Collateral Damage

by Steve Beaulieu

  In a flash, Kyle found himself in a new place, a mountaintop somewhere. Ice encrusted the rocks and he could feel the winter wind blowing against his skin. He marveled at the tactile and receptive senses of the illusion. A young thin girl stood a few feet away, her back turned to him. “Rabbit?”

  She turned as he called out her name. “Hello, Kyle.”

  “I’m in your head, can’t I have your real name?”

  “I think it’s best we remain co-workers.”

  “Co-workers? We’re opponents.”

  “As you say. No need to open up the doors between us too wide, is there?” She waved her arms around to indicate their surroundings. “How do you like the inside of my mind?”

  “I thought it would be more crowded, to be honest.”

  “I’ve never been on a mountaintop. I’ve always wanted to see one. This is a photo of Everest I saw one time. I come here to think.”

  “It’s a little chilly for me, to be honest,” he said. “You couldn’t have imagined somewhere warmer?”

  “I know too many warm places. I can’t remember most of them. The Social Welfare Agency is very thorough in their conditioning standards. We lose most of our memories in the first two rounds. Memories distract us from our work.”

  “Work? You’re a hired killer.”

  “It’s a job. I do a task and I get paid. Or do you want me to believe that you work for the military out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Touché. Do you remember anything about the people you work with?”

  “Everything. I’ll show you.” The scenery changed and they stood inside a dormitory. Racks of beds stretched along both walls, and each rack had a young girl resting in it. They popped into a sea of conversation and chattering voices, who quieted as the seconds ticked by. All the girls stared at him from their perches. Kyle had never felt as uncomfortable as he did with their many eyes on him.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  Rabbit frowned. “Where is what?”

  “The operating room. The gadgets. The researchers. The place where they made you aphasic.”

  She looked confused for a moment, they burst out laughing. She repeated his statements to the rest of the barracks and within moments every girl was snorting, chuckling, belly-laughing or at worst, grinning with obvious glee. “Come on, Kyle. I’ll show you where it happened.”

  She led him out the door and they descended staircases to the ground. Outside, the sun shone on a flat white beach. Kyle could smell the salt and the rotting seaweed and feel the sharp heat wafting off the sand. Sharp rocks littered the expanse, building a moonscape of tiny mountains. Gulls called to each other above while a fishing boat trawled slowly across the horizon.

  “Underwater,” she said. “There’re tiny caves that only appear at low tide. Under those rocks. See?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two men. They dragged me into one of those caves when I was younger. One hit me on the head with a rock while the other one rammed himself into me. I can remember their faces but not their names. I woke up in hospital, in so much pain. I withdrew. Didn’t talk. Didn’t eat. Didn’t even recognize my parents. Two people came to visit. A man and a woman. They said there was a government program to help me get over my trauma. And they brought me here.”

  Kyle looked over his shoulder and did the math. So many girls… “Good lord. Didn’t you—?”

  “I don’t remember it,” she said and led him back to the compound.

  “Rabbit…what happened to you was wrong…horribly, brutally wrong…but what you’re doing now is wrong, too.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “I never kill women or children. Only men with great power. It’s fair. We are all very good at it.”

  “The people who brought you here and trained you are using you. You don’t matter to them, you’re just a means to an end.”

  “What are you, then?” she demanded. “Little boy with big dreams, but you still feel weak and small. So what do you do? Find someone else weak and small and then save them to make yourself feel big and strong. Your Arch-Angel, your Strongarm…do you think if they could find someone who does what you do, you would even be part of their team? No. They need you today. Because to them, I’m a case—a paycheck. Don’t tell me I need your help when you can’t help anyone.”

  “I have to stop them.” He paused, wondering how to get through to her. “At least to try and find out who they are, where they operate from, how they decide...”

  Her eyes opened wide. “Yes? Can you say it?”

  “How they decide who to recruit.”

  “You already know that much, just from looking at us. Yes?”

  “I think so. The Social Welfare Agency recruits the damaged girls who no one will likely miss. Don’t they?”

