Crossover (2 page)

Then the lights went
out, and the ceiling collapsed above him.

* * *

Six rolled aside just
in time. The metal grate slammed into the floor where he had been
kneeling. Another blast of sparks lit up the room, revealing a
mountain of twisted metal in the centre. Six couldn't see Byre
anywhere. He guessed that she had been crushed.

The door had been
ripped off its hinges. Six scrambled to his feet and stumbled
through the doorway. Even through his earplugs, the rattling and
groaning of the building was deafening. It felt like being trapped
inside the bottom level of a sinking cruise ship.

He ran through the
darkness, arms outstretched, hoping the ladder was still where it
was supposed to be. The greater the distance from the magnet, the
less pulling power it had, but the bolts which fixed the ladder to
the wall hadn't looked sturdy.

Six crashed into the
ladder hard enough to bruise his shoulder. It was closer than he
had expected, and it was no longer straight – it spiralled upward
like a strand of DNA. But there was no other way out of here. He
grabbed the bent rungs and started climbing.

Something crashed up
above. Perhaps the magnet had knocked something over, perhaps the
soldiers were coming in. A flickering glow illuminated the top few
rungs. Six heard the crackling and spitting of flames.

A chunk of metal piping
tumbled through the hatch and plummeted toward Six. He swung
sideways. The fragment barely missed him as it whistled through the
darkness and clanged into a rung somewhere below.

The ladder rattled in
his grip. A hailstorm of bolts and screws fell from up above. Six
shielded his face with one hand, put the other on the side of the
ladder, and climbed using only his feet.

When his head emerged
through the hatch, he immediately felt the flames nearby, drying
out his skin. A power point on the wall was spitting sparks, and it
looked like the oil stains on the floor had caught alight. If he
hadn't been up here only minutes ago, he would never have been able
to find his way out through the thick smoke.

He clambered out of the
hatch and started running. The pipes shook above his head as he
turned corner after corner–

Until he bumped into
Soren Byre.

Her clothes and hair
were blackened by soot, but her eyes were bright as ever. An
unbalanced grin split her face.

Six stared at her. How
had she gotten up here before him?

'It works,' she hissed
at him. 'It works!'

Then a shard of metal
erupted out of her face.

Six gasped and jumped
back as the blood sprayed his clothes. Byre slumped to the floor,
the piece of magnetised shrapnel skewered through her head. The
body shifted, and for a moment Six though she was trying to get up,
but he soon realised that it was just the metal, dragging her
obscenely across the floor.

If he didn't get out of
here quickly, the same thing might happen to him.

He sprinted through the
flickering shadows, trying to avoid the burning patches of the
floor. A knotted electrical cable flew through the air towards him,
and he sidestepped around it – only to nearly collide with a
hurtling pipe. The metal ceiling was ripping apart. The whole
facility was imploding like a black hole.

Six had almost reached
the exit. The guard he had knocked out was nowhere to be seen. As
he watched, the bolts snapped and the door lurched out of its
frame. It rocketed toward him like a bullet train. He flattened
himself against the wall as it sped past.

Five more steps. Three.
One.

He dove out the door
and skidded across the dirt. Behind him, the facility folded in
upon itself like an oragami house crushed in an enormous fist. The
girders squealed as they bent. Glass exploded outward from the
barred windows as the frames shrunk.

The implosion stopped
abruptly, leaving the building silent and still but for the roiling
smoke above it. Six guessed that the generator must have finally
shorted out.

Looking around, he saw
the soldiers from earlier, lying on their stomachs with their hands
cuffed behind their backs. A group of Deck agents stood nearby,
faces inscrutable behind their black masks. Six was too far away to
read the ranks stitched into their uniforms, but one of the agents
was shorter than the others.

'Kyntak,' he
called.

The short agent looked
over, muttered something to his colleagues, and approached Six. 'I
should have known you'd show up,' he said, 'once the hard work was
over.'

Six didn't laugh. 'The
machine is destroyed.'

