by Hodden, TE
Catherine grabbed his pistol, knocking it aside so it pointed at the bins, and kicked him so hard in the groin that his eyes bulged out, and his breath escaped in a strangled wheeze. She twisted the pistol from his grip, and whipped him across the face with the grip.
He staggered back in a daze of pain.
“Right.” Catherine grabbed the guy by his collar. “Get lost.”
The mugger turned and ran.
Barney lit himself a cigarette. “See? You enjoyed that.”
Catherine shrugged, and wiped her prints from the gun, and tossed it down a drain. “Not really.”
A figure tottered around the corner into the alley.
Mister Tanaka was short, a little stocky, and impish, leaning heavily on a cane. His trousers, waistcoat and jacket, were all different tweeds. A panama hat was pulled down over tufty hair. He stared at them, with granite eyes. In the late sixties, and early seventies he had been the thief-for-hire known as the Menagerie Man.
Three cats walked at his heels. Something about them gave Catherine cold shivers. It took her a moment to realise their eyes were those of an octopus. One of the cats hissed a warning. It had a forked tongue, and venomous fangs.
“Easy,” Catherine whispered.
Tanaka smiled. “They will not attack unless I order them to. You will be quite safe as long as you do not cross me.” He glanced at Barney. “Try to activate a weapon on that dimension-suit of yours, and you will be dead before it is configured.”
“Yeah…” Catherine glanced up at the rooftops across the street from the alley, where Flintlock was watching them down the sights of her crystal-musket. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Tanaka laughed. “Oh. I see.”
“We aren’t looking for a fight,” Catherine said. She took plastic tube from her pocket. Within was the cybernetically enhanced cockroach from Wormwood’s cell. “We just want some answers.” She tossed the tube to Tanaka. “That’s your handywork, right?”
Tanaka shrugged. “Is it?”
Barney nodded. “Sure, it is. Some of the components are from local suppliers, the design is evolved from your old work, and… It has your fingerprints all over it.”
Tanaka held the tube up to the light. “I am afraid I can’t discuss my work. My customers expect a certain degree of… confidentiality.”
Catherine smiled. “It’s okay. We know who you were working for.”
Tanaka frowned a little. “Oh? Do you now?”
“Sure.” Catherine nodded. “We found it in the cell of a man called Ashley Thornwood. You might know him as¬”
Tanaka grimaced. “Wormwood.”
“Yep,” Barney said, his voice hardening. “I’ll admit, it confused me a little. I know you’re a mercenary, but I always thought your code of honour would stop you wanting to work with somebody who burned you as badly as Wormwood did in San Francisco.”
Tanaka took a deep breath. “I helped that… thing… escape?”
Catherine nodded. “We figured you might want to put that right.”
Tanaka thought for a moment. “I don’t think I ever saw who bought it. I get the feeling that the kids I saw were as under control of somebody else, as my menagerie was under my control.” His eyes narrowed. “They run their affairs through the office of Arawn International in Shibuya.” He backed away, the cats following at his heel. “It goes without saying, we never met. Understand?”
Barney nodded. “Oh yeah. We understand.”
One of the viper-cats hissed at him.
“We understand!” Barney spluttered.
Tanaka doffed his hat, and vanished around the corner.
*
The next morning, Catherine hopped off the ladder, onto a flat rooftop, and crouched low. She crept across the roof, and crept to the far side, taking cover behind the parapet wall. Barney and Flintlock crouched beside her.
Across the street was an elegantly futuristic tower block, filled with floor upon floor of rented office space. Catherine took the monocular from her pocket, and focussed on the windows for the Arawn International offices. The blinds were drawn. All of them. Because… of course they were.
She glanced at Barney. “Well, they didn’t want to make it easy.”
He laughed, and his armour folded out his helmet, and reconfigured one of his hands into a scanner. “I guess not.” He frowned behind his visor. “There’s nobody home. I mean… zero life signs. Huh. The windows are coated with a film that stops laser microphones getting a reading. None of the other offices have that, and… yeah… there’s some pretty hefty shielding in the walls. I’m countering…” He breathed out. “Well now! That is interesting!”
