Authors: Jack Heath
As soon as his palms hit the concrete he kicked his legs backward, but it was a blind strike and his feet didn’t connect. Trying to predict the actions of the soldier who’d hit him, he rolled aside—his instincts were good, and a Syncal dart snapped down into the ground where he had just been. Six lay faceup as the soldier readjusted his aim. At Six’s heart.
Tough break
, Six thought as he pointed his remote at the
soldier and clicked. The soldier fell like a puppet whose strings had snapped, smacking lifelessly down onto the floor.
Six scrambled to his feet, picking up his AM-92 and that of the fallen soldier. Then he aimed them both across the room. He lined up the sights of the first at the soldier Kyntak was currently battling, and of the second at the soldier approaching Kyntak from behind.
Bang! Bang!
Both the soldiers fell, and Kyntak looked around, confused. Six waved before turning to face the remaining soldiers.
Three had retreated back into the stairwell, presumably to wake up reinforcements from the barracks, but five stood their ground beside the doorway. Six stepped aside as a dart zipped past, and then fired the AM-92s again.
Bang, bang
—two down. Kyntak was coming out of a dive-roll towards the two troops closest to him, and he landed in a firing crouch, holding out his remote. The soldiers fell limply.
The remaining soldier had dived to one side to avoid Six’s shots and was out of Kyntak’s range. She aimed at Six as she rose to her feet, her gun arm as steady as a rock, and pulled the trigger.
Six saw the dart coming, but didn’t have time to throw himself out of the way. Instead, he reached up and caught it, stopping its flight only centimeters away from his shoulder. Then he threw it back as hard as he could, striking the soldier on the inner shin. She doubled over, half reaching for it, the accelerant in her blood fighting the Syncal for control—then she slumped to the ground.
“I could get used to this ‘accelerant’ stuff,” Kyntak said, flexing his muscles. “Do you think we could take some with us?”
“No,” Six said, walking back to the nanomachine factory cube. He picked up two more AM-92s as he went, and hooked
them into his belt. “It’s bad for you.” He looked at his watch—it was 05:51:22. It seemed years ago that he had been raiding a warehouse looking for Nai, but it had been less than twenty-four hours.
“Not as bad for you as getting killed in battle because you were too slow,” Kyntak said. “And if we—wait, what are you doing?”
Six was leaning up against the giant cube, trying to push it. He had felt it move a centimeter—which meant it wasn’t bolted to the ground. “Moving this to cover the doorway. Shut up and help.”
“Earth to Six,” Kyntak said. “That doorway is our escape route. It leads to the surface.”
“No it doesn’t,” Six said, grunting as he pushed the cube. It crackled as it slid slowly across the gritty concrete. “It leads to a hundred freshly woken soldiers, who are being pumped up with accelerant as we speak, and who will soon be coming down this stairwell to get us.”
“If we block the doorway now, how are we supposed to get out?” Kyntak demanded. “You think they’ll just forget we’re down here and leave?”
“I have a plan,” Six said. “Now, are you going to stand there whining, or are you going to help me push?”
Kyntak braced his arms against the cube. It started to grind steadily across the floor. “This plan,” he said. “It had better not involve running, falling, fighting, explosions, or gunfire, because I’ve had enough of those for one day.”
They had barely moved the cube to cover the doorway when Six heard a thumping from the other side. He could dimly make out the silhouettes of Vanish’s soldiers pounding their fists against the glass. He had hoped that they would show concern for the
safety of the equipment, and would be hesitant to try breaking through it. No such luck. But his second instinct had been correct. Because the glass cube had to be airtight and vacuum-sealed, it was structurally solid and the glass was very thick.
The pounding ceased for a moment. Six saw a muzzle flash and heard the dim report of an Owl being fired at the glass, which didn’t break. Good.
