High T saw, over Cee’s shoulder, that the other agents were all watching the power struggle intently. He regained his composure, but the anger didn’t leave his eyes.
“Bring them straight to me,” he said in a quiet, commanding tone. Not waiting for Cee’s reply, High T strode to the elevators and slipped his communicator out of his pocket. He began to dial.
* * *
As he studied the surrounding MiB agents from behind the fountain in Marrakech, H’s communicator bleeped. High T. He answered, and a holographic image of High T appeared.
“Sir—” H began.
“H, listen to me,” High T interrupted. “This isn’t my operation. Get out of there. Get safe, then report.”
* * *
High T, communicator in hand, stood at his office window, watching the agents and aliens below him. He saw Cee, flanked by a cadre of agents, walking swiftly across the main floor, obviously giving orders as he went. The agents scattered to perform their assigned tasks, and Cee paused, almost as if he sensed he was being watched. Cee turned and looked up at High T. The two men locked eyes.
“Em may be right,” High T said. “There could be a mole in Men in Black.”
20
T’s hologram dissolved, and H put away his communicator, shaken. H led them through the periphery of the medina, keeping large clusters of people between them and the ever-tightening net of agents. H saw an agent make them. He cursed under his breath and led Em quickly toward a jam of people in a narrow street of the medina.
“Take this,” he said, handing her the puzzle box. “They’ll assume I have it.” Em slid the box back into her jacket pocket. “Meet you in the main square in twenty.”
Em took in the milling crowd, and her fellow agents—the people she’d spent a lifetime trying to find—closing in on her. “Not how I pictured my first week,” she said. A ghost of a smile passed between them, and then they split, headed in opposite directions.
H moved deeper into the marketplace, closer to his pursuers. A group of MiB agents spotted him, just as he had meant them to.
“We’re wearing the same thing,” H called out to the agents. “What are the odds?” He bolted into the crowd, running like hell. The agents gave chase, and he could hear them calling out to more of their colleagues to close in on the renegade. H could see the other agents shoving their way through the crowd toward him. Come and get me, boys, H thought as he ran as fast as he could, the squad of MiB agents hot on his trail.
* * *
Em saw the agents leave their positions to triangulate on H and used the momentary opening to go with the crowd out of the marketplace. She ran until she was clear of the market, on a side street, and then looked back. No agents were chasing her. Em began to walk, keeping pace with the flow of pedestrian traffic and trying to blend in.
A light flickered near her, and she stopped suddenly, turned, and stared upwards. She saw no one on the roofs. Perhaps it was just a flickering light, and nothing more. She resumed her cautious walk, headed toward the rendezvous.
Above her, on the rooftops, the Dyad twins moved silently, shadowing Em’s every move.
* * *
H ran, a pack of agents less than a block behind him. He knew they wouldn’t risk using their sidearms in public unless he forced their hand—not against a fellow agent, at least. H banked as he saw a swarm of MiB drones closing on his position, ducking into a maze of streets so ancient, narrow, and twisting that aerial recon or even GPS wouldn’t be much use. He’d had to use the same trick years ago when he was being chased in Marrakech by a swarm of Alcallian assassin bots.
His foot pursuers would have him back in sight in a few seconds. He saw his goal, Nasr’s motorbike repair shop, and ducked quickly inside. A few seconds later, the MiB agents raced past the garage, talking into their coms as they tried to get some idea of H’s location from their blinded air support.
H, catching his breath, turned to the surprised, beardless Nasr, who had been slurping a bowl of soup by a desk covered in greasy engine parts.
“Nasr, I need to borrow your bike! Right now!”
“As long as ‘borrow’ doesn’t mean ‘steal.’” The alien mechanic went over to the tuk-tuk. Nasr quickly and efficiently removed the wood and plastic camouflage from around the bike, revealing what the delivery cycle really was. H smiled. It was a big, muscly, alien hover-bike, just the sort he needed.
“Bassam!” Nasr bellowed as he disappeared into the other room of the garage, while H climbed on the hover-bike and scanned the controls. Nasr returned with a full water canteen, which he handed to H.
