Breakout

by David Ryker

  “Can the engines be adjusted to redistribute the thrust energy below us, like they used to?” he asked Sloane.

  “Yes.” Sloane continued to stare at the screen.

  “Maybe we should do that. It could help clear away the debris that’s been loosened.”

  Again, Sloane did the jitterbug with his eyes before nodding. He manipulated the controls again and maneuvered the Raft so that it was directly over the hole it had just blasted. As Schuster watched on the monitor, a cloud of dust formed under the ship, swirling for the better part of a minute. When it was done, he saw a dark space underneath them.

  “There is the entrance,” said Sloane. “Crew, prepare to disembark immediately.”

  You’re welcome, Schuster thought as they both turned and headed toward the hatch that would lead them to the cargo bay. I’m happy to be your idea guy. It appears that you need one.

  Sloane handed Quinn, Bishop and Sally each a square device about the size of a small toaster, that had a handle on one side and a series of three circles on the other. To Quinn, it looked like a jury-rigged pistol version of the shock rifles the guards used.

  “These are force generators,” said Sloane. “You will need to aim them at the element in order to loosen it from its surroundings before extraction.”

  “Force generators?” Schuster asked as the cargo bay door lowered behind them, opening the bay to the moon’s surface. “How does that work?”

  “Manipulation of electrical fields,” Sloane answered. “You must counter the recoil with your own strength, though an exponentially lower level will be required.”

  “Speak intelligibly!” Sally snapped.

  Quinn felt a tiny stab of adrenaline, wondering how Sloane would react to the rebuke. As it turned out, he didn’t seem to notice.

  “It means it has a kick,” Boychuk offered. It was the first time he’d spoken on the journey. “But the force it generates is a lot more than what you’ll feel on your end, so don’t stand in front of it.” He turned to Sloane. “Is that correct, sir?”

  “Yes.” Sloane seemed to zone out for a second, and suddenly the four technicians and the two Yandares who had been silent for the entire trip came to life, hopping toward the edge of the crater. Below the edge was a slope about five meters across, ripped open by the cannons, that led downward on a thirty-degree angle into darkness.

  The six took up positions on either side of the slope, three to a side. One on each side produced a winch box, secured it to the surface and released a cable from within. One of the techs opened the lid of a metal box he’d been carrying, about a half-meter cubed, and set it next to the cable on his side.

  “You will take the two cables and the container into the cavern,” said Sloane. “Secure the cables when you reach the element, then tether your environment suits to one. The other cable is for the container. Once you have extracted the element, place it in the container, close the lid and attach it to the cable. The others will pull it out.”

  “Anybody care to tell us what we’re looking for?” Bishop asked, taking the words right out of Quinn’s mouth. “That knowledge might come in handy, y’know?”

  “Follow the light to its source,” said Sloane. “You will see the element illuminated from inside the surrounding strata. Loosen it with the force generators, then place inside the container.”

  “Maybe I’m dumb,” said Quinn, “but if it’s glowing, was it really a good idea to blast at it? And, uh, handle it?”

  “It is not radioactive in the sense in which you think of the term,” said Sloane. “It is not physically harmful.”

  Quinn didn’t want to think too long on that one. Instead, he asked: “How much do you want? What if there’s more down there than we can bring out?”

  “Scans show there is barely enough to fill half the container.”

  Jesus, Quinn thought. This is a helluva lot of effort for a few kilos of something. But from what Dev had told them, the element was crucial to whatever plan was being hatched, so extract it they would. He didn’t allow himself to wonder what would happen to them if they didn’t.

  Quinn nodded to Bishop and Sally and they bounced their way to the opening. The light on their helmets wasn’t enough to penetrate the gloom of the cavern, but Quinn could make out just the faintest illumination in the depths, like a distant nebula in the night sky.

  Bishop grabbed one of the cables while Sally took the other. Quinn caught her staring at Keiko and Miko before he hoisted the empty box and turned to face the opening. When he did, she broke off and took her place beside him.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said.