Six knew that if he and Kyntak had been able to push the cube all this way, a group of the soldiers would be able to push it back without too much difficulty, and it wouldn’t take them long to think of it. He ran over to the giant mechanical spider which had been working on the hollowed-out bus—it was now lying prone across the two remaining wheels, apparently having been shut down when the alert was sounded.
Six hit the power button. A few eyelike lenses clicked sleepily open. He looked at the keypad—the controls seemed reasonably straightforward. He pressed a few keys, and the spider lifted the bus, rotated it so it was the right way up, and put it back down. Six touched four more buttons and the spider extended a long steel claw, pushing the bus across the room towards the cube. It stopped a few meters short, and Six didn’t think he’d be able to get the spider to relocate and keep pushing, so he hit the power switch again and ran over to the bus, beckoning to Kyntak.
They pushed it up against the glass cube, adding its weight to the barrier. The thumps on the other side had stopped—Six hoped that the soldiers’ next strategy would be pushing rather than something he hadn’t foreseen.
“Now what?” Kyntak asked.
Six walked over to an electrical generator and started to unscrew the bolts on one side of it with his Feather knife. A metal plate came free as he pulled, exposing the inner workings. Wires
and cords were tangled everywhere—Six ignored them. In moments he had found what he was looking for—a vacuum tube. He pulled it free and rested it on the ground. There was a heavy coil of iron built into the inside wall, which he unscrewed and pulled free.
Six left the vacuum tube and the iron coil on the floor and went over to a bomb-making chamber. First he removed the ChaoPull—a device for sucking air out of a sealed chamber. Then he punched the shatterproof glass, cracking it, and ripped the pane from its rubber seal. He grabbed the lump of grey plastic: C-4, he now realized.
Kyntak gaped. “What are you making? An explosive-powered radio?”
Six was stuffing the C-4 into the vacuum tube. “The soldiers outnumber us—and as long as their nanomachines function, they’ll have the edge.”
Comprehension dawned in Kyntak’s eyes. “You think you can make an electromagnetic pulse bomb out of these scavenged parts. You think that if you set it off, the nanomachines will short out. Not only that, but you think that instead of pumping all of the Syncal, morphine, and accelerant into their systems and therefore either supercharging all the soldiers or killing them—and us, come to think of it—the nanos will become inert, and the accelerant will wear off. Then we’ll be able to move the bus and the cube, fight our way through the hundred or so soldiers, and walk out of here alive.” He paused. “Is that the plan, more or less?”
Six looked up as he was screwing the iron coil onto the vacuum tube. “You have a problem with that?”
“Heck no,” Kyntak said. “With you all the way.”
A fuse
, Six thought.
I’ll need a fuse, and some cover.
He went back to the electrical generator. “For the record, there’s more to
this plan than just the EMP,” he said, pulling out wires. “We’re going to create a distraction to draw troops away from this floor. I need to radio out before the EMP fries all the transmitters in the building. Does the radio in your helmet work?”
Kyntak pulled it off and tossed it to him. “It’s short-range radio—you can’t contact the Deck with it.”
“Watch me,” Six said, fiddling with the frequency and putting the helmet on. He muttered a few words, then took it off and threw it back. “This is what I want you to say.”
The mobile phone groaned, vibrating its way slowly across the QS’s desk. She hit
SAVE
on her computer menu and picked the phone up, staring at the screen.
Caller: unknown.
That was unusual—unprecedented, even. This was her personal cell phone. She kept her work and personal life completely separate. That way she didn’t need to surround herself with security at home. Only her husband and his daughter had this number, and neither of them had blocked their caller ID. More to the point, the phone was rigged with a descrambler that should theoretically reveal the identity of the caller even if he or she had blocked it. Whoever was calling her had more sophisticated encryption than her decryption, which she had thought would be impossible.
That rules out a wrong number
, she thought.
And it probably means that the cell phone won’t be able to record the call.
She wanted to see who it was; in fact, she needed to. This marked a security breach, and one that couldn’t be investigated unless she answered. But she wanted the conversation recorded.
