by Jack Heath
Six reattached the halves of his quarterstaff and passed it to his left hand, drawing his pistol with his right. He rose into a crouch, carefully staying below the camera’s field of vision. This was his worst nightmare—outnumbered and outgunned in an enclosed space with no escape routes. He could feel the elevator slowing as it approached its destination.
It stopped. The doors slid open.
No one was standing on the other side.
Six darted out as quickly as he could, away from the camera.
He was at the end of a narrow corridor, the walls almost invisible behind racks upon racks of equipment. Helmets were closest to him, hundreds of polished black domes on wall hooks, their expressionless dark visors staring into the corridor. Beyond them were rifles; neat rows of identical Eagle OI779s nestled side by side, ready to be pulled out and used. Six touched the pad on the butt of one of them, switching on the tiny display screen on the stock. The gun was fully loaded. Eighty rounds.
Six switched off the gun and kept walking. There was a grid of spare magazines, at least a thousand resting on the shelves. Beyond that there was a pipe with belts hanging from it, each fully equipped with the weaponry Six had seen on the soldier in the apartment building: one Feather knife, one fully loaded Raptor sidearm, a string of six PGC387 grenades. But the remotes weren’t attached, he saw.
Six now knew more or less what he was looking at. When they were being sent into the field, the soldiers would be funneled through this corridor. They’d grab their weapon belts, their spare magazines, their Eagle automatics, and then throw on their helmets before piling into the elevator and heading for the surface.
Not all the equipment was here, Six noted. The soldiers would need clothes, boots, earpieces. They probably kept those near where they slept.
He was nearing the end of the corridor, and he peeked around the corner. As if reality were mimicking his thoughts, he saw three men asleep in a column of bunks, all lying flat upon their backs, their feet pointed towards him. Six watched them for a moment, checking for movement. There was none. They appeared to be fast asleep.
He edged around the corner, keeping his breaths shallow and quiet. He looked past the column of bunks and saw another. Two women and a man, fast asleep, identical posture. Another column: three men. None moving.
As Six walked forward, he saw that he was no longer in the armory. There was at least a hundred bunks, each holding a sleeping man or woman, stretching into the distance.
He had found the barracks.
Six eyed the aisle between the bunks apprehensively. He could be quiet when he wanted to be. He could sneak up on someone better than anyone else he knew. But it was one thing to slip by a guard when he or she was looking the other way, and quite another to tiptoe eighty meters past a hundred soldiers as they slept.
Nevertheless, that was what he was going to have to do. The layout to this facility seemed to be very linear—so far there had been only two doors per room. He had been forced to come this way, and even if doubling back were an option, it wouldn’t help him find Kyntak.
Six took a deep breath and started to move through the room.
None of the soldiers stirred as he passed. He assumed that most of them must be fairly deep sleepers—the room was air-conditioned to a cool fifteen degrees Celsius, and none of them had blankets—they were covered only by thin cotton undergarments. The lights were on too. The whole hall was bathed in a fluorescent bluish glow, casting sharp indigo shadows of the bunks onto the bald cement floor. But all the soldiers were faceup, and none wore blindfolds.
Six noted that almost a third of the sleeping soldiers were female. This seemed unusual to him. More than ninety-five percent of the soldiers in the City were male. There were still plenty of jobs for women in ChaoSonic security and various private armies, but they were usually strategic, administrative, or medical. Six wondered why Vanish had so many women in the infantry. He couldn’t imagine the organization caring about equal-opportunity employment.
Six was halfway across the barracks when he saw an empty bunk ahead. One of the soldiers wasn’t in bed.
Six caught the eye of the soldier as he stood up beside the bunk. He had removed his armor and was wearing the same cotton undergarments as the sleeping soldiers. His shirt was in one hand, his pants were dangling from the other.
He stared at Six in astonishment for a fraction of a second that seemed to last an eternity. Then they both moved at the same time, Six starting forward, raising his quarterstaff, and the soldier grabbing the strut of one of the bunks and swinging his legs out.
