Project Phoenix

by D. C. Fergerson

  The room used dim, orange lighting to lend some sophistication. Earth tones and cherrywood floors made the whole place feel dark and intimate. In the dim light, the blood on the walls was the first thing Cora noticed. It was everywhere. She blinked, her brain unable to process what she was seeing. A woman in a white dress sprawled out on the floor nearest to her, the position of her lifeless body indicating that she crawled for the door, likely due to the bullet wound at her back. The entry wound in the back of her head put a stop to that. Her blonde hair stained in the pool of crimson on the wooden floor.

  The smell of carbon hit her. Steaks burned to bricks in the kitchen. The bar across the room was partially obscured by smoke coming from the door behind it. Four people rested their cheeks on the bar, fingers laced behind their head. One crumpled body laid in a ball at their feet. A man and a woman at a table on her right were in the same position. Four people in the corner. Three more in chefs uniforms at the back of the room. Cora swung her head left, her jaw hanging open and quivering, struggling to comprehend it all.

  The left side stepped up to an elevated section. Only one table there seated customers, a horseshoe-shaped booth seat. Three men laid on the table, while a woman and a man rested on the floor. The woman had shoulder-length, jet-black hair and a black dress.

  “No,” Cora said, tears welling in her eyes. She ran for the seat. The woman laid on her side. Cora knelt down and rolled her over. Dark red blood sprayed the caramel skin of her forearm. There wasn’t enough of the woman’s face left to identify who she was. Cora gasped and wailed, her cry of pain mixed with horror. She jumped back and landed on her rear a few feet away, choking back the bile rising in her throat.

  The unbearable silence only made her crying bounce off the walls and come back to her like a drill bit to her temple. Across from the woman, Drake laid on the ground, staring at her with dead eyes. His hands clutched to his stomach, blood seeping between his fingers. Cora’s hand clasped over her mouth. She shut her eyes as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Putting the barrel of her gun to the floor, she propped herself back to her feet. Cora stepped forward and examined the table. Doctor Nielsen on the right, a man she recognized from the photograph as Doctor Toller, and between them her mentor.

  “Richard, no,” Cora moaned, her anguish turning to sobs.

  A bullet had struck the side of his head. He was gone before he came to rest on the table. Cora’s hands shook uncontrollably, the metal rattle of her Predator competing with the sound of her cries. She surveyed the room. Twenty-two people were dead.

  Shaking her head, Cora tried to regain some composure. A massacre like this had to have motive. Cora stepped over Giovanna’s body to kneel beside Drake. She looked at the floor beside him, then under the table. His rig was gone. His wrist computer was taken, too. Drake’s wound was to the stomach, but it didn’t make sense that he was dead. A wound like his wasn’t immediately fatal. She examined his body, looking for other gunshot wounds, but there weren’t any. Out of everyone she’d seen, Drake was the only one that should still be alive. She felt for a pulse. There was nothing.

  As Cora pulled her fingers from his neck, she saw behind Drake’s ear. There was his data jack for plugging his consciousness into NeuralNet. She pushed on his shoulder, rolling him to his other side. Behind his right ear, a scar from the back of his head to behind his ear marked the incision for a wet drive.

  Cora knew little about wet drives, other than the abomination of biotech that they were. A favorite cybernetic upgrade of digital couriers and hackers, the device fused with the human brain to carry, store, and transmit data.

  A thin, black slot for a Micro Card ran vertical with Drake’s ear. The pulse of a barely noticeable red LED light beside it drew her attention. She pressed her finger to it, and a Micro Card popped out of the slot, startling her. She looked around the room before taking it out and putting it in her pocket.

  Mumbles. Cora dashed around the booth for cover and listened.

  “...calling in cleaners?”

  The voice came from ahead and below. Two men’s heads peeked from a staircase behind the bar.

  “A cleaner? Are you fucking kidding me? Look around,” a blonde man with a crew cut said. “Who’s gonna hide all this?”

  The men emerged from the hidden staircase, wearing full riot armor. Their clothes were all black. Their accents said American, but the outfits put them with Vulkan Group, a local private military corporation. Soldiers like these were cheaper, asked fewer questions, and had a much looser code of ethics than global PMC’s like Bauer Securities. At the end of the day, though, they were still veteran soldiers with elite training and years of experience. Getting information from them would be like pulling teeth, perhaps literally.

  A younger man with a shiny, shaved head said, “Alright, we going to call it, then?”

  “I’ll make the call. They’re going to be pissed the data isn’t here,” the blonde replied.

  The men came around from behind the bar, fanning smoke from the kitchen out of their faces.

  “Shame about the cook, though,” the blonde man said. “The currywurst here was great.”

  Cora closed her eyes, breathing in through her nose. Eagles flew in the blue skies above Montana. Her every spell linked her to a memory of Richard and some place he brought her. She’d turned that magic into a tool of infiltration for the NSA, but never this one. The last time she brought up this memory was on a live-fire range almost a year ago. Energy pumped hot like adrenaline through her, bringing a fire to her eyes. When they opened, time moved to a crawl. Her irises changed from brown to yellow. She fixed on the soldiers, and made out the individual stitches in their sleeves from across the room.