She had a minidisk recorder in her desk. She slipped the mike into a groove she’d cut into the phone. It should record the actual sound rather than the signal. It would be good enough.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“The Joker,” came the whisper. “Authorization code one seven one two one nine seven five. You can confirm that with any of the Queens and Kings of Hearts and Diamonds, but I’ll change it very soon. I needn’t tell you that I wouldn’t be calling you except under dire circumstances.”
That can’t really be one of the Jokers
, she thought.
What “dire circumstances” could there be? But no good will come of contradicting him—keep him talking. Collect info.
“How did you get this number?” she demanded.
“I’ve tracked down harder things than that. You don’t believe me—I would expect no less until you’ve confirmed the code. But do it later. I have information for you.”
“What kind of information?”
“An agent and an employee will soon be in need of immediate evacuation from a hot zone. Agent Six of Hearts and Kyntak.”
The QS gripped the side of her desk. “Where?”
“A warehouse near an airfield—you’ll see the coordinates at http://cww.prog91167/sim23053306.ds.”
“What do you mean,
hot zone
?” the QS asked. “What kind of hostiles, and how many?”
“Private army, at least two hundred strong, probably heavily armed, but they’ll be disoriented, due to a situation that Six will brief you on later. More soldiers will arrive soon, perhaps as many again, but they’re not reinforcements—they’ll create confusion and panic.”
“Are you going to tell me exactly what is going on?” the QS demanded.
“The decisions are not yours to make—you are to follow my instructions.” The voice was even, cold. “Validate the code I gave you. Get as many agents as you can and go to the warehouse, but stay outside the perimeter. When Six and Kyntak come out, evacuate them. Be invisible. Don’t get caught in the cross fire. Understand?”
“Will they want to be evacuated?” the QS asked. “My troops have orders to arrest Agent Six of Hearts, and he knows it.”
“The evidence against him was fabricated in order to sabotage his investigation. He resisted arrest under my orders. Argue protocol later—you will be needed soon.”
The line clicked dead. The QS placed her phone gently on the desk, rubbed her temples for five seconds, and then picked up the landline to dial King of Hearts.
“So if the Deck agents are being invisible,” Kyntak said, as he threw the helmet back to Six, “then who’s the distraction? Who’s going to break in and save us?”
Six had removed a battery from the first fallen gun he had found, and was now pressing the metal nodules against his tongue. A tangy, hot tingling raced across his taste buds, and he withdrew the battery hastily. It was fully charged. Excellent.
He jammed the helmet back onto his head and recited another phone number to Harry as he stuck the ends of the wires into the lump of C-4 inside the vacuum tube and used the ChaoPull to remove the air from it. He beckoned to Kyntak and they left the improvised EMP device on the floor and ran to stand behind the tank.
“
I am connecting you to that number now, Agent Six of Hearts
,” Harry said in Six’s radio.
“When the Deck agents arrive, get out of their way,” Six told him, “and cloak so no one sees you.”
“Seriously,” Kyntak said, still waiting for the answer. “Who you gonna call?”
The line clicked, and a voice answered.
“Serfie Thaldurken.”
“I know the location of Vanish’s base of operations,” Six said. “And I know that he’s trapped there right now. I got your number from a dossier you wrote about him, and thought that you might be interested.”
“Who is this?”
“Your enemy’s enemy,” said Six. “Listen carefully…”
Six told Thaldurken most of the things he had learned about Vanish since reading the dossier. Not just the nanomachines and the body switching, but also further details about his past crimes: that Vanish had purchased a bot from Earle Shuji, now destroyed, and that he had broken into the Lab to steal Chelsea Tridya’s drug.
He didn’t reveal that he himself worked for the Deck, or that he was one of the Project Falcon kids. He also left out the parts about the self-replicating telomeres and the clone in the cell. The last thing he wanted was ChaoSonic abducting the clone and starting its super-soldier project all over again.
