Uprising

by David Ryker

  “I guess I have to be.” He rose from the chair, unsteadily at first, but once he was on his feet he didn’t need any assistance. Quinn led him to the door, which opened automatically into the corridor.

  “This Oleg,” said King. “He’s a bad guy, I take it.”

  Everybody’s a bad guy these days, Quinn thought bitterly. Some are just worse than others.

  “Yessir, but he’s not that tough. If we can get past him with you, we’re good.” That was a flat-out lie, but what was he supposed to say? As far as the poor guy knew, he’d just been kidnapped and then set free by the person he thought had kidnapped him.

  They followed Bishop down the corridor until they reached a hallway that branched off into a number of rooms. The first, directly to their left, appeared to be a vast living room with a wall of windows on the east side. Bishop pointed to a door set into the far wall, about thirty meters away.

  “That’s our elevator,” he breathed. “Just gotta make it there.”

  Quinn nodded and took a handful of steps, scanning the room. There were cameras in every corner, but they should still be in the maintenance cycle. Once they were back down in the party, of course, they could disappear into the crowd. All they had to do was get across this room.

  “Clear,” Bishop hissed from his position at 10 o’clock.

  “Clear,” Han replied from their six.

  Quinn continued guiding King by the shoulder, past the window wall that looked out on the greasy lights of a darkened Moscow, his eyes never leaving the door at the end of their walk. It got closer, and with each step, he felt his hope growing that they were only minutes from getting out of here and accomplishing the first part of their mission.

  Bishop held up a fist to halt them as they reached the door. There was a panel set in the wall, and Quinn was encouraged not to see a palm scanner. It was possible that there was other tech that Oleg used to keep people out of his elevator, but it was also possible that it automatically opened for anyone coming into it from this spot, since it was a living room and hence might be host to special guests at certain times.

  He took a step forward and the light over the door turned green. The panel began to slide open, and Quinn allowed himself to hope that they just might get out of this.

  Of course, that wasn’t the case. When the door was fully open, his stomach dropped as he saw Oleg standing in the elevator with Ulysses by his side. Both were sporting wide grins, and Ulysses was levelling an antique pistol directly at Quinn’s belly.

  Shit. Quinn raised his hands and the others followed suit. They backed away from the door to allow Oleg and Ulysses into the suite. A pair of large, chalk-skinned men in tight gray bodysuits joined them via the entrance from the hallway.

  “I take it this wasn’t part of the plan,” said King.

  Oleg and Ulysses stepped forward while the two men from the doorway closed in from the back, essentially trapping them in place. Their only route of exit would be the window wall, and even if they could get through it, they were some two hundred stories up.

  “Nice try,” Oleg said amiably. “I’ll give you credit, you got balls. And I don’t know what you did with my Yandare bodyguards, but they’ve disappeared. That alone is impressive.”

  “So just let us go and everything will be great,” said Quinn, smiling back.

  “Nah, I’m afraid Mr. King here is a little too valuable to just let him walk out of here with you. And you, well, like I said, you cost me two Yandares, so that’s coming out of your asses. Do you have any idea how hard they are to come by?”

  “Let’s make a deal,” said King. “I’ll stay here on the condition that you let the others go. I know you need me alive for leverage, though I can’t for the life of me figure out the details.”

  Oleg nodded, and Quinn thought the man looked genuinely touched.

  “That’s very noble of you,” said Oleg. “Stupid, but noble. We don’t see a lot of that here in Moscow. Unfortunately, I need you in the U.S.”

  Quinn was surprised by the revelation, and he seized on the possibility that it might be a way out.

  “Then let us get him home,” he said. “We don’t have a problem keeping him away from Zero. Hell, I’d prefer it.”

  “Wait, who’s Zero?” asked King.

  “Somebody you don’t want to know.” Oleg shook his head. “Sorry, I’ve already made a deal with your copper-skinned friend here. You folks are extra baggage.”

  Ulysses grinned stupidly and waved with the pistol.

