Authors: Jack Heath
A countdown started automatically in his head, recording the number of seconds remaining before the patrolling soldier would spot him.
Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four…Six didn’t panic. He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the guard opening the doors. The guard had reached down, pushed the button, and the doors had opened immediately.
Six looked at the button panel. There were no other buttons on it. He pushed it again, and the orange light blinked again. The doors still didn’t open.
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…
He rewound his memory. Before the soldier pushed the button, what did he do?
Nothing. He was standing there, then he put his hand to his ear, then he pushed the button, then the doors opened. Was the order he’d received significant? Was it a message from someone in control—someone who’d disarmed the doors so they could be opened?
The patrolling soldier was walking alongside the adjacent wall, getting closer and closer to the corner. When he reached it in perhaps ten seconds, he would see Six. Give him another three, maybe, to determine that Six wasn’t the door guard. Another two to raise the alarm, then one to fire.
Eight, seven, six…
Six looked around for a hiding place. The plane was too exposed; the soldiers would see him moving towards it. There was no way back up to the roof—he had no grappling hook to go with his climbing rope, and it would take too long to improvise one.
Six slid the two halves of his quarterstaff out from under the straps on his back and clicked them together smoothly. If he ran towards the patroller, he might be able to knock him out before he could raise the alarm. He dropped into a sprinter’s crouch.
The doors slid open behind him, and Six dived backward through them without even checking what was on the other side.
The doors slid shut a moment later. Six disassembled the quarterstaff as he took a look around. Now he saw why the doors had not opened for him immediately. He was in an elevator.
There were no buttons inside. Apparently the elevator only traveled between this floor and the one below. This made Six
nervous—the fewer floors there were, the more likely it was that there would be someone on the other side of the doors when they opened. He scanned the elevator for a hiding place, but except for the doors it was a featureless cadmium box. The ceiling was a single plate of stainless steel with a coin-size puncture in it, containing a low-watt bulb. The corners were—
Six flattened himself to the floor and dragged himself back to the wall. There was a tiny surveillance camera in the corner, pointed at the doors. He had been standing right in front of it. He hoped that he hadn’t noticed it too late. A monitor somewhere would have displayed an image of him as he jumped backward into the elevator. He could only hope that no one had been watching.
The elevator hadn’t stopped, which was a good sign.
If I’d been spotted
, Six thought,
surely they would stop the elevator. Or they could just mobilize the troops outside the doors on whichever floor the elevator is headed to.
Six reattached the halves of his quarterstaff and passed it to his left hand, drawing his pistol with his right. He rose into a crouch, carefully staying below the camera’s field of vision. This was his worst nightmare—outnumbered and outgunned in an enclosed space with no escape routes. He could feel the elevator slowing as it approached its destination.
It stopped. The doors slid open.
No one was standing on the other side.
Six darted out as quickly as he could, away from the camera.
He was at the end of a narrow corridor, the walls almost invisible behind racks upon racks of equipment. Helmets were closest to him, hundreds of polished black domes on wall hooks, their expressionless dark visors staring into the corridor. Beyond
them were rifles; neat rows of identical Eagle OI779s nestled side by side, ready to be pulled out and used. Six touched the pad on the butt of one of them, switching on the tiny display screen on the stock. The gun was fully loaded. Eighty rounds.
Six switched off the gun and kept walking. There was a grid of spare magazines, at least a thousand resting on the shelves. Beyond that there was a pipe with belts hanging from it, each fully equipped with the weaponry Six had seen on the soldier in the apartment building: one Feather knife, one fully loaded Raptor sidearm, a string of six PGC387 grenades. But the remotes weren’t attached, he saw.
Six now knew more or less what he was looking at. When they were being sent into the field, the soldiers would be funneled through this corridor. They’d grab their weapon belts, their spare magazines, their Eagle automatics, and then throw on their helmets before piling into the elevator and heading for the surface.
Not all the equipment was here, Six noted. The soldiers would need clothes, boots, earpieces. They probably kept those near where they slept.
