grainy sort of clarity to the world.
The two soldiers dove in opposite directions, their faces frozen in shock. Taken by surprise, neither man had activated his speed implants, causing both of them to move slowly through the air as if it were viscous.
Without the handicap of solar flares blinding me I made a course correction and fired twice. My pistol spat two swirls of compressed air that carved through the heat vapors rising off the blacktop runway before finding their intended targets. Each guard hit the ground a moment later, unconscious, but alive.
On my left, the mechanic cowered behind the front wheel of a Kestrel, shielding his face with a crescent wrench on the off chance that it might blunt the effect of the pistol. He posed no threat and frankly I didn't have the heart to neutralize him. I deactivated my speed nanites and braced myself while the world raced by in fast forward. Finally my brain caught up and began processing at normal speed.
Raines sat in the cockpit of the Kestrel the two guards had been standing beneath. With eyebrows narrowed and lips pulled tight, she flicked a series of switches and the copter roared to life. Low bone-rattling vibrations filled the hot sticky air around me with an indecipherable hum. The memory of lying on Lucky Lou's floor sprang to mind along with the sickening reminder of what he'd taken from me.
Those were thoughts for later, assuming we made it out of there in less than a handful of pieces. I hopped into the passenger seat and flashed the thumbs-up. The door shut and the whine of the engines became an indistinct purr, leaving us to fill the relative silence with heavy breathing.
More accurately, I filled the silence with heavy breathing. Raines appeared unaffected by the exertion of our recent circumstances.
She jerked the flight stick and we lurched into the sky like a startled cat.
"Wait," I said through gritted teeth, "you're gonna fly by hand?"
"Got a better idea?"
"Tons!"
"I'm open to suggestions."
"Use your nanocomp?"
"The system's encrypted."
"Decrypt it."
"You decrypt it," she said.
"Who knows how long that'll take?"
"Well then shut up and hold on."
Lest our escape be too easy, a half dozen guards leaked onto the roof via the secret passageway. They moved with the reflexes of trained professionals—fanning out, taking cover, and opening fire faster than I could point and stutter, "Shit."
Nanite-tipped bullets clanked harmlessly off the sides of the Kestrel, unable to penetrate the vehicle's superior armor.
One heroic guard sprinted across the roof, a black blur that was either ramped up on speed implants or the fastest natural human alive.
Raines held our position twenty feet off the deck while she fiddled with the controls. It felt like a good time to say something encouraging, but you can't force motivational speeches, so I kept quiet and watched the guard leap into the air.
He caught the wheel of the Kestrel, jerking the vehicle violently with the sudden addition of weight.
We spun a quarter turn clockwise before Raines regained control. The anti-aircraft weapons lining the rim of the floating island were pointed out to sea, a strange orientation I was currently thankful for. They hadn't fired on us, which if I had to guess, meant they were waiting until we were away from Pause so they wouldn't have to deal with our burning wreckage raining down on the compound.
A man in a black flight suit crossed the open pavilion below and hopped into the cockpit of the Kestrel the mechanic had been working on.
I prayed for mechanical difficulties, but those prayers fell on the deaf ears of a heartless deity. The machine lifted gently and spun in a circle.
The melody of my heavy breathing was joined by a chorus of alarms. The other Kestrel had missile-lock. We were worse than the proverbial sitting duck, who, at minimum, knew how to fly away.
This wasn't how I'd expected to die. I held no delusion that my death would be a noble occasion, but being blown out of the sky felt cheap and unfair.
Raines, less keen on death, pulled the only trick she'd shown mastery of and yanked back on the flight stick. My balls sprang up into my body cavity and tickled my pancreas as we launched towards the sky.
I clung to my chair, fingers splayed in a death grip, thankful I was not the one clinging to the wheel beneath the Kestrel. It was fair to assume the guard regretted his decision about now.
Our ascent into the wild blue continued. We rose at nausea
-inducing speeds. The weight of acceleration felt like a giant squatting on my chest. The once dull vibrations of the Kestrel became a high-frequency whine of stabbing needles that numbed everything from toes to nose.
My stomach had almost settled back into the general vicinity of my abdomen when the other Kestrel pulled even with us.
Luckily Raines possessed another trick up her sleeve, one I should have seen coming, but I didn't, so when she flung the flight stick forward, there were mixed emotions.
On the one hand I enjoyed a peaceful moment of zero-g where everything was light and happy and life looked as if it might work out after all.
But then we dropped.
CHAPTER TEN
Crashing It
We plummeted with the combined efforts of gravity and a couple supercharged engines. The enemy copter zipped past us, still on an upward rise.
It wouldn't take the other pilot long to realize we could only go up and down, and then our little game of yo-yo would come to an explosive end.
None of that mattered as we hurtled towards the ground, though. Mind and muscles were focused solely on the task of keeping my ass planted in my seat.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Raines flip a switch, pull back on the flight stick, and slam the lever at her side down. The Kestrel broke every rule of physics I'd ever known.
It thrust forward with devastating effect on my internal organs, which I imagined had liquefied and were trying to escape my body through open pores.
Raines dove us towards the ocean paste below.
"You had me worried there for a second," I said, feeling the need to speak more for my sake than hers. "Wasn't sure you knew what you were doing."
Raines turned her head, eyes narrowed and focused with a determination that instilled confidence and said, "I don't have a clue what I'm doing."
If ever in the history of the world there had been a series of least inspiring words spoken, I had yet to hear them.
I thought back to the guard beneath the Kestrel. No way he could've held on through the acceleration. Another life lost in the wake of Malcolm Wolfe. I thought of the man's family going about their daily routine, not yet realizing their lives would forever be shadowed by that day. I couldn't escape the role I'd played in their tragedy, only accept it and shoulder the weight of his loss along with all the others I'd failed.
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