  “So you couldn’t just work with us?” Quinn said bitterly. “You had to go on your own?”

  “You was about to get killed,” Ulysses pointed out. “Ah din’t want none o’ that action, so I took mah shot. Looks like it paid off, too.”

  “So what’s your plan?” asked Bishop. “Do you really think you can trust Ulysses here?”

  “He’s the one who came up with it,” said Oleg. “He already messaged your colleagues in that magic ship that dropped you off here. Told them you all were dead and that the mission is to take Mr. King here straight back to San Antonio, seeing as how they don’t have to worry about getting out of the city. I’ve taken care of that.”

  “How are you going to explain that to them?” asked Han.

  “Tell ‘em Alina figgered sump’n out.” Ulysses shrugged. “Shouldn’t be hard; Maggott’s dumber’n a sack o’ hammers, an’ yer men prob’ly don’t give a shit either way. I never got the sense y’all inspired loyalty the way Captain Crewcut here does.”

  “You bastard,” Quinn growled. “If all you wanted was money, we could have got that for you!”

  “Money’s only part o’ this,” Ulysses said, frowning. “I wanted respect, dude. You fuckin’ Marines are all war buddies, all fer one an’ one fer all. But ah’ve always been an outsider with y’all, no matter how many time ah save yer sorry asses.”

  “I offered the gentleman what he couldn’t get from you,” Oleg said simply. “It’s how I got to where I am today.” He glanced at his wristband. “Tick tock, my friend. Tempus fugit and all that.”

  Ulysses blinked. “Ah don’t git what yer sayin.’”

  “Kill them.” Oleg pointed at the antique pistol in his hands. “I didn’t give you that for show. That’s a Colt M1911 .45 auto. Belonged to my maternal great-grandfather during the war in Afghanistan. I want you to use it on them.”

  Quinn looked for a sign of hesitation but didn’t see any. Ulysses walked over to him and placed the muzzle of the ancient weapon against his temple. His mind went blank even as his guts clenched: he was out of ideas. He could try to fight, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.

  “See y’all on t’other side, Quinn.”

  The Colt’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Quinn’s heart skipped a beat at the sound, and he was pretty sure he might have let go of a tiny bit of urine.

  “Whut?” Ulysses looked at Oleg. “This thang work?”

  “It does, but it’s not loaded,” said Oleg. “I was just giving you a little loyalty test. You passed, obviously.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Ulysses frowned. “Can ah have a loaded one now?”

  Oleg reached into the small of his back and retrieved a smaller automatic pistol which he handed to his new henchman. Ulysses gripped it with obvious pleasure.

  “Now yer talkin!”

  Quinn used the reprieve to move into a position closer to Ulysses. He would wait for the opportunity to rush him and fight for the weapon; at least he knew King would be safe regardless.

  Suddenly even that longshot option was taken away from him as Oleg waved to the men behind them.

  “Boris, Gleb—kill these three, will you?”

  “Whoa, hold on a sec,” said Ulysses. “Now that ah got the real thing, I was hopin’ t’take it fer a test drive.”

  Quinn stared, unbelieving, as Oleg grinned.

  “You are a cold one, aren’t you?” Oleg raised a hand. “Be my guest.”

  Ulysses looked Quinn in the eye. �
�Ah’m gonna enjoy this.”

  Quinn took a sharp breath, ready to make a desperate roll to the side to avoid the bullet, but it was too late. A pair of shots exploded in the room before he could move, and a shriek rang out.

  It was Oleg. Quinn watched dumbly as he dropped to his side on the floor, clutching the bloody bullet holes in both his knees.

  “Rat bastard!” he grunted.

  Quinn barely had time to register what had happened before Ulysses was charging at them in a tackle formation. He drove into King, knocking him to the floor just as shots began to fly from behind them—Boris and Gleb had apparently found their own weapons and were using them—which prompted Quinn to do a sweep of his own, knocking Bishop and Han off their feet and out of the line of fire as well.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Quinn hollered at Ulysses.