  Popped to her feet, Cora extended her arms across the leather booth and took aim. Three taps of the trigger on her Predator. Adjust aim to the bald one, three more. Two to the chest, one to the head. She was reciting from muscle memory, the same method Richard drilled her with day after day on the firing range. She didn’t think about how she’d never pulled the trigger on a human target before, that she’d never taken a life. With the eyesight of an eagle, she didn’t miss. The Predator was a hybrid that fired regular pistol rounds through a magnetic accelerator in the barrel. Cora could hunt bears with that kind of stopping power.

  The bullets ripped through the body armor of both men, but the head shots splattered crimson across the back mirror of the bar. They fell in a heap to the ground. Cora came around the booth, moving like a cat stalking its prey. She ran down a checklist of how to secure a room, scolding herself for all the rules she broke, Richard’s voice resounding in her head.

  Start over. Run it again.

  She stepped over bodies and crossed the restaurant, kneeling beside the soldiers for hire. She fluttered her eyes, releasing the magical energy and returning her sight to normal. One hand kept a firm grip on her Predator while she dug into the pockets of the blonde man. His wrist computer would likely have a trove of information for her, but without Drake to disable its GPS monitoring, his whole PMC would know where she was. As it was, they likely already knew that the biometrics on these men just flat-lined and were probably on their way.

  Cora swiped out a screen from her wrist computer. Hands shaking, she fumbled through apps, locating the camera. She shifted around, trying to get a good angle on the blonde man’s face without having to touch his corpse. With the push of a button, the screen on the back of her hand was now covered by his mug. She tapped a button on her ear.

  “Run this picture against the PMC registry,” Cora said. She looked around the room, listening for any further signs of movement. She needed to check out the basement these guys came from.

  “Match confirmed,” the synthetic female voice of her computer responded. “Lance Corporal Donald ‘Donnie’ Lawson, retired UNS Marine Corps. Current Assignment with Vulkan Group.”

  More noise broke her concentration. From her right, far down the street outside, the rumble of an engine
headed east to her position. It was their unit, it had to be. They were ahead of schedule. Maybe they were already in the area and doubling back. There was no way the entire restaurant was massacred with only these two. The roar of a diesel-powered, large truck screeched to a halt and puffed out air. It rumbled in idle, stopped in front of the restaurant. Boots hit the street and fanned out in different directions.

  Cora stood up and ran for the bar. Glass from the front windows shattered behind her. They were already shooting. Stealth was off the table. Cora set a hand on the bar and vaulted over it. She stepped over a trap door in the cramped walkway behind the bar. A staircase led to a hidden basement. She wanted answers so bad she could taste it, but it was the wrong play. Covering her face with her forearm, she pushed through the door to the smoking kitchen.

  The Feedback Loop

  Cora ducked low and moved across the wet floors of the kitchen, holding back the urge to cough. The sprinklers rained from above, drenching her in frigid water. Her black motorcycle boots tried to give way on the slick floors. Suppressing gunfire rattled in the dining room, followed by an impact against the front door as the soldiers breached the restaurant. Cora weaved through the smoke blind, trying to find an exit door on the east side of the building. She had to get to the parking lot. Marzahn was no place to be on foot at night.

  She came upon a door near the walk-in freezer marked for emergency use. Examining it, there were no wires to trip an alarm. Deciding that was good enough, Cora pushed through the door to the spring air. Before she could let herself breathe for the first time in far too long, she caught sight of another black-armored soldier along her side of the building. She looked right, and ducked behind a nearby dumpster. His back was to her, and he was alone. He was the only thing between her and the parking lot.

  Cora shut her eyes, trying to still the pounding of her heart. In all her time with the NSA, Richard never once called upon her to kill anyone. She hadn’t even processed her emotions, or lack thereof, from dispatching the last two soldiers she crossed. She couldn’t afford to start questioning herself now. Her Predator went back to her holster. It was much too loud. She reached behind her shoulder and unsheathed her katana. The blade teemed with magical energy like static electricity.

  The run at the guard took eighteen paces. Not one of her steps made a sound. Once she was within striking range, Cora closed her arms around his head as if to embrace him. The center of the blade met the soft flesh of his unprotected neck. Cora sidestepped, dragging the razor edge across his throat. The soldier chortled and gagged, a sound low enough to go unheard by his compatriots. Cora didn’t look back to his final moments, or the face of the life she ended. Eyes forward, she raced for cover behind her team’s Lincoln in the parking lot.

  Assess.

  Cora sheathed her sword and peeked over the trunk to the front of the restaurant. A large, gray armored personnel truck grumbled. Three more men in the same black riot gear stood guard with machine guns, waiting on an unknown number inside. She recalled the pair of guards she put down, using six rounds. The window back at the hotel took three. The Predator held ten in the clip and one in the chamber, and all of her extra magazines sat the bottom of her suitcase...back at the hotel. Her motorcycle rested out of reach, at the front of the lot near the entrance. She dropped to all fours and looked under the Lincoln. Duct tape secured a square package strung together by small wires to the power cell of the car, waiting to eliminate any survivors of her team caught in the massacre.