He listed the information he knew about the facility and its inhabitants. Thaldurken seemed keen to let him talk—probably so the call could be traced. That didn’t bother Six. Even if the trace was better than Harry’s shielding mechanism, it would just lead ChaoSonic forces to the facility, which was exactly where he wanted them to be.
“If I were you, I’d get to the facility ASAP,” Six finished. “Something tells me Vanish isn’t going to be there for much longer.” He terminated the call before Thaldurken could say anything else.
Six knew that he and Kyntak could never fight their way out
through so many Vanish commandos. And there was nowhere to hide, which ruled out his usual strategy. So the plan was to give those troops bigger problems to worry about. If the base was being attacked by ChaoSonic forces, hopefully the two of them could get out during the confusion.
The battery was in his left hand and the wires leading to the vacuum tube filled with C-4 were clenched in his right. He peered out around the edge of the tank, looking at the tube on the floor, and trying to calculate which direction it would fly off in when the plastic explosive inside detonated.
Impossible to tell
, he thought—
it’s completely sealed. I hope it doesn’t crack. That will fragment the pulse and make it useless.
A large enough EMP would short out any electronic device switched on within its blast radius. Six hoped it would kill the nanomachines. But even if it didn’t, it would shut down all the remote controls. That would be almost as good. Vanish’s soldiers would no longer have the advantage.
“Are you ready?” he asked Kyntak.
Kyntak put his fingers in his ears. “Why do I get the feeling that this is going to hurt?”
“Here goes nothing,” Six said. He jammed the wires against the nodule on the battery.
Nothing happened.
Six frowned. What had he done wrong? The battery was charged, the wires were embedded in the C-4, no air was in the tube, the coil was firmly attached. Why hadn’t the EMP gone off? He tapped the wires against the battery a few more times.
“Six,” Kyntak said, pointing at the battery, “that side’s positive; the other side’s negative.”
Six grudgingly turned the battery over and held the wires near the correct nodule.
“Where would you be without me?” Kyntak asked smugly.
Six touched the wires to the metal.
With a noise like a giant champagne cork being popped, the vacuum tube exploded upward, slamming into the roof of the warehouse. The wires burst out the end, cracking backward towards Six and Kyntak like a burning bullwhip. They both spasmed as the EMP fried the microscopic circuits in their nanomachines, blasting throbs of electricity through their arteries.
The vacuum tube clanked to the ground and the burning wires twisted slowly down through the air like streamers at a party.
Kyntak raised an eyebrow. “Okay, that was pretty cool.”
Six picked up the remote and reattached the battery. He pointed it at himself and clicked
ACCELERANT
.
Nothing happened. He waved a hand in front of his face and it appeared to move at normal speed. He pointed the remote at Kyntak and pushed
SYNCAL
.
“Hey!” Kyntak yelled, snatching it away from Six. He didn’t fall asleep, and it looked like his limbs were responding normally.
“Well, it worked on us,” Six said, dropping the remote. “Now let’s just hope it worked on the guys outside.”
Six walked over to the glass cube, sandwiched between the doorway and the bus. He could no longer see the silhouettes on the other side; either the soldiers had given up and gone away or, more likely, they were momentarily stunned by the EMP. From now on they would be functioning without accelerant, morphine, or locators. He and Kyntak might make it out alive after all.
Kyntak was approaching behind him. “Well done for making it this far, but there’s one part of your insane plan I still don’t quite get. Why’d you call the psychoanalyst? Isn’t the presence of
ChaoSonic soldiers going to make it harder for us to walk out of here, rather than easier?”
Six turned to survey the room again. His eyes settled on the almost-finished tank. “Who said anything about walking?” he asked.