  “Great plan!” Bishop covered his head. “You delayed our execution by a few seconds!”

  Ulysses looked at the two and shook his head. Meanwhile, Quinn saw Han’s eyes widen at whatever she saw in the window wall behind the rest of them.

  “What the hell is that?” she breathed.

  “Ye o’ little faith, I tell ya,” said Ulysses. “It hurts me, it really does.”

  An instant later, the window wall was shattered by a blast of pure force that sent everything in the room flying, including them.

  23

  Sloane?

  Gloom?

  Chelsea?

  Ben?

  Anyone?

  Dev Schuster floated in the void, unable to perceive anything other than the great white emptiness that somehow filled the universe. This wasn’t the astral plane. It was nothing. It was the complete lack of anything, except, apparently, his own consciousness. He remembered the window shattering and the purple-eyed woman, he remembered Sloane chasing her and then disappearing.

  Now nothing. Emptiness.

  He tried to imagine something, but nothing appeared. As hard as he worked to manifest something, anything, all that came to him was white emptiness. Not even white, but a complete lack of everything, including colors. It was emptiness, vast and complete.

  Where were the others? Had they been sent here somehow as well? Could he contact them? He tried to reach out, but there was nothing. No response, no confirmation that he was even doing anything other than simply floating in the void.

  It occurred to him after an infinite amount of time had passed that there actually was something in the void with him, but now that he realized it, he immediately wished it wasn’t there.

  It was his own despair.

  Another geological era seemed to pass before he finally heard something. Heard something? There was no sound here, how could he be hearing something? He didn’t even recognize what it was, just an odd vibration of sorts.

  A vibration that was getting stronger and louder, even though Schuster had no sensory abilities to perceive either of those sensations. It grew and expanded and seemed to surround him, until the vibrations felt like they were pressing in on him, crushing him into a dense point, a singularity.

  “Dev.”

  It sounded as if a voice had spoken, but the voice was the sound of a million bees buzzing in a chorus. It rose in strength and volume, seeming to double upon itself over and over an over again.

  “DEV.”

  “Sloane?” Schuster reached out again into the void, only this time, he felt another presence.

  “DDDDDEEEEEVVVVV.” The buzzing was turning into a screech, a squawk that someone a hundred years earlier might have recognized as the sound of an analog modem connecting to the early incarnation of the network, a nerve-splitting rasp that seemed to eat right to the heart of one’s brain.

  “Sloane, is that you? What the hell is happening? Where are you? Where am I?”

  “FFFIIRRRRRSST TIIIIIIIMMMEE YOOOUUUU….”

  “Just tell me what you see!”

  At that instant the universe suddenly flipped from white to black, like a bright light being turned off in a room. But Schuster could see stars—except they weren’t white, they were green. And they were moving, shifting and coalescing into recognizable patterns, first in two dimensions on a flat plane and then into three, so that he was surrounded by a cube of patterns, of data. After several more generations, globs of green data started to come together in a form that eventually began to resemble a human figure.

  “Sloane?” Schuster asked the void. “Is that you?”

  “YYEEZZZ.”

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  The buzzing became incoherent and grew in volume again before finally slowing and lowering and streamlining into something that Schuster could decipher.

  “Apparently I’ve taken control of Dr. Copeland’s artificial intelligence,” it said.

  “What? You mean… we’re in the AI?”

  “I believe so.”

  “How do we get out? What about the others?”

  “They are not here.”

  Schuster felt a wave of panic. “Where are they?”

  “In their own minds. They were returned automatically when I terminated the program.”

  “And took me along for the ride?”

  “My apologies. I believe I can fix that.”

  “How?”

  The universe winked out of existence, and the sudden heaviness of his physical body felt like a block of granite in the chair where he was sitting. Returning to the real world was never easy, but this transition was different. It felt more… physical, somehow. He turned his head slowly, with great effort, to his left and saw Chelsea’s eyes flutter open. A look to his right showed Gloom and Ben doing the same.