  She snorted. “The damaged girls. The sickly. The mutilated. The malformed. The crazy. The weak. The abused. They give us new bodies, sometimes. Stronger, faster, better in every measurable way. But without our memories…who are we? I ask myself that sometimes.”

  They appeared back in the mountains. Rabbit was thinking. She looked to the horizon, lost in thought. She flinched when he reached out and nudged her shoulder. She glared at him, then softened. “I’ll tell you what I know. It’s not much. Each girl has a handler. Some have better relationships than others. Some girls have more augmentations than others.”

  “You’re all cyborgs?”

  “It helps with data transfer. You noticed we have a language barrier. The implants are placed very near the speech center in the brain. Sometimes it shifts…”

  “And you became aphasic,” he said. “God, I really have no clue what I’m talking about, do I?”

  She smiled at him, her eyes big and black. “You’re honest. And you’re sort of sweet. I wish we’d met somewhere else. I might have called you a friend.”

  “We still can be friends,” he said. “You’ve been hurt enough. But I can’t help you if you won’t help me.”

  She giggled and reached out toward him. Kyle flinched as her arms circled his neck. “I appreciate your concern. I do. But I have work to do, and you’re in my way, now…”

  She tightened her grip, and he flinched again. Then she reached into him, pulled him out of his skin and jumped into the empty space he left behind.

  • • •

  Kyle opened his eyes, whipped his head around, and found that he was in a rolling harness chair. He looked down at himself, saw some woman’s chest, arms, and legs. He screamed. A high-pitched voice came out of his mouth. Rabbit’s voice. Rabbit’s mouth. He struggled with the straps, tried to wiggle out of the restraints and realized that he wasn’t anywhere near as smart as he’d thought he was. She’d played him. Worse. She’d gotten him to play himself. He shouted in her voice, her vocabulary.

  Braintrust looked up, startled. Psy-Block stared into space, a thin line of saliva trickling down the corner of her mouth. Kyle screamed through Rabbit’s mouth as he watched his body sigh and step away from the cot, taking Braintrust by the elbow and leading her out of the room. Kyle quieted, wondered if Rabbit had had auditory implants, and strained to listen.

  “What happened?“ Braintrust asked. “Joy? Partial joy?”

  Kyle fought the urge to struggle as he watched his body talk to his former co-worker. “No joy. I really do suck at this heroism thing.” He jerked his thumb at Psy-Block, still in her chair, head now drooping. “Rabbit got away from us. Psy-Block is still in there, handling her. Give her a few minutes. She’ll be back.”

  “All right. What are you—?”

  Braintrust turned to see Kyle Richards’ fist heading for her face. She dodged out of the way but tripped as she tried to dodge the sweep he followed up with then collapsed as his forearm found her throat.

  By the time she recovered, “Crypto” was gone. Kyle started talking Rabbit’s head off. The horror doubled as he realized that he had no way to talk to her; Chinese was her only language, even if she hadn’t been aphasic as hell. Braintr
ust staggered and crawled to the holding room. Psy-Block was insensate, her chin touching her chest and her muscles slack and floppy. Kyle stopped as she entered the room, sitting in Rabbit’s harness, speaking softly but urgently, motioning toward the other woman with her head. Pleading with Braintrust to do…something.

  Come on, Brainy, you can do this, you’re hooked into every computer in the building. There must be a translator app in their somewhere, right? Right?

  “What the hell…?” Braintrust coughed, massaged her throat, and stepped behind Rabbit’s harness chair. “Back to the Tank with you, my dear, whatever you’re saying. Believe it or not, it’s for your own safety.”

  Kyle rested Rabbit’s head, closed her eyes, and thought furiously. There had to be a way of reaching out to Braintrust. If only he had access to the building’s computers! He could…

  Implant. She has an implant!

  Kyle closed Rabbit’s eyes, relaxed and looked for a switch. He eventually found a toggle, flipped it on and found himself staring at a HUD of sorts. Success! He experimented with menus, hurriedly swapping through various selections, drilling down to hastily read commands and then discard them for other menus. Luckily, he could read Mandarin.