“You’ll need this out there,” the mechanic said. “It’s hot.”
H took the canteen and put it in one of the bike’s storage boxes. He nodded to the controls as he flipped the main power on and the hover-bike growled to life. “Seems pretty straightforward.”
“Just like riding a bike,” Nasr offered.
H hit the throttle, and the hover-bike roared to life, smashing through the closed garage door and careening into the wall of another building.
“This is actually not like riding a bike at all.” He turned the handlebars hard, too hard, and hit a third wall on another building. He flew off and crashed into the street, face down, and the bike stopped, bobbing in the air next to him.
H groaned through a mouthful of pavement and climbed to his feet. A small crowd of locals and tourists had gathered around him and the strange, levitating, wheel-less motorcycle. H sighed and pulled out his neuralyzer.
* * *
The twins moved across the rooftops of Marrakech like parkour runners. They cleared the gap between two buildings and then dropped off the edge of the roof of the next building, landing on a ledge halfway down the wall. They pushed off the ledge backward and used their backs and palms to slide the rest of the way down the opposite wall, dropping ten feet in front of Em as she reached a four-way intersection of streets. Em froze. She knew, had seen, what the Dyads could do. Her Series-4 De-Atomizer sidearm wouldn’t even slow them down.
A donkey cart, loaded with wares and led by an old, half-blind merchant, creaked across the street, blocking the twins from Em for a few seconds. When the cart passed, Em had vanished. The twins looked at each other, speaking without talking, and then split up to search the surrounding streets.
Em ran as fast as she could. She turned from street to street, ashamed to admit she was letting panic guide her path. She kept looking over her shoulder, expecting to see the twins, invulnerable, relentless, remorseless, on her heels. But they weren’t. She turned onto an alleyway partially covered by a wooden roof. The shadows were deeper here, and Em felt a terrible sense of isolation and loneliness fill her. She tried to be cool, to keep her mind on the business at hand, but here, in this dark alleyway, she could die and no one would know, would really care. She was cut off from her partner and on the run from the very organization she had wanted to be part of her whole life. You don’t trust anyone, Vungus had said, and he had been right. This was the downside to living the way she had. It was a two-edged sword. If you don’t trust anyone, there’s never anyone really close to you.
An electric streetlight in the dim alley flickered and then faded to black. She turned to retrace her steps and found a wall was in front of her, blocking her way. The wall’s composition was odd, as if it were made out of the clay and tile of the buildings that made up the walls of the alleyway, but it was irregular, rippling, almost breathing. She remembered what the twins had done to the London street. Phase transition.
She spun around again, but one of the twins stood before her, his dark eyes locked on her, blocking any chance of escape. Em backed away as he came closer. Draw your gun! Shoot him! Fight! Use the comm; call for help! All her reason was choking on fear as the lone Dyad stepped closer. Her back brushed the dead-end wall that had materialized in her path. An arm of clay and tile grew out of the wall and grabbed her. Em gasped and struggled to free herself but to no avail.
A fireba
ll of energy struck the arm growing out the wall, and it chipped and cracked, releasing Em long enough for her to move away from the wall. The other Dyad twin emerged from the wall, rubbing his arm but seemingly otherwise unaffected by the blast.
The pawn, peeking out of Em’s shirt pocket, fired a second shot with his wrist blaster at the twin from the wall. “Not this time! Not this queen!” the little soldier shouted as his blaster howled and struck the twin. “Not this queen!” The injured twin seemed barely to notice the blast striking him. His brother, who was blocking Em from retreating down the alley, ripped part of an iron window grate off and transformed it into a nasty-looking, barbed, spear-like weapon.
The first twin raised the spear and stepped closer to Em and the pawn. Em’s hand tightened on the puzzle box in her pocket.
The second twin moved menacingly toward Em, his skin still smoking from the pawn’s blasts.
The twins closed on Em, and she was certain she was going to die. She pushed her fear away and reached for her pistol under her jacket. She might have failed in her mission, but these two Hive goons were going to know they had fought an MiB agent to her dying breath.
