by Jack Heath
Six supposed that many of the other Deck agents would feel honored by such a reputation, but he didn’t like it at all. In his experience, the more people who knew about him, the more who wanted to kill him. ChaoSonic was a double threat to Six; they would study him and experiment on him for being one of the Lab’s creations, and they would execute him for being a Deck agent. But the danger which scared Six the most was the one closest to him—the Spades.
The Deck was divided into four sections: the Hearts, who did the fieldwork; the Diamonds, who managed research and design; the Clubs, who trained new recruits; and the Spades, who monitored the rest of the Deck, watching it for signs of corruption. Six knew that the Spades wouldn’t take kindly to him if they ever learned of his origins. He would be seen as nothing more than a weapon of ChaoSonic, and would probably be “shuffled”—locked up in the Deck’s cells alongside the hundreds of Code-breakers he had caught. The King of Hearts would probably suffer the same fate. He had been protecting Six for sixteen years.
The irony wasn’t lost on Six. He and his colleagues at the Deck had dedicated years of their lives to resurrecting the world of pre-Takeover times, protecting its values and enforcing its laws. But while the present-day City seemed to have no place for him, in the lost world of pre-Takeover times, things would be far worse. He would be considered a scientific monstrosity.
But he didn’t think he was in any immediate danger. ChaoSonic didn’t know who he was, or where he was—Kyntak had wiped the Lab computers clean eight months ago, erasing their records of Six’s DNA and the hidden location of the Deck. Methryn Crexe, the director of the Lab, was safely shuffled so ChaoSonic couldn’t get to him. While ChaoSonic probably suspected Deck involvement in the collapse of the Lab, they would never know for sure. And excluding monitoring of e-mails and phone calls, the Spades relied mainly on the two Jokers for their intel, so Six was relatively safe. Neither Kyntak nor Grysat, the other Joker, would turn him in.
As usual, Grysat was sitting behind the reception desk, fiddling with his cuffs as he watched the agents come and go.
“How’d the mission go, Six?” he asked cheerfully.
“Well, thank you.” Six looked at his watch. It was 07:49:13. “Buzz me in, please.”
Grysat complied.
The elevator doors slid open, revealing polished mirrors gleaming in the incandescent lighting. Agent Two was standing in it, leaning on the aluminum handrail.
Six had been rude to Agent Two from the day he joined the Deck to the day Two was kidnapped by the Lab. Six had been rude to everybody. It was nothing personal. But Two had never held it against him.
“Hey, Six,” he said. “Successful mission?”
“One hundred and four arrested,” Six said, “no casualties, and a few hundred thousand in the Potential Funds Intake.” The elevator doors swished shut.
“Pretty standard, then,” Two said, deadpan.
“Substandard. Kyntak sang all the way home.”
Two laughed. “Is he any good?”
“Either his DNA isn’t perfect after all, or he’s living proof that musicianship isn’t genetic.”
“Does that mean you’re just as bad?”
Six shrugged. “I have the sense not to try.”
Ping. The doors slid open on the fifth floor.
Out of efficiency rather than urgency, Six sprinted along the empty corridors until he reached his office. He disarmed the door, entered, armed it behind him, and sat down in front of the laptop on his desk. He hit the power switch.
His office was tidy, clean, and minimal. Besides the computer and desk, the only objects were his spare coat, hanging on a hook behind the door, and a painting on the wall. The painting had been a gift from the Queen of Hearts. He suspected she’d given it to him as an experiment, just to see if he would discard it. He hadn’t.
The mission report template opened automatically on the screen. He began to type:
MISSION REPORT: 8066-7145-9899
AGENT NUMBER: 06-4 (Six of Hearts)
LOCATION: Warehouse for storage and transfer of human cargo on Highway 03649
BRIEF: Enter facility, arrest suspects, recover hostages for adoption
AGENT IN CHARGE: 06-4 (Six of Hearts)
MISSION DESCRIPTION: Entered through roof (0542 hours). Established validity of suspicions by confirming presence of hostages (0600 hours). Led suspects to holding vehicle (0608 hours). Left scene (0614 hours).