  “Hey!” Schuster called out.

  Quinn and Bishop turned to face him. “Yeah?”

  “Be careful down there.” Schuster paused. “Uh, you know… because that element is valuable.”

  The duo nodded and gave Schuster a small wave that looked a bit like a salute. They both managed to overcome the urge to shout “Oorah!”

  The light was easy enough to follow, as the glow got brighter the farther in they advanced. About a hundred and fifty meters down, the trio reached a Y-shaped branch in the tunnel, but all three of them automatically went to their left, even though there was light coming from both branches. Quinn would have occasion to think about that later on.

  Finally, after about a half hour of descent, they emerged from the tightness of the tunnel into a more open area a few meters in diameter. The walls of rock seemed to pulse with light, almost as if there was heat buried in the walls. But even if he’d been blind, Quinn would have known they were in the right place. He could feel it.

  “I think we found it,” he said.

  “Bzzzhhqthht,” came the response.

  “Great,” said Bishop. “Radio doesn’t work at this depth. Are you ready to get to work on this?”

  Quinn glanced at Sally, who responded by lifting her force generator and activating it. The business end glowed blue. He and Bishop followed suit with their own, and pointed them at the wall.

  “You sure we’re ready for this?” asked Bishop, unable to keep the fear out of his voice.

  “Death summons us all,” said Sally. “We can only control how we answer.”

  Quinn rolled his eyes. If he’d gotten philosophical every time he faced danger, there’d be a statue of him in Athens. Instead, he pointed the gun and squeezed the trigger.

  An instant later, he was in a compound of abandoned buildings in Astana, Kazakhstan, and a helicopter had just landed in front of him.

  25

  Schuster couldn’t help but stare at the four techs and two Yandares. They stood like statues on either side of the opening to the tunnel. He hadn’t heard any of them make a sound since they left the station.

  “Why not send them in with the others to help?” he asked Sloane, hoping he wasn’t pole-vaulting over some boundary by doing so.

  “They are fully attenuated,” said Sloane. “It is possible that direct contact with the element in its raw form might kill them.”

  Schuster tried hard not to react to the jolt of adrenaline that coursed through him. He cleared his throat instead.

  “Well, uh, we wouldn’t want that, obviously.” He took a breath. “But it won’t kill the others.” He waited several seconds for an answer that never came, before adding: “Right?”

  “That is undetermined,” said Sloane. “I am not certain of the effect the element will have on humans. You have proved to be wildly unpredictable.”

  On humans? Schuster’s mind was racing. There could be no more self-delusion anymore. If he’d had any doubt before, it was gone now. They weren’t dealing with drugs or people going crazy on Oberon One. They were dealing with aliens.

  Not just aliens: aliens that could control their minds.

  He didn’t have long to think about that, however, because a few moments later, he was back in his bombed-out classroom in Mumbai, sitting on the floor, surrounded by dozens of other children.

  Quinn was looking into
his own face, except it wasn’t his face. It looked exactly like him, yes, except for the right eye. The right eye was wrong.

  It was glowing red. Why was his eye glowing? And how could he be looking at his own face? There was no mirror anywhere, no camera. He felt his heart hammering inside him as his mind flooded with a single thought: King! Where is King? We have to protect him!

  There was chaos all around him. He couldn’t see his men, blinded as he was by the light from the chopper in the utter blackness of the night sky. Maggott was on King! Where were Bishop and Schuster? Against the wall, his mind told him.

  With his bearings again, Quinn was able to turn his mind back toward the man with his face and the red eye, who had turned and headed to Quinn’s right. What would cause a red eye? Bionic implant, his brain said. Cybernetics. But they were illegal, weren’t they?

  He had no time to think about it before every muscle in his body suddenly screamed out and stiffened like steel. His teeth clamped together and he dropped to his knees onto the asphalt under him.

  “Holy shit!”