There was an explosion of sound and clay tiles, and the Dyads’ wall disintegrated, debris phasing through the second twin. H appeared on a roaring hover-bike flying through the fiery cloud, his smoking De-Atomizer in hand. The second twin had stabilized his form from the explosion just in time for H to run him over with the bike. The twin was smashed by the impact and then set on fire by the powerful exhaust of the bike as it passed him. H swerved the bike ninety degrees in the tight alley and stopped next to Em. “Jump on!” he shouted.
“Took you long enough,” Em said as she climbed on.
“Had to learn how to drive it.”
The first twin was coming toward them, dragging a living wall of matter behind him that consumed stone and clay, a tuk-tuk, everything in its path, hemming them in. A glance over his shoulder showed H that the second twin had rematerialized almost immediately. The scorching damage the fire and impact had caused were gone. He looked pissed. Like his brother, he raised a living wall, sweeping it toward the trapped agents.
There was nowhere to go—the Dyads still blocked them in, one on either side, and H no longer had the element of surprise. In unison, the twins brought their walls together; the street around the agents grew smaller and smaller as H hesitated. The second twin’s wall caught a motorbike in its path; the twin grabbed a part of it before it vanished, and the metal morphed into a sharp, cruel-looking weapon.
H’s eyes were on the wall ahead of them, and a high window with a closed metal shutter covering it.
H watched the ground seethe under the manipulations of the twins on either side of them. The twins stood, their faces lit by the strange energies they had infused into the alley floor. The walls of energy they had summoned were closing in, and he didn’t want to be around when they met. H jammed the throttle and the bike bucked and roared, the engine diagnostics jumped into the red, warning that the hover-bike was at maximum acceleration; the engines were pegged.
“Better hold on!” H shouted over the snarling engines. The hover-bike shot straight at the alley wall at maximum speed. H leaned back and jerked up on the handlebars with all his might. The bike reared up into a wheelie and then caught on the alley wall, rocketing up the vertical surface at a blurring speed.
The twins flipped, sending massive waves of molten stone at the spot where the bike had been only a second before. The deadly masses splashed into each other and rained down as the twins watched the hover-bike carrying the agents clear the roof, launched out of the medina.
At the zenith of the climb, all three passengers on the bike felt gravity and time abandon them. H hung onto the handlebars for dear life; Em, behind him, had flown free but was still above the bike’s seat. Pawny was hurtling away from Em, his tiny mouth opened wide in a scream. Em grabbed H’s belt, reaching out, straining, and managed to grab the tiny warrior, cupping him in her hand as the bike began to descend and gravity reclaimed them, hard.
The hover-bike hit a wooden canopy on the way down. H steadied the bike as it hit and shot off horizontally along the platform, jumping when the platform ended. H brought the bike down; its gravity suspension field dipped low but held as the bike landed hard on a busy market street several streets over from the alleyway. H looked back at his passengers. Em, cradling the visibly shaken Pawny, was gasping to recover the air that had been sucked from her lungs.
“I can’t believe that worked,” H said.
“H…” Em looked at all the startled and confused faces of the civilians on the street who had watched their descent on the alien hover-bike.
“Glasses,” H said pulling out his neuralyzer. He spoke to the crowd. “If you would all please look—”
Em plucked the neuralyzer from his hand and slipped on her own sunglasses. “Just drive.”
H gunned the engine and they shot off down the street. Turning back, Em pressed the button, and there was a flash of light—the bystanders in their wake had been neuralyzed. It wasn’t quite how she’d imagined first using a neuralyzer, that was for sure.
H tried to get his bearings, looking for a gate out of the city, and feeling rather pleased with his skills on the hover-bike, when the empty street ahead of him was blocked by the sudden appearance of an MiB sedan. It screeched to a halt directly in front of them. H didn’t think, only reacted, turning sharply left onto another street. Just as he righted the bike, another MiB car roared into view, moving to block the whole street.