  What the hell kind of hardware did she bring into this place? That kind that was programmed to look for neural links and kill them at the source, that’s what. Kyle couldn’t figure out all the details so quickly but the code told him things that others might not catch. The neural links were routed through Braintrust…he could see the IP that she had to log on to for her standard operations. That was her thing: monitoring the New Angels’ data network. She was the team’s Guy in the Chair, picking up feeds from one server and deploying the team where they needed to be on any given op. But this thing…this was something new.

  Finally, he found an open port in the main computer, turned the flow up to its max level, and connected Rabbit’s implant to the network. Then he pinged the hell out of Brainy’s connection. The sudden discharge snapped Braintrusts’s head back and she let go of the wheelchair, stumbling, finally righting herself with a furious look on her face. She drew back and punched Rabbit in the face. “You try that again, and I’ll—” Then her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “Kyle?”

  Kyle forced Rabbit’s head to nod. He waved her hands up and down, pleading with her. Finally, Braintrust accepted the connection and they could finally talk to each other.

  “Ow,” Kyle said. “You’re not supposed to hit the prisoner!”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I thought you were…well, you know what I thought. What happened? Why’d you punch me in the throat?”

  “That wasn’t me. Rabbit used her implant to grab me and stuff me into her body. She must have used Psy-Block’s bridge as a conduit. God knows how. Anyway, I’m using your neural link as a way to reprogram Rabbit’s implant. The translator program is working, right?”

  “Either that or I just learned a crazy dialect of Chinese.”

  “Close enough. If you’re hearing me talk in English, it’s working.”

  Red lights came on while sirens blared somewhere on the floor. All at once, Braintrust’s neural links popped open and for ten seconds she felt engulfed by the silence of dead air. It felt like being swaddled in cotton heavy enough to kill any sense of hearing she had. Then she realized she was hearing with her ears. Not the collective sensors of the security system. She switched channels, or tried to. She was cut off. Her world had gone dark, and her hands tightened on the chair’s handles as she fought down the urge to panic.

  “I’m dark,” she said.

  “You’re…what?”

  “I’m dark! I’m locked out of my own system. I can’t hear the network anymore!”

  “Dammit. Okay, wheel me to the control room.”

  “I’ll let you out of the chair.”

  “No! We don’t know what Rabbit is doing or when she’ll swap back. Last thing you need is another chop to the throat. Wheel me, let’s go.”

  “Fine.” Braintrust gathered herself behind the chair, and with a last check to make sure Psy-Block was breathing, wheeled Kyle to the control room. It wasn’t NORAD high-tech but it served the purpose. She grabbed a keyboard from one unit, placed it beneath Rabbit’s fingers and stood to the side. “You good?”

  “I got this. Let me just…” He scanned reams of material, gleaning what he needed from the lines of code that he ran Rabbit’s eyes over. Finally, he grunted. “That’s what she did. Let’s put a stop to that junk.”

  “Dude! Talk to me.”

  “Arch-Angel didn’t lock me out of your system when I quit. Well, Rabbit knew that and used my own codes to gain access to everything. It’ll take hours to figure out every place she’s been.”

  “No, it won’t. Here, shove over.” She grabbed the keyboard and entered commands of her own. “Ha! Back in. The world is bright and shiny again.”

  “Congratulations,” he snarked. “Get in there and tell me everything I’ve accessed in the past half hour.”

  It took only a few seconds. Braintrust gave it her full concentration, closing her eyes, breathing deeply and slowly. “Looks like your body had a plan. You reset the old password to a new one, then opened the door and walked right out. At the moment you’re still in there, using a mobile IP. That means Rabbit has a hand computer but it’s not one of ours. The handshakes are different.”

  “SCYTHE technology,” Kyle growled.

  “It’s a good bet they gave Rabbit some very specific instructions on what to do when she left.”

  “You have to lock me out of the system. Now.”

  “No, if I do that, we can’t track her anymore.”

  “If you don’t, God knows what she’ll do with it. The Vice President is in town! Remember that?”