Kyntak nodded to the
collapsed building. 'Yeah, I figured. And Byre?'

'Dead.'

Six didn't meet his
brother's gaze. Kyntak knew him too well to ask if he had killed
Byre, but he would be wondering what had happened.

'That might be for the
best,' Kyntak said finally. 'If she'd survived, she would have
tried again.'

Six said nothing.

Kyntak gestured at the
prostrate guards. 'We've got a bit of cleaning up to do here. The
gates are unlocked – you should go home.'

Six had already started
to walk away.

The cars grumbled past,
the sterilised rain poured down between the skyscrapers and the fog
swirled around Six like ghosts of the millions who had died
breathing it. His superhuman lungs were less susceptible to the
toxins than most, but he wore a filtration mask like everyone
else.

He was ChaoSonic's most
wanted. Standing out was a sure way to be killed.

Almost two months had
passed since Soren Byre's death. Six had completed several missions
since then, but he still found himself scrubbing his face harder
than he needed to each morning – he could still feel the droplets
of her blood on his skin. Six was no stranger to death, nor to
failure, but this event had stayed with him, perhaps because he had
known Byre when she was a Deck agent.

By the time he spotted
the razor wire of the ChaoSonic checkpoint up ahead, it was too
late to turn back. Unmanned aerial vehicles would be circling
above, armed with thermal cameras and ready to follow those who
ran. Instead, Six joined the queue of shuffling pedestrians, hoping
his fake triple C – ChaoSonic Citizen Card – would fool the armed
guards.

The checkpoint hadn't
been here yesterday. It was very close to the Deck. Six hoped this
was a coincidence, but he made a note to plant some decoy data in
ChaoSonic's network, leading their search teams further away.

Three of the four
guards had standard cockroach armour – gleaming shells of
interconnected carbon-fibre plates and proboscis-like breathing
tubes. They trained heavy eight-gauge Vulture shotguns on the
ambling line of citizens, waiting for someone to flee.

It was the fourth guard
that caught Six's eye. He was twice as tall as the others, with
impossibly broad shoulders and meaty, three-fingered hands. He was
naked but for a bulletproof apron and a giant helmet of tinted
glass. A patchwork of greyish pink skin and short black fur covered
his bulging muscles. He looked like a visitor from another
planet.

A Taur, Six thought.
They have them at checkpoints now.

Six had heard about
Taurs, but had never seen one. They were violent, hulking creatures
grown from human embryos infused with cattle DNA. Fewer than one
hundred had been made, and all were sent to the mines on the
western side of the City, where they ripped out the remaining coal
and oil at depths the human body wouldn't withstand. Their skin was
fireproof and probably bulletproof. Six guessed that the earth must
finally be empty, and the Taurs who had survived the fumes and
pressure had been put to work elsewhere.

ChaoSonic's promotional
material said that they were three times as heavy as "purebred"
humans, but twice as fast and four times as strong. Six had also
heard that they were fairly stupid, but he had never been able to
confirm this.

If his triple C was
rejected, his usual backup plan was to beat up the guards and run
to the nearest subway entrance, where the drones wouldn't be able
to follow him. But he couldn't outrun or outfight a Taur. He could
only hope that the card would work.

Only eight people stood
between him and the checkpoint. He would find out soon.

Someone shouted up
ahead. Peering over the shoulder of the person in front of him, Six
saw that the three cockroaches had aimed their shotguns at a wiry,
dark-haired man.

Six gasped. It was
Agent Two of Hearts.

* * *

'Wait,' Agent Two said,
his hands raised. 'There must be some mistake.'

'Counterfeit
identification is a serious offense,' one of the cockroaches
said.

The Taur growled. Twin
streaks of steam appeared on the inside of its helmet.

Six watched the
commotion, heart pounding. If he did nothing, Two would almost
certainly be arrested, tortured and executed. But if he tried to
intervene, they might both die.

'If you'll just check
again...' Two began.

'Lie down on the
ground,' the cockroach said. 'Now.'