  He took a few deep breaths and managed to sit up in his chair. They were all seated in reclining loungers that were no automatically whirring forward to set them upright.

  “Where…?” Chelsea breathed. “What…”

  Schuster stood and took a tentative step; the sensation of heaviness was quickly fading and he managed to keep his balance. He made his way slowly to Chelsea and looked into her bleary eyes.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said, his voice like sandpaper. “Do you know my name?”

  “Dev,” she whispered. “You’re… you’re my friend.”

  Schuster touched his nose and grinned. “Right the first time. How do you feel?”

  “Tired.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as Gloom and Ben joined them.

  “What the fuck was that?” asked Gloom, her own eyes swimming. “One minute that crazy bitch is running into the window, the next we’re in here.”

  “Sloane got us out.”

  “Sloane?” Ben goggled. “Seriously? Wow. I owe my life to someone I’ve never even met. Someone I can’t actually ever meet.”

  Schuster scanned the room and was shocked to see Dr. Copeland still seated in one of the chairs. It quickly passed as he realized he should have known she was sharing a physical space with the rest of them. A large piece of equipment sitting in the center of the room, acting as a hub for the chairs that circled it. It had to be the control unit that Sloane had talked about.

  He reached out with his mind, but there was no response from Sloane. It was a strangely empty feeling, even though Sloane had never truly occupied much of his actual consciousness. He was more of a lodger, sharing the house and the amenities, but for the most part sticking to his own room until asked to come out.

  “I think he’s in there,” Schuster said, pointing to the hub.

  “Whoa,” said Gloom. “That’s—whoa.”

  “Yeah. Whoa is right.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” said Chelsea. “What happened to us? To me? What are you guys even doing here?”

  Schuster took her hand and gave it a squeeze. It was cold and clammy in his, but she managed to squeeze back.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “And we don’t have all the answers. But I’ll do my best.”

  Before he could even begin, Dr. Copeland sat straig
ht up in her chair, violet eyes snapping open, and let out a fierce scream.

  24

  Quinn looked up to see the cargo bay door of a Raft hovering in the air outside the shattered window wall. Beneath them, he see and hear the identical window wall on the floor below now breaking just as theirs had.

  “Let’s go!” Ulysses barked, grabbing King by the arm and rushing for the window. The way was level with the floor but King still almost tripped climbing into the ship. Quinn saw Maggott’s massive form appear in the cargo hold and haul King the rest of the way in.

  “You three waiting for an engraved invitation?” yelled Thorson Shane, motioning for them to get their asses in gear. “Come on!”

  Quinn pushed Bishop and Han ahead of him before taking one last look around. Boris and Gleb were still recovering from the shock wave that hit the room, and Oleg was lying on the floor, his face white with shock. Quinn made a mental note to avoid contact with the man for the rest of his life, unless he wanted to be killed in some spectacularly imaginative way as he followed his companions on board.

  “He’s in!” Shane shouted as Quinn crossed the threshold. The Raft began to rise as the cargo door did the same, until it finally sealed shut. Quinn saw the view outside the porthole turn white, which indicated that the cloaking device had been activated, likely by Gomez in the cockpit.

  “Mr. King,” Maggott said with a wide grin. “Sgt. Maggott, sir, good t’see ye again.”

  “Same here, Sergeant,” said King. “Though it’s been longer for you all than it has for me.”

  Quinn turned to Ulysses. “Mind telling me what all that was about?”

  “I saved yer stupid asses,” he said simply. “Whut else is there to tell?”

  “You put a pistol to my head and fired!”

  “For fuck’s sake, Quinn, you Marines ain’t the only ones know the difference ‘tween a loaded weapon and an empty one.”

  “You didn’t have to be so goddamn convincing,” Bishop said, his voice shaky. He wrapped an arm around Ulysses’ neck. “Not that I’m ungrateful, I’m just saying.”