  “Dammit.”

  “Yes.”

  Braintrust clicked her tongue. “Okay. I’m killing your access in three, two, one—”

  “Don’t do it!” They both turned to see Psy-Block stagger in from the other room, visibly shaken and green to the gills. “She’s playing you two. If you lock out Kyle’s access, it’ll trip a new set of implants she has that are designed to bootstrap our computers into SCRAM servers. Then she’ll be inside the biggest spy organization in the world. Trust me. I got a good, long look inside her head. It’s a scary place.”

  “She showed me mountains.”

  “She likes you. A lot. All I saw was a conversation between Rabbit and her handlers. They’re not after the politicians. They want the computers.”

  “Then why is Kyle’s body using a SCYTHE hand computer to send signals to other computers within a three block radius?” Braintrust demanded.

  For a moment they all froze, unsure of what to do.

  “Crypto. You were inside her head. What’s she up to? What do we do?”

  Kyle looked at the situation once more. He saw two possibilities if he screwed up: SCRAM would lose every datum in their vast server farms to the World Wide Web, compromising thousands of undercover agents worldwide; or an assassination of epic proportions about to consume the Vice President of the United States and his intelligence staff.

  “Crypto?”

  Kyle thought back to the memories Rabbit shared with him. Deep down she really was a scared little girl. She would feel the pressure, even with all her assassin training. She had a plan. Executing it was her only goal. But she had rules. No women or children. Only men of power.

  “Crypto!”

  “Men of power,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Hold on. Let me look through this…” He relaxed into a search routine, looking for data in Rabbit’s HUD. There was a ton of it to sort through and he only had the most rudimentary notion of how her interface had been organized. Say what you wanted about the utility of programming languages: East Asians coded differently from Americans. Finally, he found what looked like a good prospect, popped the file open, and saw a very detailed dossier.

  “Oh my god,” he groaned.<
br />
  “What?”

  “It’s Arch-Angel. They’re going after Arch-Angel.”

  • • •

  Braintrust pulled open an equipment locker as Psy-Block unhooked Rabbit’s body from the wheelchair. Kyle took a deep breath and stood, amazed at how light Rabbit was. She stood shorter than the other women as well. It took a moment to remember that Rabbit was only a teen, and a young one at that. Still, walking around in a woman’s body felt very strange.

  “I just want to say once more that this is a really crap idea,” Braintrust growled. “You’re the one who pointed out Rabbit could swap bodies back at any time.”

  “That was before I figured out what she was doing,” Kyle said. “It’s easy. Psy-Block is going to keep this body honest. So if Rabbit does swap back, she’ll be ready to pull her plug. You’re going to vector us to the hit team.”

  “Teams. Plural. I’m counting four signatures. Can you take them all out?”

  “With this new body I can.” He flexed artificial muscles, ran air through oxygen extractors, and did a few deep knee bends more quickly than he’d thought possible.

  “I still think we need to tell Arch-Angel what’s going on.”

  “If we do that, the hit team will smell the tip-off and we’ll lose our chance to ground them in action.”

  “Fine. Here’s a standard gear loadout for any of us when we do fieldwork.” Braintrust eyed Psy-Block. “I’m giving you the stun gun. Keep him out of trouble.”

  “Meh. It’ll be fine.”

  “Not if you seize up again.”

  “Puh-lease! Ancient history.”

  Kyle fitted his com and tested the connection. All secure. “Let’s save your boss.”

  • • •

  As Kyle and Psy-Block moved through the streets of Manhattan in the dead of night, Braintrust called out locations of the mobile IPs she found. The first was almost too easy: a tween girl drinking a cup of hot chocolate in a diner on Thirty-Eighth and Fifth Ave. A strange sight in middle America, perhaps, but not so much in the Big Apple. Rabbit’s HUD identified the girl immediately; when Rabbit and Kyle approached her booth, she even looked up quizzically and asked: “What’s wrong?” Psy-Block zapped her with a hypnotic command that she turn herself in to the first police officer she saw, which she did.