Flintlock rolled her eyes. “What is it?”
“They have one room dressed as an office. An empty desk, and empty filing cabinets. A cheap computer and phone for appearances, and all the other rooms are full of… some kind of computer equipment that is giving off some… weird signals.”
Flintlock glanced at the windows. “Weird like magic?” She folded out a long barrelled sniper rifle from her tattoos, and glanced through the sights. “Up there on the roof. That mast in the corner.”
Barney adjusted his aim. “That isn’t a radio mast. That is…”
Flintlock smiled. “An Ether Converter.”
Catherine swallowed. “They want to open a Schism Way?”
“No…” Flintlock adjusted her sights. “The signals are all wrong. They’re… fishing. Sending out signals, and seeing where a Schism reacts.”
Barney folded his scanner away. “So… What are they looking for?”
Catherine looked over the building. “Hack the computer and find out.”
Barney shook his head. “It’s mot connected to the internet. It can’t be hacked from outside. If we want to know what they are upto… we have to get into that building.
“Right.” Flintlock folded away her rifle. “That is a lot easier said than done.”
“I know.” Barney grinned. “Like I said…”
Catherine groaned. “We wouldn’t want it to be too easy.”
00011
Melisa woke alone, a little before dawn, when the cool of the night still lingered in the air. Charlie’s side of the bed was cold, and empty, his presence had withdrawn from her mind. She lay still, in the near silence of the darkness, closed her eyes, and reached out.
Charlie was nearby, his shields firmly in place, his aura buzzing and crackling like a live wire.
“Ugh,” Melisa groaned, dragging herself from the cosy stew of warmth beneath her covers, and into some fresh clothes.
She padded quietly up through the deck to the First-Class lounge.
Charlie was sat crossed legged on the floor, holding the laptop, and surrounded by print outs of maps, and diagrams, sticky-notes and old books. He sipped coffee, and scribbled ideas on a pad of paper.
On the coffee table there was a model of the floorplan, made from old cardboard boxes, sticky tape, and craft glue.
“Charlie?” She crouched beside him. “Are you okay?”
He looked up at her. “Sorry? Did I wake you? I… tried to keep it all locked in here, where it wouldn’t reach you, but…” He trailed off. “Sorry.”
Charlie measured her tone, carefully. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t meditate, and I don’t sleep, so…” He rubbed his face. “I needed something to think on, something to do, so I don’t find myself in a quiet moment where it will pounce on me.”
“What will?” Melisa asked. “Memories of the machine?”
“The machine, the fire…” He lost his focus. “Harper. Harris. The white hole where my parents should be. All my mistakes, all my failings, are all tangled up. These days I seem to have too much time to think, and they are always there to fill the silence.”
Melisa nodded. “So… you kept busy?”
He snapped back into the presence. “I needed something to focus on.”
“And?” Melisa sat with him. “How’s it going?�
��
“It turns out,” Charlie said, “that an international summit, with multiple heads of state, will have pretty tough security.”
Melisa looked at the model. “Almost impossible.”
Padmaja stepped in from the deck, and set the kettle boiling. “Hey.” She dropped her laptop on a table, and started plucking fruit from the bowl for her plate. “I don’t suppose you guys could help me out with a little something?”
Melisa smiled. “What kind of a something?”
“The urgent kind,” Padmaja said. “Fate of the world kind of stuff.”
*
They drove through the Highlands to the hilltop carpark for a walking trail, and viewing spot. The carpark was empty, under the barrage of heavy rain.
Melisa chose a spot in the corner furthest from the road.
In the back seats Padmaja connected the laptop to a hefty suitcase sized box of electronics, with a number of switches and dials, that she spent a considerable time adjusting. She plugged in an umbrella-like satellite dish, on an extension lead. She leant over to the passenger seat and tapped Charlie’s shoulder.