Six ducked under the flying kick and whirled back to face the soldier, quarterstaff first. The soldier blocked the blow by raising his forearm above his head and he drew his other arm in close to his body, ready to parry any punches Six threw at him.
Six swung around and kicked him behind the knee. The soldier’s leg collapsed and he slipped backward to the floor. On his way down he tugged Six’s Owl from its holster. Six saw it fall too late to catch it. It dropped into the soldier’s waiting hand.
Six slid aside swiftly as the soldier hit the floor and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet crashing into the ceiling. He fired a second shot immediately, and a puff of foam exploded into the air as it hit the side of a top-bunk mattress; Six guessed that both bullets had been intended for his abdomen. Soldiers often aimed first, then fired three shots before aiming again. This one hadn’t had much time to line up his shot, but he’d still fired two before realizing that Six had moved.
His reflexes didn’t seem as quick as those of the other troops Six had fought today—but he had been caught by surprise, and he was in his pajamas.
Six slammed his foot down on the soldier’s gun hand, pinning it to the floor. The soldier howled as one of his metacarpal bones cracked and the gun fell from his wriggling fingers.
Six quickly slapped his palm over the soldier’s mouth and drove the index finger of his other hand into the flesh behind the soldier’s ear. The soldier went limp instantly. Six lifted the man’s eyelid with his fingers. The pupil didn’t contract. He was unconscious.
Six stood up immediately and lifted his quarterstaff. There were no soldiers in the aisle between him and the armory. He turned to face the other way. No one there, either.
He frowned, heart still thumping in his chest. Was it possible that not a single person in the entire barracks had been woken up by all that scuffling and two gunshots?
He stood on tiptoes so he could see all the bunks. The soldiers were lying exactly as they had been before. No one was rubbing their eyes or sitting up. No one had even rolled over.
Six knelt beside the nearest bunk and poked the soldier there gently. No movement. He prodded him again, harder. He didn’t react at all. Six’s eyes widened as a drop of blood appeared on the soldier’s undershirt; Six rolled it back to expose his stomach. It was unmarked, but as he looked at it, a drop of blood appeared in the same spot. He looked up; a red stain was spreading across the underside of the mattress above, and blood was dripping from it onto the bunk underneath.
He stood up, and saw that the second shot the soldier had fired had not only punctured the mattress; it had clipped the thigh of the mattress’s occupant.
An occupant who was still asleep?
Six had the sudden overwhelming sense that everyone in the room was dead, that he’d been sneaking past rows of corpses rather than sleeping troops. He touched his fingers to the throat of the soldier with the wounded thigh.
Yes, there was a pulse. So what’s going on? Six thought. Who sleeps through a gunshot wound? He tore the man’s shirt into strips and started tying them around the injury. The bullet had gone straight through and had missed the femoral artery, so it was easy enough to stem the blood flow. He looked around the room. Some of the unconscious soldiers were lying with their eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Only now did Six notice that every bunk had a synthetic rubber holster clipped to its side. In each holster was
a remote. He lifted out the one closest to him and examined it. It was identical to the one he’d found at the Timeout, with the same four buttons. SYNCAL, ACCELERANT, MORPHINE, and LOCATOR ON/OFF.
Six had seen the equipment the soldiers had: guns, clothes, knives, ammunition, earpieces. Nothing that needed a remote control, certainly not one with those buttons. So why would every single soldier need one?
A piece of the puzzle resurfaced suddenly in Six’s brain. Vanish, or one of the people who had used that title, had been a nanotechnology expert. He used to be a scientist, Shuji had said. And Ace had told him that Syncal, the fluid in the tranq gun he’d been shot with, was a sedative. Enough to put most people in a coma, she’d said, but creating a refreshingly deep sleep in small doses.
Six was no nanotech expert himself, but he knew the basic principle of nanotechnology—microscopic robots, sometimes injected into the bloodstream for medical reasons. Could these robots each be given a tiny sensor and a capsule filled with chemicals? Syncal or morphine, ready to be pumped into the bloodstream when a button on a remote was pushed?