H leaned in low and hard, nearly clipping the hood of the car. He barely made an extremely tight turn into what appeared to be a courtyard of reflection pools. A few tourists stood near the fringes, taking pictures with their phones. Beyond the courtyard, H saw the open roads and distant dunes of the Sahara, past the walls of the city. He grinned back at Em. The grin dropped when he saw another MiB Suburban, racing down the street behind them.
H revved the hover-bike and began to race over the pools, water flying in their wake, splashing the tourists. As they neared the portal, two more MiB vehicles roared into view on the other side, blocking the route to freedom. H hit the brakes, and the bike hung, unmoving, over the pools. Agents in tactical gear swarmed from the vehicles in front of and behind them, aiming their guns at the bike and its passengers. More Men in Black agents appeared on a narrow walkway on the walls of the courtyard, aiming down at them. They were joined by a swarm of MiB drones, hovering and flitting about the sky above. They were trapped.
“That’s some escape plan, Blondie.” Pawny stared at all the guns pointing at them.
Options sifted through H’s mind; every one of them ended up with all of them dead or captured. He felt bad for Em, she was already a better agent than most he could remember. She didn’t deserve this ending, this soon.
He scanned the hover-bike’s console, seeking desperately for some hidden epiphany there. He didn’t find one, but he did see something that set off his “what the hell” reaction. Close enough. He looked back at Em. “What do you think? Push the red button?”
“No way,” Em said, peering over H’s shoulder at the big, shiny red button on the top of the console. “You never push the red button. Everybody knows that.”
H pivoted the bike, its massive repulsion vents still roaring. The MiB agents’ guns tracked the slight movement.
“I think it’s the hyperdrive,” H said, nodding to the red button, ignoring the agents surrounding them. It took a lot for an MiB agent to shoot down one of their own, after all. He gunned the engines and shot straight toward the archway and the wall of guns.
“No, it isn’t.” Em shook her head, her hair fluttering behind her. “Hyperdrive is blue.”
“Sometimes you have to trust your gut.” H put his hand on the red button.
“My gut!” Em shouted. “Not yours!”
H pushed the red button. MiB agents flew everywhere as the hover-bike and its passengers vanis
hed in a flash of brilliant light and a loud, earth-shaking whomp.
21
Em groaned and raised her head. All she saw in every direction was desert. She struggled to her feet and took in the scene around her. H was pulling himself up to a sitting position, brushing sand off his jacket. About twenty yards away, the mangled remains of the hover-bike jutted out of the side of a dune.
“Told you. Hyperdrive. Trust your gut,” H said, standing.
“Yeah, yeah.” Em got to her feet and turned her pants pockets out to empty the flood of sand.
Pawny’s tiny green head popped up out of the sand between the two agents. “That was nuts!” he shouted, like a kid after his first time on a roller coaster. “We gotta do that again!” He saw the less-than-enthusiastic looks on his companions’ faces. “What? I’ve lived my whole life on a chessboard. Anything new is good.”
“Shhhh.” Em heard a faint snick-snick sound and then a strange humming, like a machine powering up. The sounds were emanating from the puzzle box, which lay a few feet away on the ground. It had fallen from her pocket in the hyperjump, and the tiles had shifted about in the crash, aligning themselves. It was humming, vibrating itself and the sand around it, as if it was desperate to pop open. She walked over to it, knelt, and carefully picked it up.
Pawny jumped up on the handlebars of the hover-bike to get a better view. “That looks pretty lethal.”
Burning with curiosity, Em examined the pattern on the box, memorizing it so she could close it or open it again if needed. She slid the final tile into place, and with a click, the box began to expand in her hands, folding, shifting, and finally revealing a large, ominous-looking alien device, almost like a free-standing control panel. The device was as light as the box had been, so Em could hold it as if it were weightless.
At the heart of the device was a large sphere: a swirling maelstrom of light and darkness; a gasping, hungry maw that spun slowly, like some terrible cosmic predator, waiting patiently to be freed, to devour and destroy. The two agents stared at it. Em was mesmerized by the phenomenon inside the globe, the flaring light and deep shadow playing across her features.
Men in Black International Page 11