“What do you need?” He asked.
Padmaja nodded out to the heath. “Just take that somewhere nice and open, and it more or less westwards.”
Melisa chuckled.
Charlie looked around. “You know I have bare feet?”
Padmaja nodded. “Melisa drove. I’m taking the readings. This is your job.”
Charlie stepped out into the rain, took the satellite dish into the field, trailing the cable behind him. He crouched in the long grass, and opened out the dish.
Padmaja glanced at Melisa. “Ready?”
Melisa nodded.
Padmaja hit a switch, and started a three minute countdown, as she connected to the Broadsword network. The signal was traced on the screen as a waveform. “Right, that is the signal from the bunker in South Dakota that the President claims is controlling the satellite. Every fifteen seconds it sends a command signal to check the systems… here. But… There is a pause of six seconds before the satellites respond, during which…” Another signal tracked over the screen. “Somebody else gives them permission to report back.”
“Somebody else has control of the network? As well as the US Military?”
“It’s worse than that,” Padmaja said. “The United States only think they have control.”
“So who does?” Melisa asked.
“Ah. Let’s find out.” Padmaja flicked some switches. “First I need to isolate it…Ha! Like so! Now…” She clicked open a new window. “We trace it back…”
The progress bar ticked along.
The seconds ticked away.
The tracking failed.
“Damn it!” Padmaja said. “We can try again.”
The progress bar ticked along again. Padmaja made some quick adjustments to the dials on her box of tricks. The progress bar faltered and the tracking failed.
“Third time’s the charm?” Melisa asked.
Padmaja reconfigured her box of tricks. “Let me try something else.” She clicked the keyboard. “And here we go!”
The progress bar started to creep across the screen.
The seconds ticked away.
“It’s holding!” Padmaja said.
“Thirty seconds left,” Melisa informed her.
“I’m almost there…” Padmaja whispered. “They are in the Pacific…”
“Twenty seconds.”
“Hold on… I almost have it.”
“Ten seconds!” Melisa warned.
The signal spiked, screeching into stiletto peaks.
Charlie howled in pain. His thoughts filled with white noise, a blizzard of sharp-edged numbers.
Padmaja hurried to disconnect the equipment, cutting the connection with seconds to spare. She spoke in a rapid babble. “They shouldn’t have known I was there, but if they did, somehow, then they probably didn’t have time to track me, so maybe that was supposed to blow out my equipment? It certainly would have scrambled my computer if I wasn’t running it through a¬”
“Charlie!” Melisa shouted, bolting from the car, and running to him.
He flopped forwards, over the dish. His thoughts went blank, like a light switching out.
Melisa dropped to her knees, and rolled him over. His eyes were staring without seeing, blood dribbling from his nose and ears. His teeth were ground together, foam around his lips.
“No!” Melisa lifted his head. “Charlie. Please. Look at me…”
Padmaja crouched over him, and parted his hair. There were red welts on his scalp.
Melisa had a horrible flash of the memory she had glimpsed. The needles burrowing down.
“Oh…” Padmaja whispered. “That’s what it was? Why would they think he was here?” She cupped Melisa’s cheek. “We need to get him to the car. I don’t think they tracked us, but it is best not to take the risk. We need to move.”
Melisa put Charlie’s arm over her shoulders. “Okay. A hospital. We have to get him…”
Padmaja shook her head. “No. We’ll take him back to the ship. We’ll stop at an electronics store on the way. You stand out less. I’ll give you a shopping list.”
Melisa stared at her. “What?”
Padmaja helped lift Charlie, and they dragged him to the car. “Those marks on his head, suggest there were bits of the needles left in his brain. A hospital can’t help him, but maybe Brandi can. That staff of hers can san him, and if we can locate the needles, I can extract them. I can extract them. I just need the tools, which I will need to make.”
Melisa lay Charlie over the back seats. She gripped his hand. “Hang in there Charlie.”
His mind sparked. She felt the cogs turn, rolling through the meditations for a trance.