Six had never heard of it being done, but he was sure that it was possible. And it made more sense than any other explanation he could come up with. Vanish’s soldiers all had nanomachines in their bodies, controlled by the remotes they always carried. He knew that Syncal could put people in a deep enough sleep to ignore a gunshot wound, and morphine was one of the strongest known painkillers. A soldier-locator that couldn’t be removed would be invaluable to field troops, and while Six didn’t know exactly what an “accelerant” was, he was betting that it could explain the abnormally fast reflexes he’d observed. Possibly the high percentages of women, too—gender wouldn’t matter much if drugs were being used to enhance ability. The soldier Six had just fought hadn’t been expecting a fight and hadn’t had his remote within reach. He’d seemed like a normal, if well-trained, soldier.
Six thought back to the soldiers who’d been captured and taken to the Deck. They’d been unconscious much too long, and Ace found Syncal in their bloodstreams. What if the soldiers had dosed themselves up with their remotes? Or, more likely, a signal had been broadcast from here, or from a satellite, knocking them out so they couldn’t be interrogated by their captors? If Vanish had access to an orbiting transmitter or a broadcasting tower, troops could be reclaimed by switching on the locator function in their nanomachines, hitting the SYNCAL button, and sending out a rescue team to recover the sleeping bodies.
He recalled the document he’d read about ChaoSonic capturing the man they believed to be Vanish, who’d wounded himself to get to the emergency room. The writer hadn’t known how the Vanish troops had found the facility holding their leader, but now Six thought he did.
And then he thought of all the people who had been captured, released, and then co-opted into stealing ChaoSonic secrets. Now he knew how they had been kept to their word. There were nanobots in their blood. “Do as we say or you’ll fall asleep” was quite a fearsome threat, and Six figured that worse chemicals could be carried by the tiny robots. Arsenic, cyanide, peroxide—any of a dozen poisons.
Six put the remote back in the holster. This presented a problem. What if Kyntak had been injected with the nanobots? It seemed likely. A hostage with nanobots in his blood would be much easier to interrogate.
Even if Six found Kyntak and got him out without the alarm being raised, there would be nowhere to run. Kyntak would have microscopic beacons coursing through his veins, beaming his location to every monitor in the facility.
THE VICTIM
Apparently there were no surveillance cameras in the room. Kyntak couldn’t see any, and the neck clamp was loose enough to allow his head to turn and scan the whole area. He figured that Vanish had weighed the risks of putting additional equipment in this otherwise sterile room against the benefits of watching him lie on the table and decided that it was better to make the cell featureless.
All the better. Kyntak wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got off the table, but being watched would severely limit his options.
The wrist clamps were tight, but they’d been left loose enough to keep his circulation flowing. Kyntak gritted his teeth as he pulled. His theory was that if he tugged with enough force, he could dislocate the bones in his hand and make it slip through the clamp. Then he could reset the joints with his teeth and use the hand to hit the buttons that unlocked the clamps around his other joints. Then he would wait for Vanish to come in, kick the stuffing out of him, and run.
One, two, three. Pull! He drew his breath in sharply as the flesh of his hand was squeezed between the metal and his bones. He stopped before there was a risk of the cuff cutting him—this was hard enough already without having to worry that his skin would be scraped off his hand. Not to mention that if Vanish came back too early, he might notice that Kyntak was bleeding.
One, two, three. Pull! He crushed the base of his palm against the rim of the clamp, and a whimper of pain escaped his lips. His freakishly strong bones and joints withstood the pressure. He stopped once again. I’ll have some impressive bruises if I live long enough, he thought.
“Yeeaargh!” He tried to throw his body into the air, hips first—there were no restraints around his torso. He held himself up like a crooked bridge, straining against the clamps at his knees and elbows, the restraint around his neck choking him.
Thud. He landed back on the table, the impact sending a shock of pain into his coccyx. He breathed quickly and deeply, saturating his brain with oxygen to numb the pain, and flexed his aching wrist.