The controls were nothing like those of a car. Six didn’t know what the cabin of a tank was supposed to look like, but the interior seemed new. Vanish had probably designed his own control mechanism. There were two levers with a wheel in between, and Six had spent almost a full minute trying to move the tank using the wheel before realizing that it was probably designed to aim the gun, which hadn’t been completely built yet. After that it only took him a moment to establish that the two levers controlled the treads on either side. He could make the tank roll forward by pushing them both and backward by pulling them, and he could rotate the tank on the spot by pulling one and pushing the other.
This seemed to be the first time the tank had been switched on, which made sense given that it was incomplete. The EMP hadn’t busted any of its circuits, but the downside was that Six had no idea which functions would work and which wouldn’t. The missing gun wasn’t the only handicap. The interior had no seats, so Six had to operate the controls standing up. There was no lock on the inside of the roof hatch. If someone outside wanted to open it, all they would have to do was pull. The screen for observing the outside world wasn’t connected to any digi-cams, so Six had to make do with the narrow view through the dark strip of bulletproof glass that circled the cabin. Kyntak was providing additional surveillance—he was currently testing a pull-down periscope he’d found.
But it was still a tank—and Six was confident that it could take them out.
They had pushed the bus out of the way. Now only the nanomachine-manufacturing cube stood between them and the stairwell. They had decided not to move it—pushing it aside would leave a gap wide enough for soldiers to pour through long before it was wide enough to drive the tank past. Besides, the cube was made of glass—thick enough to repel bullets, but not to stop a tank. And ChaoSonic soldiers would be arriving any second—Six knew that the nanotechnology was not much safer in ChaoSonic hands than in Vanish’s.
“Ready?” he called to Kyntak. He could feel the engine growling beneath his feet.
“Ready,” Kyntak said. He gripped the sides of the periscope with both hands—the closest thing possible to bracing himself in the seatless cabin.
Six threw both levers ahead, and the front of the tank lifted slightly off the concrete as the treads spun into motion. Six braced his feet against the floor as he leaned forward, making sure that the momentum didn’t throw him over backward or weaken his grip on the levers. Dust and grit exploded out from under the tank as it thundered towards the glass cube. Six watched it rush up to the nose of the tank through the darkened glass.
The wall of the cube didn’t shatter; it cracked into jagged splinters, and the tank bounced slightly backward. Six was hurled against the controls, and he used the extra momentum to push the levers as hard as he could. The treads kept whirring underneath the tank, and it shoved against the glass, bending the fragments inward with an earsplitting creak. Soon they were crumbling to the floor and the tank crushed them under the treads.
“Are you okay?” Six yelled back as he plowed the tank through the matrix of machinery inside the cube and slammed it against the opposite panel of glass.
“I’m fine,” Kyntak shouted. “Keep going!”
Through the web of cracks in the remaining pane, Six saw the soldiers raising their guns as they retreated. Sparks exploded out from the nose of the tank as it scraped against the shuddering glass.
The drive through the first panel had taken away too much momentum. Six pulled both levers back, and the treads shrieked as they changed direction. The tank rolled backward until it was half-outside the cube, spitting shreds of machinery from underneath as it went.
The soldiers were apparently smart enough to realize that Six and Kyntak weren’t giving in—the tank was taking a run-up. They started to flee up the concrete stairs. Six threw the levers forward, the giant motor roared beneath him, and the tank thundered across the debris-strewn floor.
This time the glass did shatter. Huge blades of it exploded out into the stairwell, and the tank smashed through, knocking out chunks from the sides of the doorway as it went. Bullets crashed against the steel roof, fired by the soldiers on the flight above. Kyntak left the periscope and stumbled across the cabin to the hatch, where he employed all his weight to keep it firmly closed.
Good instinct
, Six thought as the gunfire stopped and he heard boots land on the roof of the tank.
They know they can’t penetrate it with weapons, so now they’ll try to board us.
“What are you waiting for?” Kyntak demanded, dragging the hatch down as hostile fingers pried at it from above. “Let’s go!”