“Oh…” She whispered. “Yes! Yes!”
Magic began to flow about him.
“Mel?” Padmaja asked.
Nightmares boiled over, and his grip on the magic was gone, as his mind went quiet once more.
Melisa felt suddenly, terribly, alone.
00100
Catherine glanced around, as they hurried across the lobby of the office building, to the elevators.
Barney kept pace with her, and checked his watch. “I’m not picking up anything from the security system.”
Catherine nodded. “Anybody watching?”
“Nope,” Barney muttered.
Catherine placed her pocket computer to the security console by the elevator. It cycled through a programme, and chimed, as it mimicked the signal from a pass card. The elevator opened.
They stepped inside, and selected the floor for the Arawn International offices.
Barney grinned. “You might want to look away.”
“Too right!” Catherine said, turning her back on him, while his briefcase popped open, and the Osprey suit swallowed him up, in that creepily organic way. She screwed her eyes shut, and tried not to hear the slithering.
“Done,” Barney said, from inside the visor of the suit.
The elevator dinged open. Catherine checked the coast was clear, before they hurried out, into the empty corridor. They walked briskly to the outer doors of the office.
“Right.” Barney cocked his head, and studied the door, and the wall around it. “Let’s see… Sensors on the door, and temperature sensors in the room, connected to that box on the far wall, and from there to…” One of his reconfigured to a blade. He sliced through the plaster, concrete, and then the metal plate in the wall, to reveal the wires within. He scraped the insulation from two of the wires, and twisted them together. “There we go. Alarm bypassed.” He tugged another wire from the loom, with a snap. “And muted.”
He put the lump of wall back in the hole, and dug a laminated safety notice from his briefcase. He stuck the notice over his surgery on the wall, to disguise it. “Eh?”
“Wow,” Catherine sighed. “Surely a master cat-thief at work.”
“Yeah,” Flintlock giggled over the e
arpiece. “You know if this doesn’t work out, I’ll need to put together a new crew. I know some guys in Hadal who would love you…”
“Oh?” Barney asked, with a smarmy smile.
“Don’t encourage him!” Catherine put her computer to the card reader on the lock, and it crunched through the programme again. The lock clicked open. “Shall we?”
Barney flicked out his wrist and reconfigured his hand to a sonic shotgun. He held it ready, and stepped into the office. He glanced around, scanning it with his visor. “Looks clear.” He hurried over to open the blinds. “Marco?”
Flintlock groaned. “Is that an American thing? I can see you.”
Catherine pointed to the next room. “Server room.”
Barney walked to the door, and peeked within. “Clear.”
Catherine stepped into the room, and walked up to one of the servers. She plugged her computer into the stack, and tapped her way past the security protocols. Data flickered over the screen. “Hey! Barney. Look at this.”
“In a moment.” He tried to open the blinds. “Why does these things tangle up and get jammed?”
Catherine glanced over the data in the stack. “It’s mapping schism ways, but only in cities. They get graded, from A to F, depending on the population of the city…” She chewed her lip. “And once a day it sends a report to… somebody.”
Barney opened the blinds, and started. “Flintlock! No!”
Catherine wheeled around.
Over on the other rooftop, Harris was stood, in his Scimitar armour, on the parapet wall. He was holding Flintlock over the edge, by her wrist, pointing her rifle to the sky. She was clawing and twisting, trying to fight him, as he plucked her earpiece out. He tucked it in his ear, and folded his helmet closed.
“Osprey,” he said, in a cold monotone voice. “Do not move. Do not think a single command to your armour.”
Barney stiffened. “Rock. I know that if there is even a splinter of you left in there. You won’t do this. Put her down, buddy.”
“It’s not him!” Flintlock screamed. “It’s the Nightmare. Kill¬”
The Nightmare drew his crossbow, and put an armour piercing bolt between her Flintlocks eyes, at point blank range. She sagged like a rag doll, her life gone, and he released his grip, dropping her into traffic. “Sorry. Was that not what you meant?”