  Despite herself, Cora turned her head to the corpse behind her. The black suit would hide the blood, but that gear would take too long to strip off. Assuming it would even fit her, she was probably a foot shorter than most of the guards and would stick out like a troll at dwarf convention. There had to be a solution she wasn’t seeing.

  Calculate.

  A guard at the front of the restaurant tapped a finger behind his ear. His German accent coupled with the distance made it impossible to understand what he was saying. Being low-tech for so long, Cora took the lack of technology for granted. Every one of the men were using an open comm system embedded in their head.

  Cora turned and ran back to the dead guard along the side of the building. Clutching his wrist, she swiped out the screen from his computer and checked the running apps. There was an open comm channel on a closed network. This was her ticket out.

  Drake once regaled her with the story of Emil Rodriguez, a biotech engineer made famous in the 2040’s when he exposed a glitch in the prototypes of audio implant technology. The chips implanted in most every person around the world contained the speaker and the microphone and used software to alternate between the two as needed. If the speaker and the microphone were on the same channel at the same time, it would create a feedback loop that was not only loud and obnoxious, but painful enough to require disabling the implant entirely. News of the glitch made technology giant Arcadia’s stock plummet overnight. The most anticipated new tech in years seemed doomed to fail, but round-the-clock coding binges allowed Arcadia to release their product on time, and spin the story to restore customer confidence. To this day, in the audio settings of every computer, there were six warnings before anyone could disable the EmRod switch.

  Cora sped through the prompts. She raised the microphone volume to maximum, and set the audio to single channel communication. All that was left was to hit the talk button. Like a sprinter, she lunged forward in a three-point stance, eyes ahead to her motorcycle. The noise carried across the comm channel would be disruptive, but it would only buy her seconds before the guards recovered from the shock and turned off their receivers.

  Breathe.

  Inhaling through her nose, Cora let her breath come out slow. She was ready to move, and confident of her course of action. If she was wrong, she wouldn’t live long enough for anyone to rub it in her face, anyway.

  Act.

  Cora tapped the talk button on the fallen guard. The screech coming from behind his ear was her signal. She dashed past the Lincoln, the Volvo, the BMW. At her side, the guards in front of Steakhaus Günther were on their knees, clutching at their ears. The sound coming from their implants was a chorus of screeching tires rattling around their skulls.

  Her hands wrapped around the handlebars of her bike and released the brake. She pulled to the left, walking the bike in a U-turn and doubling back down the side of the building. Once she straightened the wheels, she sped up to a jog and fished the key from her pocket. The feedback sound, like distant insects coupled with the moans of the men, fell silent.

  Cora learned how to perform a rolling start on a motorcycle from a holo-movie, the worst way to be taught anything. Desperate times called for winging it. With a decent speed and the slightest of downgrades in the road, Cora hopped on to her bike and turned the key. She kicked into neutral. The next kick would let out the roar of her bike, drawing the guards and their gunfire. She hadn’t even cleared the restaurant yet, still close enough to be gunned down before she got out of first gear. She took another breath and hit the clutch.

  The kitchen’s emergency door burst open as her engine came to life. Cora didn’t wait to see who emerged, pulling her Predator from the holster. She took aim. Smoke puffed out of the doorway. A black-armored figure emerged. She pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession, collapsing the man in the doorway. The thunderous blast of her weapon echoed around the empty streets. With no time to see what happened next, Cora switched to second gear and pulled back on the throttle with her right hand. She bolted down the unfamiliar street while the whizzing sound of bullets cut the air around her.

  The men would need at least twenty seconds to load up for pursuit, but the truck faced away from her bike. It would require a U-turn to follow her. Like the hotel escape, if she made a few turns down side streets, she could speed away before they could even begin a pursuit.

  Cora flipped on her headlights, unable to remember the last time she needed them. There was no place in Berlin this dark at dinner tim
e. The city center near her hotel was the tech capital of Europe. It reminded her of Times Square in New York, a blinding mix of neon, vid screens and brightly colored holograms in every direction, all competing for whatever fraction of attention tourists would give. This was the darkest night Cora had seen since she arrived.

  Cora tapped her ear, saying, “Open Black Book, password gamma-six-five. Directions to nearest safe house.”

  Light projected from her wrist, creating a screen between her handlebars.

  “You will arrive at your destination in seventeen minutes,” the computer said.

  “Call home,” Cora said grimly. Richard should have been making this call, not her. Never her.

  A Scottish male voice greeted her. “Thank you for calling O’Malley’s Dwarven Funeral Home, where we put the wee in the weeds. How can I help you?”

  “This is Agent 71280, confirm,” Cora said.

  A pause. The voice changed to a serious, American accent. “Confirmed. Hold for handling.”

  Cora followed the course laid out by her GPS, taking her onto the B158 highway. The wind whipped through her jet black hair as she revved her bike down the onramp.

  “This is Handler 227,” another voice came on the line. “Go ahead.”

  “My team was scheduled to meet up at Steakhaus Günther. I got held up at the hotel,” Cora said. She cleared her throat, steadying her voice as she explained. “The hotel got hit, unknown shooters. When I reached the meeting point, everyone was dead.”