Looks pretty simple on paper, Six thought. Lucky there was so much equipment to be sold and so many arrests, or this would practically be a blemish on his record.
GENERAL CASUALTIES/INJURIES: None
DAMAGE TO AREA: Warehouse door damaged. Corridor and stairwell at rear demolished
ESTIMATED COST: 18,000 standard credits
DAMAGE TO PERSONAL PROPERTY: N/A
ESTIMATED COST: N/A
NUMBER OF KNOWN SIGHTINGS: 104. All offenders in custody.
ESTIMATED POTENTIAL FUNDS INTAKE: 760,000 standard credits
Save. Proofread. Print. Shut down.
Disarm. Exit. Arm.
“Not bad, Six,” the King of Hearts said, green eyes twinkling. “Not too bad at all.”
Lucky I do this for the money as opposed to praise from my boss, thought Six. No matter how successful the mission, he always says much the same thing.
King saw the look in Six’s eyes. “Sorry,” he said, scratching his clean-shaven scalp. “I try to be enthusiastic, but you’ve desensitized me with three years of amazing work.”
“I could use a raise,” Six said.
“You barely spend any of the millions of credits you have,” King said. “You could use a raise, but you wouldn’t.”
Six raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t known that his minimal lifestyle had been watched so carefully.
“So,” King began. He stared at Six, waiting for an answer to the unasked question. Six held his gaze.
“She wasn’t there?” King asked finally.
Six shook his head.
There was a pause.
“There’s still hope,” King said.
“For an eight-month-old child? In the City?”
“You were younger than that when I found you crawling the streets,” King pointed out.
“Exactly.” Six stared at King’s desk. “By now someone must have her. And I doubt they’ll be as upstanding as you.”
King conceded the point with a grim nod. “But to mount an assault like the one on Kyntak’s house, you’d need resources. Lots of money, manpower, and information. There aren’t many people in the City with the capabilities. And those who have them can’t stay hidden.”
“I think there’s a new part of ChaoSonic,” Six said. “Someone filling the hole the Lab left in biological research. Adults react more slowly to drugs and viruses than children do, unless you’ve got some of Tridya’s product to accelerate growth. And using animals doesn’t reliably predict a result in humans.”
Chelsea Tridya was a freelance scientist who had been kidnapped by the Lab. She’d invented a drug that was able to control the rate of aging by manipulating the gene known as P53—something which no one had previously been able to do without causing tumors in the subjects. She had intended to use it to help people lead longer lives, postponing the early death that came from breathing the City’s polluted air. But the Lab had had other plans. They wanted a drug to make people age faster so they could grow clones of Six to maturity in days instead of years. They had planned to build a superhuman army.
Six had rescued Chelsea, and she was now working under the Deck’s protection. But the Lab’s supply of her drug had never been found. If there was an upside to the fact that children were being sourced for experimentation, it was that ChaoSonic probably didn’t have the missing supplies.
“And you think Nai was taken by whoever has taken the Lab’s place?” King asked.
Six said nothing. He hadn’t thought so at first, because the abduction had happened only two months after the L
ab was liquidated. There hadn’t been much time for a new division to take its place. But now it seemed the most likely scenario. Nai was a flesh-and-blood weapon, the Lab’s most advanced, and final, super-soldier. So whatever new division had sprung up to take its place, they would have a keen interest in her. And they would have ChaoSonic’s cash, intel, and muscle.
“Still no mention of her from our spies inside ChaoSonic,” King said. “So if they have her, they haven’t gotten what they want from her yet. Therefore she’s still alive.” He put Six’s mission report in a desk drawer. “There’s still hope.”
King’s terminal buzzed. “It’s Queen,” he said as he slipped the headphones on and pushed ACCEPT.