He was nearing the end of the corridor, and he peeked around the corner. As if reality were mimicking his thoughts, he saw three men asleep in a column of bunks, all lying flat upon their backs, their feet pointed towards him. Six watched them for a moment, checking for movement. There was none. They appeared to be fast asleep.
He edged around the corner, keeping his breaths shallow and quiet. He looked past the column of bunks and saw another. Two women and a man, fast asleep, identical posture. Another column: three men. None moving.
As Six walked forward, he saw that he was no longer in the
armory. There was at least a hundred bunks, each holding a sleeping man or woman, stretching into the distance.
He had found the barracks.
Six eyed the aisle between the bunks apprehensively. He could be quiet when he wanted to be. He could sneak up on someone better than anyone else he knew. But it was one thing to slip by a guard when he or she was looking the other way, and quite another to tiptoe eighty meters past a hundred soldiers as they slept.
Nevertheless, that was what he was going to have to do. The layout to this facility seemed to be very linear—so far there had been only two doors per room. He had been forced to come this way, and even if doubling back were an option, it wouldn’t help him find Kyntak.
Six took a deep breath and started to move through the room.
None of the soldiers stirred as he passed. He assumed that most of them must be fairly deep sleepers—the room was air-conditioned to a cool fifteen degrees Celsius, and none of them had blankets—they were covered only by thin cotton undergarments. The lights were on too. The whole hall was bathed in a fluorescent bluish glow, casting sharp indigo shadows of the bunks onto the bald cement floor. But all the soldiers were faceup, and none wore blindfolds.
Six noted that almost a third of the sleeping soldiers were female. This seemed unusual to him. More than ninety-five percent of the soldiers in the City were male. There were still plenty of jobs for women in ChaoSonic security and various private armies, but they were usually strategic, administrative, or medical. Six wondered why Vanish had so many women in the infantry.
He couldn’t imagine the organization caring about equal-opportunity employment.
Six was halfway across the barracks when he saw an empty bunk ahead. One of the soldiers wasn’t in bed.
Six caught the eye of the soldier as he stood up beside the bunk. He had removed his armor and was wearing the same cotton undergarments as the sleeping soldiers. His shirt was in one hand, his pants were dangling from the other.
He stared at Six in astonishment for a fraction of a second that seemed to last an eternity. Then they both moved at the same time, Six starting forward, raising his quarterstaff, and the soldier grabbing the strut of one of the bunks and swinging his legs out.
Six ducked under the flying kick and whirled back to face the soldier, quarterstaff first. The soldier blocked the blow by raising his forearm above his head and he drew his other arm in close to his body, ready to parry any punches Six threw at him.
Six swung around and kicked him behind the knee. The soldier’s leg collapsed and he slipped backward to the floor. On his way down he tugged Six’s Owl from its holster. Six saw it fall too late to catch it. It dropped into the soldier’s waiting hand.
Six slid aside swiftly as the soldier hit the floor and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet crashing into the ceiling. He fired a second shot immediately, and a puff of foam exploded into the air as it hit the side of a top-bunk mattress; Six guessed that both bullets had been intended for his abdomen. Soldiers often aimed first, then fired three shots before aiming again. This one hadn’t had much time to line up his shot, but he’d still fired two before realizing that Six had moved.
His reflexes didn’t seem as quick as those of the other troops
Six had fought today—but he had been caught by surprise, and he was in his pajamas.
Six slammed his foot down on the soldier’s gun hand, pinning it to the floor. The soldier howled as one of his metacarpal bones cracked and the gun fell from his wriggling fingers.
Six quickly slapped his palm over the soldier’s mouth and drove the index finger of his other hand into the flesh behind the soldier’s ear. The soldier went limp instantly. Six lifted the man’s eyelid with his fingers. The pupil didn’t contract. He was unconscious.
Six stood up immediately and lifted his quarterstaff. There were no soldiers in the aisle between him and the armory. He turned to face the other way. No one there, either.
He frowned, heart still thumping in his chest. Was it possible that not a single person in the entire barracks had been woken up by all that scuffling and two gunshots?