One, two—
The wall started rolling aside. Kyntak immediately slumped limply against the table, heart pounding. He lifted his head as the door opened, as if he had just woken up.
“We must stop meeting like this,” he said as Vanish and the red-eyed woman entered. She stood silently in the corner, gun in one hand.
Vanish approached the table. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Headache gone? Any nausea?”
“My back is a little itchy in a spot I can’t quite reach,” Kyntak said.
“Cold?” Vanish asked, ignoring him. “Thirsty?”
Kyntak was thirsty, but he doubted that saying so would get him anything to drink. “Your torture methods suck,” he said. “It’s like the water torture, but with dumb questions instead of drips.”
“I don’t want you damaged,” Vanish said. He began to pace slowly from one side of the room to the other. “Not yet.”
“You want me to win a beauty competition first?” Kyntak asked. “The kidnapping makes sense now—you’d never win one on your own.”
Vanish smiled. “No, I’m just waiting for Agent Six to get here.”
Kyntak’s heart thumped faster, and he was suddenly certain Vanish could hear it. He kept his voice level. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” Vanish said. “Your twin brother? Or should I say triplet brother—Sevadonn may be dead now, but he was part of Project Falcon too.”
“Now I am thoroughly confused,” Kyntak said. “The Deck didn’t pay up, so you assume I’m not the real deal?”
“You know what the secret to a good plan is, Kyntak?” Vanish pierced him with a cheery grey gaze. “Fluidity. Let’s say I want to capture the remaining two Project Falcon kids. I stage a prison break as bait, and leave a trail to an empty apartment building by planting the blood of one of the residents I’ve disposed of. So far, so good. But then what happens?”
He laughed. The noise bounced off the walls, hitting Kyntak from all sides. “They both show up! Not just the one from the Deck, but the freelancer too! And, of course, I’ve given my troops orders to take the agent with the superhuman abilities, but I’ve never imagined two would show up and confuse them. After all, when every scientist wants you dissected and every vigilante wants you dead, you don’t expose more than you have to, right? Sending two Falcons to a job that only requires one is stupid, correct?”
Kyntak tried one last time. “You
got me,” he said, slipping a little sarcasm into his tone. “I’m not Agent Six of Hearts, I’m just an impersonator. Guess you’re going to have to let me go now, huh?”
Vanish shook his head. “I’ve known who you are since you first spoke to me,” he said. “I’ve studied both of you. The real Agent Six would have pretended to be another Deck agent, a generic. A regular human being. But not you. ‘My reputation precedes me?’ you said. Because secretly, and I find this fascinating, you were glad when I mistook you for him. He’s becoming a big name in the criminal underworld, and you’re jealous. And the fact that Six sees it as a liability, that he wishes he could remain anonymous, that’s conducive to celebrity, and that just makes it worse.”
“Yeah,” Kyntak said. “I’ve been knocked out, abducted, clamped to a table, drained of my blood, bored to death by this empty room and by your ranting. But it’s really hard to concentrate on all that when I’m so busy wishing I was my brother.”
“But when the two of you showed up,” Vanish said, ignoring him once more, “did my plan collapse? Of course not, because it was fluid. I was originally expecting to take one and get the other when he came to the rescue, and Six’s surprise appearance didn’t stop me. I sent the ransom demand as planned and told my troops to take Six alive if they could. The fact that Six showed up to collect you instead of you showing up to collect him didn’t change a thing.”
“Yeah, it did,” Kyntak said. “You obviously didn’t catch him.”
Vanish’s grin broadened. “You’re right. He’s evaded my capture twice. He must be the competent one. He brought a friend with him who killed a few of my troops. But did this mess up my plan? No. Because it’s fluid.”
He leaned down close to Kyntak. “Six has been headed our way for the better part of an hour. He’s in this facility right now, looking for you. I didn’t need to bring the trap to him—he came to it. And as soon as he’s on the floor…” Vanish’s white teeth showed as he smiled. “See? Both the Project Falcon kids are mine.”