Six stared into space. He had escaped from the Lab as a baby, albeit because Methryn Crexe had let him. Crexe, the executive in charge of the Lab, had wanted Six, Kyntak, and Sevadonn, the three clones, to grow up with different personalities. That way he could see which one made the best soldier, and duplicate his upbringing with the next batch. Six had wanted Nai to have a normal childhood, but she’d only had two months of freedom before she’d been taken. Even if he found her, who knew what mental and physical damage might…
King’s face had grown ashen. He looked Six in the eye. “I’ll send Six right away,” he said grimly into the mouthpiece. “Get all the agents you can for backup.”
He replaced the headphones in the terminal. “There’s been an explosion in the cells. Methryn Crexe has escaped,” he said.
The cell-block door marked 81-B slid open with a hydraulic hiss as Six approached. A cloud of dust avalanced out, blinding him for a moment as if he’d stepped outside into the fog. He could taste brick and mortar in the air, and smell the tangy scent of twisted steel.
He walked into the dust cloud, and the door slid shut behind him.
The noise inside was piercing. Some of the criminals howled abuse at Six as he walked past, kicking and shaking the bars of their cells. Others begged him for information, demanding to know what all the noise had been. A few cried out that they hadn’t committed the acts for which they had been shuffled.
The latter were the easiest to ignore. Six didn’t make mistakes, and he had faith in his fellow agents.
It was obvious which cell had been Methryn Crexe’s—it had no ceiling. It was as if a Dumpster-size fist had punched through the roof and snatched up Crexe, then vanished into thin air.
Six walked through the open cell door. He could see the remnants of the cell above, missing its floor and ceiling, and, above that, the opaque grey sky.
A woman’s body was lying in the dust, surrounded by a puddle of dried blood—the former occupant of the cell above, Six presumed. He knelt down beside her. Shot in the head. Probably killed instantly.
Six looked up again, trying to picture the scene. It’s a miracle she survived the demolition of the ceiling, he thought. They must have expected her to die in the blast, but she was sheltered somehow, so they had to shoot her.
But how could she have survived a massive explosion like this?
How did Crexe survive it?
A large disc of concrete in the corner caught Six’s eye. He squinted through the smoke and the fog seeping in from above. The disc was perfectly circular.
There was another one just like it, lying on the floor to one side. Six hadn’t seen them immediately in the rubble.
What are the chances of an explosion creating two identical concrete discs? he wondered. The odds against it must be huge.
Six looked down at the body again. So, he thought. They drilled a round hole in the ceiling first, shot the woman, drilled an identical hole through the floor, rescued Crexe, and then blew up both cells to destroy the evidence.
What evidence? Crexe is gone; the woman’s dead. What am I missing?
Six looked harder at the puddle of dried blood around the woman.
He rolled the body over. Her blank eyes stared up at the foggy sky. The bullet hole was in the underside of her chin, and the exit wound was a small hole near her crown.
With a wound like that, Six thought, her heart should have stopped beating before she even hit the ground. So why was there such a large puddle of blood?
Because it isn’t her blood. It couldn’t be.
Six started to picture the incident from scratch. The rescue team drilled a hole in the ceiling. The round block of concrete fell, alerting the woman. She attacked the first one to climb down…with a broken-off piece of concrete, perhaps, or even just her bare hands. The intruder shot her during the struggle, from close range—hence the bullet wound under her chin, rather than in her face, as it would be if the shot had been taken from a distance. But she’d wounded her attacker, and he was bleeding. Perhaps his gun discharged during the struggle, and he was hit. Perhaps he died, Six thought, and later the others put him in their getaway vehicle. There was a lot of blood.
No, wait. The blood was on the floor of Crexe’s cell, not hers. So the attacker was still alive, and still bleeding when they drilled a new hole, climbed down into Crexe’s cell, and grabbed him.
It was even possible that they’d placed the woman’s body on top of the blood puddle so it appeared to be her blood and was never examined more closely.
Once they had Crexe, someone up above must have lowered the rope. They grabbed it and were lifted out, explosives were set (some kind of powerful directional bombs, Six thought, though not claymores, because there would be ball bearings on the floor), and they drove away.