He stood on tiptoes so he could see all the bunks. The soldiers were lying exactly as they had been before. No one was rubbing their eyes or sitting up. No one had even rolled over.
Six knelt beside the nearest bunk and poked the soldier there gently. No movement. He prodded him again, harder. He didn’t react at all. Six’s eyes widened as a drop of blood appeared on the soldier’s undershirt; Six rolled it back to expose his stomach. It was unmarked, but as he looked at it, a drop of blood appeared in the same spot. He looked up; a red stain was spreading across the underside of the mattress above, and blood was dripping from it onto the bunk underneath.
He stood up, and saw that the second shot the soldier had fired had not only punctured the mattress; it had clipped the thigh of the mattress’s occupant.
An occupant who was still
asleep
?
Six had the sudden overwhelming sense that everyone in the room was dead, that he’d been sneaking past rows of corpses rather than sleeping troops. He touched his fingers to the throat of the soldier with the wounded thigh.
Yes, there was a pulse.
So what’s going on?
Six thought.
Who sleeps through a gunshot wound?
He tore the man’s shirt into strips and started tying them around the injury. The bullet had gone straight through and had missed the femoral artery, so it was easy enough to stem the blood flow. He looked around the room. Some of the unconscious soldiers were lying with their eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Only now did Six notice that every bunk had a synthetic rubber holster clipped to its side. In each holster was a remote. He lifted out the one closest to him and examined it. It was identical to the one he’d found at the Timeout, with the same four buttons.
SYNCAL
,
ACCELERANT
,
MORPHINE
, and
LOCATOR ON
/
OFF
.
Six had seen the equipment the soldiers had: guns, clothes, knives, ammunition, earpieces. Nothing that needed a remote control, certainly not one with those buttons. So why would every single soldier need one?
A piece of the puzzle resurfaced suddenly in Six’s brain. Vanish, or one of the people who had used that title, had been a nanotechnology expert.
He used to be a scientist
, Shuji had said. And Ace had told him that Syncal, the fluid in the tranq gun he’d been shot with, was a sedative. Enough to put most people in a coma, she’d said, but creating a refreshingly deep sleep in small doses.
Six was no nanotech expert himself, but he knew the basic principle of nanotechnology—microscopic robots, sometimes injected into the bloodstream for medical reasons. Could these robots each be given a tiny sensor and a capsule filled with
chemicals? Syncal or morphine, ready to be pumped into the bloodstream when a button on a remote was pushed?
Six had never heard of it being done, but he was sure that it was possible. And it made more sense than any other explanation he could come up with. Vanish’s soldiers all had nanomachines in their bodies, controlled by the remotes they always carried. He knew that Syncal could put people in a deep enough sleep to ignore a gunshot wound, and morphine was one of the strongest known painkillers. A soldier-locator that couldn’t be removed would be invaluable to field troops, and while Six didn’t know exactly what an “accelerant” was, he was betting that it could explain the abnormally fast reflexes he’d observed. Possibly the high percentages of women, too—gender wouldn’t matter much if drugs were being used to enhance ability. The soldier Six had just fought hadn’t been expecting a fight and hadn’t had his remote within reach. He’d seemed like a normal, if well-trained, soldier.
Six thought back to the soldiers who’d been captured and taken to the Deck. They’d been unconscious much too long, and Ace found Syncal in their bloodstreams. What if the soldiers had dosed themselves up with their remotes? Or, more likely, a signal had been broadcast from here, or from a satellite, knocking them out so they couldn’t be interrogated by their captors? If Vanish had access to an orbiting transmitter or a broadcasting tower, troops could be reclaimed by switching on the locator function in their nanomachines, hitting the
SYNCAL
button, and sending out a rescue team to recover the sleeping bodies.
He recalled the document he’d read about ChaoSonic capturing the man they believed to be Vanish, who’d wounded himself to get to the emergency room. The writer hadn’t known how the Vanish troops had found the facility holding their leader, but now Six thought he did.