  The sound of Geordie Bishop’s voice sent Quinn reeling backward onto his ass onto the cave floor, his pulse thundering in his ears. He blinked, trying to process where he was, what was going on.

  Oberon, he thought blankly. I’m not in Astana, I’m on Oberon. How did I get here?

  It occurred to him, as his faculties returned and he pulled himself from the floor, that the real question was how had he gotten to Astana. The events he just experienced had happened more than two years earlier.

  Bishop was on all fours about five meters away. Quinn helped him to his feet, then turned in the direction of Senpai Sally. She seemed to be in better shape than the two of them, but she still had her hands propped against the cave wall.

  “Status report!” Quinn barked.

  “Fi-five by five,” Bishop croaked. “I think. Jesus, what was that?”

  “I don’t know. What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything; I was in bed with Ellie in our shitty little flat in Montreal, when I was on leave from that duty in Argentina a few years ago. We were eating the pecan pie that she’d saved up for weeks to buy. It was—Jesus, I could taste it! The sugar and the butter. No nuts because the fucking baker ripped us off.” He grabbed the shoulders of Quinn’s suit and locked eyes with him. “I could smell Ellie’s shampoo, Lee. I was there.”

  “I believe you,” said Quinn. “I was just at the compound in Astana when the chopper landed. Right before we got zapped by the shock rifles.”

  Bishop’s eyes were saucers. “Holy shit, man! What did you see? My memories of that night are still hazy; all I remember was the light in the sky and then firing out the windows. Then nothing till I woke up in the infirmary.”

  Quinn shook his head. “It ended when I got shocked, just like before. But I got a clear memory of something that I thought I might have imagined. Turns out it was real.”

  “Will you two shut up?” Sally griped through their headsets.

  Quinn turned to see her hopping slowly over to them.

  “You all right, Sally?”

  “Yes.” She pointed to the floor of the cave, illuminated by the dusty beam from her helmet’s lamp. “Look.”

  He followed her finger to a pile of rubble that looked like giant fireflies, except not exactly. More like how fireflies would look if they were underwater. But even that wasn’t quite right. In any case, it was glowing. They had found what they were looking for.

  “Let’s load up and get the hell out of here,” he said.

  Quinn pulled up the container they’d come down with and the three of them knelt to scoop the element inside of it. As his hands made contact with whatever the hell it was, he got an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, but nothing like what he’d experienced before. The sensation in his hands, however, was brand new.

  “Are you two feeling this, too?” Bishop asked.

  Quinn nodded. “Yeah, it’s warm somehow. Doesn’t make any sense; if it was hot enough to feel it through our gloves, it should be able to burn through them.”

  “It is alive,” Sally said simply.

  “It’s not alive,” Bishop scoffed. “It’s just metal. I think.”

  “I don’t know what it is, but I doubt it’s metal,” said Quinn. “In any case, we’re not getting anywhere standing around. Let’s load this shit up and get the hell out of this tomb.”

  They each clipped a tether from their suits to one cable, then clipped the container to the other. Quinn gave that one a tug and a few seconds later, it started to move up the slope, pulled by the winch at the other end, some two hundred meters above and away from them.

  “Don’t know why they can’t pull us out, too. There’s another winch,” Bishop grumbled as the trio followed behind the box, pulling themselves along through the dark with their own cable.

  Quinn scoffed. “You going soft on me, Marine?”

  Bishop turned to him with a grin. “Least I’m not a coward. One of us has to ask, I guess it’s gonna be me.”

  “Ask? Ask what?”

  He turned to Senpai Sally. “What was your memory of?” Then, to Quinn: “Avenge my death if she kills me.”

  “I don’t understand why you Jarheads feel the need to act like such children,” Sally said. “But to answer your question, the memory was quite pleasant.”

  “Mine, too,” said Bishop. “Eating pecan pie with my girlfriend.”