This explains how they did it so quickly, Six thought. The explosion happened after the rescue, not before. And there were probably at least four perpetrators: two to break in (one to drill and one to shoot), one to lift the intruders and Crexe out, and one to drive the car. There may have been an extra person to set up the explosives, but one of the others could have done it without too much trouble—probably the driller.
The important thing is, Six thought, looking at the body on the floor, that this blood belongs to one of the attackers. It can be traced.
Six scraped some of the stained crimson dust into a small plastic case and left the cell block.
Door 81-B slid closed behind him.
RUNNING BLIND
Six knocked on the door of Kyntak’s office.
“Go away, I’m busy,” came a voice from inside.
Six pushed open the door. Kyntak had his feet up on his desk and was throwing peanuts into the wastepaper basket.
“You don’t look busy,” said Six.
“No,” Kyntak admitted, “but an initial warning is usually enough to get rid of people who want to harass me with trivialities.”
“Having an office has gone to your head,” Six observed. He kicked a crumpled potato-chip packet away from his foot, and it rejoined the others in a corner. The clock on the wall said 9:15:00.
“That sounds like insubordination to me, Agent Six of Hearts,” Kyntak warned. “State your business or get out of here.”
“You heard about Methryn Crexe.”
“Yeah—I thought you were taking care of it. Need a hand?”
“I’ve given a blood sample of one of the intruders to Ace of Diamonds; she’s going to analyze it and pass it over to King of Diamonds, who’ll compare it to those in the ChaoSonic database and get the address of the suspect. When we have that, King of Hearts’ll send in a team—and I’ll be doing recon.” He paused. “But there are too many variables for my peace of mind—I’d appreciate you watching my back.”
Kyntak smiled. “Only if you’ll watch mine.”
“Deal,” Six said. “I’ll let you know when we have the address.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
“Let’s go,” said Kyntak.
“Sorry,” Jack said as he zipped up the back of Six’s combat suit, “but I won’t have much time to chat with you today.”
“That’s a shame,” Six replied flatly.
Jack was probably the most talkative person he knew—he seemed to be able to ramble for hours witho
ut caring if his victim was listening. Six tried not to be too rude to him; Jack had suffered more of his blunt coldness than anyone else at the Deck. But Six didn’t know how to apologize for years of poor social skills. So he just tried his best to keep his mouth shut. And Jack seemed capable of handling the conversation on his own.
“I’ve got seven other agents to suit up, you see,” Jack continued, picking up equipment from a nearby table. “Busy busy busy. Lucky none of you need makeovers or I’d be here all day. And time’s a factor, as I understand it. Is it true that someone managed to break out of one of the cells? I always thought it couldn’t be done!”
“So did I,” Six growled. “They had outside help. Lots of it.”
“Well, if anyone can bring in the culprits, it’s you. Good luck, Six. Here’s your radio earpiece, your PDA, Owl 5525, and your ski mask.”
Six clipped the radio and the gun onto his belt and pulled the ski mask over his head.
“Oh, and the grenades,” Jack added, picking them up from his desk. “They’re OT-78s, so they explode on impact after the pin is pulled rather than on a timer. Don’t rely on rebound, don’t squeeze them too hard, and don’t drop them once they’re armed.”
Six pocketed the four grenades.
“Ready?” Jack asked.
Six nodded. And left without a word.
“The blood recovered from the cell belonged to a man named Vidar Dehayt,” King said to the eight agents standing before him. “Our only information on him comes from his confidential ChaoSonic file. He worked in security for the Lab last year. And you all know what that means.”
They did. King was telling them that this may have something to do with the history of Six, or Kyntak. Tread carefully.
“By necessity, this is a top secret case,” King said. “Need to know, classified, etcetera. So you report to no one but the following people: me, Queen, Six, or Kyntak. Except in the event of an emergency, you are not to share details of this case with anyone outside the Hearts department, and if you’ll take my advice, you won’t discuss them with one another either. If you need assistance from another suit, contact me or Queen first. Clear?”