Six slammed the levers against the panel, and the tank
lurched on towards the staircase. He heard stumbling from above as the soldiers on the roof lost their balance. “Hang on,” he yelled back to Kyntak as the treads reached the steps.
The whole cabin lurched as the tank mounted the concrete stairs, treads clanking as they fought for grip. Six heard panicked screams as the soldiers who’d been trying to pull open the hatch flew backward off the roof. The first step crunched when the weight of the tank cracked it, but there was more concrete underneath; the stairs were climbable. Six crouched with his knees bent, the balls of his feet pressed against the lopsided floor of the cabin as if he were waiting for the starter pistol. His knuckles were white around the control levers.
The staircase was huge, but only just wide enough for the tank. Sparks flew off the stairwell wall as the armored shell scraped past. The tank ground its way to the top of the flight of stairs, and Six heard bullets ricocheting off the hull once again. He ignored them—he was headed for the wall.
Turn left!
He pulled the left lever back, but kept the right as far forward as it could go—the tank spun left with surprising agility, turning towards the next flight of stairs. The right treads mounted the wall and tilted the cabin sideways—Six pulled the left lever back even farther, making the left treads roll backward. The ground shivered as the tank smacked down onto the landing with a thud.
The motor growled in anticipation as Six rotated the tank to face the next flight. The bullets rained down from above and star-bursts of sparks fizzed near the window. Wasting no time, Six pushed the levers against their hinges again, and the tank thundered up the second flight of stairs, cement dust shooting out from under it as it went.
Six thought back to his original journey down these stairs. There had been four flights. The tank lurched as it reached the second landing—two to go.
Kyntak was looking into the periscope. Suddenly he staggered backward and grabbed the hatch again. “Six,” he roared. “Incoming!”
A pair of boots landed on the roof, and footsteps clanked above Six’s head. He pulled the right lever back and thrust the left one forward, spinning the tank to the right, and then pulled them both back, reversing into the wall. The cabin shook and the concrete gave way with a crack; Six heard the thumps as the soldier stumbled backward and hit the wall. He shoved both levers forward again, and the tank climbed the third flight of stairs.
A trench was splintering its way up the wall. The stairwell was crumbling. Sturdy though the steps were, they had been designed to carry people, not tanks. Six kept the treads spinning as fast as they would go, and the tank bounced upward as the concrete cracked beneath it. It mounted the third landing, and Six turned it around again. He couldn’t see the last landing and the doorway through the narrow window, but he knew the soldiers must be on it. The hail of bullets chipping the nose of the tank had intensified.
Why haven’t they retreated through the door to the barracks?
he wondered. That could be much more easily defended than this last landing, and they’d be closer to the armory. Without heavier artillery they had no hope of stopping the tank.
But if they didn’t want to retreat to a more easily defended location, that wasn’t his problem. He jammed the levers forward, and the tank clambered up the first few steps of the last flight.
An ominous creaking noise reached Six’s ears, muffled by
the tank’s thick shell. He saw the stairs shudder, and a chunk of concrete snapped off the side of the stairs and tumbled down into the dusty darkness. Six’s instinct was to reverse—this flight of stairs wasn’t solid—but he knew their best chance was to drive up it quickly, before it had a chance to collapse completely. If he drove the tank back to the third landing, the stairs might crumble anyway, leaving them trapped there.
The bullets stopped hitting the nose, and now that the tank was facing upward Six saw that the soldiers were ducking for cover as they raced through the doorway. They didn’t want to be in the stairwell when it fell to pieces under the strain.
Six gritted his teeth as he held the levers as far forward as they would go, pressing them against their hinges—he actually felt the steel bend slightly under the pressure. Chunks of the concrete wall rained down upon the roof of the tank, some small enough that they merely bounced down into the stairwell, and some so large that Six felt the cabin shake as they hit. The treads squealed as they scraped against the stairs, the motor howled as gravity dragged the tank backward, and the concrete boomed like thunder as it splintered under the tank’s weight.