  Sally sighed wistfully. “I relived my first kill. He was an immensely fat man with no hair anywhere on his body. He ate garlic right before we fornicated. It was an indescribable joy to sever his testicles and watch him bleed to death on the white carpet of his hotel suite.”

  Quinn looked at Bishop, who had turned a shade of green, and sighed. “Happy now, smartass?”

  “What did you experience?” Sloane asked.

  It had been a minute or so since Schuster had come out of whatever the hell it had been, but it was still incredibly vivid in his mind.

  “A memory from my childhood in India,” he said. “I was talking to my teacher, Ms. McKinlay. She was a Tower dweller from Brisbane who volunteered to work in the slums. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.”

  “What did she converse with you about?”

  He grinned. “She told me that I was different from the other kids. Gifted was the word she used. I felt so proud. No one had ever told me I was special before. Well, my parents did, but everyone’s parents do that…”

  “And you?” Sloane seemed uninterested in Schuster’s story and turned to Boychuk, who was standing several meters away.

  “I was playing hockey back in Belarus,” he said thickly. His gaze was far away. “In my teens. Swung my stick right into Ari Kowalski’s teeth. They smashed like little ice cubes. I could hear them. The air was cold, and his blood was warm when it splattered on my face.”

  “Was it an accurate recollection of the original experience?” asked Sloane.

  “Huh?”

  Something tickled in the back of Schuster’s mind. “I think he means did it really happen,” he said. “Was it, like, an actual memory, or more like a dream?”

  Sloane didn’t contradict him, and he watched as Boychuk frowned in deep concentration.

  “It felt real, like a memory,” the guard said slowly. “But it never actually happened. I never took out another player like that, ever. I wanted to lots of times, but I never did.” He shook his head. “Something like this happened to me last week, too.”

  The itch in Schuster’s brain deepened. His own experience had been a recollection of something very real. That conversation with his teacher was one of his most treasured memories, something he’d held on to and trotted out many times in the two decades since, like an old two-dimensional digital photo of a long-lost loved one.

  But Boychuk’s experience, while equally real to him, was a fantasy of violence. It was like Schuster’s own vision on the surface the first time, when he watched wolves viciously
ripping apart helpless street people. He’d never actually experienced anything like it in real life, but the experience had felt as real to him as his memory of Ms. McKinlay did now.

  He had no idea what any of it meant, but it was something to hold onto.

  “This is incredibly frustrating,” said Sloane, and to Schuster he sounded a bit different now than he had a moment earlier. More tense. “There’s no consistency.”

  “Consistency in what?” Schuster asked.

  “It is irrelevant.” And just like that, Sloane’s voice was back to the way it was. He turned to Boychuk. “You will not have any direct contact with the element. You are a failure.”

  “Hey,” Boychuk protested. “I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to call me that.”

  At that moment, a small cloud of dust wafted out through the opening to the cavern, stirred up by the footfalls of Quinn, Bishop and Sally. They emerged through the opening, carrying the container they had taken with them, its lid closed.

  “Mission accomplished,” said Quinn. “You can hear us now, right? We had some reception problems when we were down below.”

  “Affirmative,” said Sloane. “You have the element.”

  “As much as there was. Locked up tight in here.” Quinn patted the lid with a gloved hand.

  With that, the techs, along with Keiko and Miko, turned and began to hop their way toward the back door of the Raft.

  “What about the winches?” Quinn asked.

  “They are no longer of consequence,” Sloane said. “Give me the container.”

  Quinn and Bishop gave up the handle each was carrying and Sloane yanked it away almost greedily.

  “Prepare for liftoff,” he said, and turned to follow his drones back into the ship. The rest of them had to do double-time to keep up with him.

  As the cargo bay door rose behind them and one of the techs initiated the launch procedure, Sloane placed the container on his lap. Even in the lighter gravity, Schuster thought it had to be digging into the man’s thighs. Sloane opened the lid, and the cargo hold was bathed in iridescent light that seemed to be all colors and no color at the same time.