Two fell to his knees,
defeated.

I can't let them do
this, Six thought.

He drew a Hawk 9mm
semi-automatic pistol from under his trench coat. The woman behind
him screamed. He ignored her, taking aim at a dark shadow in the
foggy sky, and pulled the trigger.

The gun kicked in his
hand, over and over until only one bullet remained. The shots
echoed around the street as the other pedestrians ducked and
shouted. The cockroaches whirled around to face Six. The Taur
raised its giant arms like a weight-lifter. Six could just make out
a pair of giant black eyes behind the tinted visor.

Two was quick. He
launched himself at the nearest guard, fracturing the proboscis
with a brutal head butt even as he wrestled the shotgun out of his
hands. The other cockroach took aim at Two, but couldn't shoot him
without hitting his colleague.

The aerial drone
wheeled down out of the sky, smoke puffing from the bullet holes,
and slammed into the road on the other side of the checkpoint. The
impact distracted the second cockroach, but the Taur didn't even
look. It thumped toward Six like a rampaging elephant, shoving
people out of its way with its mighty paws.

Six turned and ran back
the way he had come. He caught up to the rest of the crowd without
difficulty, but he wasn't fast enough to outrun the Taur. He could
hear its massive feet thudding across the asphalt toward him,
closer and closer...

He had one bullet left.
He trained his pistol on the third-floor window of a nearby office
building, and pulled the trigger.

A spiderweb of cracks
spread across the glass. Six sprinted toward the building, taking
longer and longer strides, and then he launched himself into the
air.

The wind blustered in
his ears as he sailed through the fog, keeping his feet forward and
shielding his face with his arms. The window was too high for the
Taur to reach – he hoped it wasn't also too high for him to jump
to.

Smash!
Six plunged through the glass
and tumbled onto the plush blue carpet. His clothes jingled as he
stood and shook the broken glass out of them.

A forest of desks and
chairs surrounded him. The office was deserted, but the computer
monitors were all switched on. A few half-empty coffee mugs
decorated the desks. The employees must have fled when the bullet
struck the window.

Six ran over to the
polished titanium door, and pulled on the handle. Locked. A swipe
card reader was mounted on the wall. He would need an access card
to get out this way. But there must be a fire exit somewhere.

Something metal
shrieked outside the window. By the time Six worked out what it
sounded like – a skip bin being dragged across the concrete – the
Taur's enormous hand had already appeared on the window sill. It
was climbing up after him.

Six looked around for
something he could use to fight the monster. The chairs and desks
would bounce off its flesh without slowing it down. The kitchen had
a kettle, but there was no steam above the nozzle. Burning it
wasn't an option.

A second three-fingered
hand gripped the sill. Six was running out of time.

A brown leather jacket
was draped over a nearby chair. Six shrugged off his trench coat,
unhooked his respiration filter and threw them both across the
room. Then he pulled on the jacket and hid behind one of the
desks.

He heard the Taur haul
itself through the window and stand up. The floor creaked under its
weight. He could hear its helmet scraping the ceiling as it
walked.

It won't see me, Six
told himself. It'll walk right past.

The beast shuffled
closer and closer. Broken glass crunched under its feet. Six could
hear it snuffling like a bloodhound.

Suddenly the desk Six
was crouched behind vanished, swept aside so fast that Six didn't
know where it had gone until he heard it shatter against the far
wall.

The Taur loomed over
Six, peering down at him like a child inspecting an ant. Six didn't
need to hide his terror.

'Please,' he said. 'I
just work here. Please don't hurt me!'

The Taur squeezed the
hem of the stolen jacket between its massive fingers. Then it
looked at the trail of broken glass, leading all the way from Six's
feet back to the window.

It's smarter than it
looks, Six thought.

The Taur looked back at
Six. Its wet black eyes met his.

It gave him a barely
perceptible nod.

Then it let him go and
walked away.

Six watched the Taur
rip through the titanium door as though it were made of rice paper.
It disappeared through the doorway.