"How did you-"
Anna honed in before the first of the soldiers could fire, twisting off a chunk of ice and shaping it into a bullet, that flew out and dropped him where he stood.
The two remaining guards watched him go down with a second's disbelief, then tried to fire as well, but Anna dropped them with two more shots, pop pop, to the floor. The power was really humming in her now. She wasn't even thinking, just doing, surfing the surge intuitively just as she'd learned to race catamaran on the ocean. There were tides and flows and she rode them better than anyone.
"How did you do that?" Peters called out.
Anna shifted her flows and began to sprint.
There were seventeen signals in the dark of the hangar ahead. She ran under the lip of the wide entrance and circled round a stack of large crates, to emerge into the midst of them as they prepared for combat; putting on black tactical gear similar to the uniforms worn by the ones in Istanbul city center. A range of strange helmets sat on a table beside them, some matte black and others like ancient diving bells similar to what Salle Coram had worn.
Montcliffe stood in the middle, a powerful man dictating his most trusted troops, amongst whom were the five who'd pulled the skin off Jake; she recognized them not by their faces but by the stink of their signals in the absence of the line. In their hands were rifles, grenades in long rolls, even a flamethrower, ready to come kill her and her people.
They saw Anna and their faces paled. Their weapons spun around like a circular firing squad.
Anna waved a hand and cold shot out of her like a bomb, freezing them in place. Only Montcliffe went untouched, his jaw dropping as the strings of all his people were cut. There wasn't anything any of them could do. They hadn't grown up in the arms of the ocean, faced off with demons as a teen, lived through the explosion of a leper that broke the line. They just weren't prepared.
"You can't do that," he said, as Anna stepped up to him, the slightest note of a whine entering his voice, as if he'd just caught her cheating at Monopoly. "How can you-"
"It's done," Anna said, passing by the table of helmets. "Get used to it. Put your gun down."
He looked down at the gun in his hand. He'd forgotten it was there. His face flicked from shock to an ugly snarl, and he raised the gun smoothly as he spoke.
"I should have killed you the moment we had you."
Anna froze his hand with a thought.
"Yes," she said, "you should have," then covered the last few yards and knocked him out with a solid punch in the real world, a right cross across his jaw. He dropped.
For a moment Anna stood at the head of his frozen people, looking out at their wild, terrified eyes. Yes, it wasn't fair. Yes this wasn't what they expected, but she was going to show them a hell of a lot more mercy than they ever would have shown her.
"Stop fighting me," she said. "I'm not fighting you. Open your eyes."
At that moment Peters came running in, panting round the boxes. He stopped at the edge of the ring, like the final statue in the full-size diorama, and stared with disbelief at them, at Anna, at Montcliffe on the floor.
"Anna, how did you-"
"Can you please tie these people up?" Anna said, not willing to waste another moment.
"But how did you… I've never…"
"Please, Peters," Anna said, already starting back through the hangar toward him. "I can't hold them like this forever. I'll explain everything soon. But please, do this for me now."
He looked at her, into her eyes and past the new demon-like aura she exuded, and she tried to show him the real Anna inside, who she'd always been, just altered, and he nodded.
"Good. Yes. Of course."
"Thank you," she said, rested a hand on his shoulder as she passed by, then continued swiftly out.
The air was dead silent outside. Anyone watching had tucked themselves away. Good. It was time to sort this place out.
She ran toward one of the hospital tents. The signal was clear and bright there, shining in the absence of the line like a lighthouse.
It was stuffy and smelled of gangrene inside the tent. Doctors and nurses called to each other in quiet, harried tones, their white aprons marred with blood and soot still. How long had they been working like this, saving lives? In the corner a man worked at a sputtering air conditioning unit. People on beds watched her dimly pass by. Blood streaked the canvas ceiling.
Anna advanced through their ranks, drawing no attention, toward a doctor in the middle who was intent upon an incision in a patient's abdomen, extracting a fragment of what looked like rubber. It was a young woman. Across her chest Anna picked out the unmistakable marks of tire treads.
Amo.
She waited while the operation continued. The doctor was skillful, precise, though she had to be exhausted. Her concentration did not break until the last shreds of rubber were extracted, the wound cleaned and sealed.
Then she turned to Anna, as if she'd known she'd been there all along, waiting.
"You," she said.
"Me," Anna answered.
It was the woman who'd saved Anna and her people the night before. She was young, perhaps twenty-four, with the same pale skin as the rest of the bunker people, bloodshot eyes, but a gritty resolve in the set of her mouth.
A moment passed.
"I heard something about a coup," the woman said. "Was that you?"
Anna smiled. "It is now, I suppose. Montcliffe was coming for me, trying to undo your work, and I couldn't have that."
The woman frowned. She was not impressed, nor afraid. Anna liked that.
"Dead? Injured?"
"Just unconscious."
The woman grunted. "It's not my business." Then she started to turn, but Anna caught her arm.
"It is your business. I need you."
The woman looked at the hand and frowned. "I have work here. Too much work."
Anna shook her head. "You're not helping anyone like this, in a tent in the baking sun without air conditioning, understaffed, under-resourced, getting by on probably no hours of sleep. That's bullshit and you know it. Inchcombe's out of her depth and your people won't listen to me, not after what I've done. They need someone strong and fair, and as far as I can see that's you."
The woman glared. To her credit, she didn't dissemble or deny anything Anna had said. If anything her signal shone brighter. "You don't even know me."
"I know what I've seen," Anna said firmly, "and that's enough. Look around you. We need to do this together or we're all going to die, and I think you might grasp that. Inchcombe couldn't see past her own nose. Montcliffe can't see anything except revenge. Did you know they're carting the corpses only a few hundred yards away? They're not thinking clearly, not beyond the next emergency, while I'm talking about surviving the line, and the bunkers and the lepers, and the years that come after that. Stop fighting me and start helping, and help your own people."
The woman's eyes hardened.
"What do you mean, the bunkers? We are the bunkers. We're all part of the SEAL."
Anna snorted. "That's what I'm talking about. I said it to Inchcombe and she didn't listen, but maybe you will. You're not in the SEAL anymore! Think about what you did to us when we were offering a treaty, just because we were outside their shields. You're outside their shields now too, which makes you just as infected as us. It doesn't matter that this is a gap in the line; in a few months enough of it'll creep in and you'll flip to zombies, just making more of the enemy. You really think they won't strike here first, with another nuclear bomb?"
The woman paled, but gritted her teeth. "You really think…"
"What's your name?" Anna asked.
"I- it's Helen. You're Anna."
"I'm Anna. I'm telling you this because I know the bunkers in ways you can't. I guarantee that they are not sending aid convoys to help you as we speak. Rather they are planning how to blast you off the map, to cut off the infected limb, just like they did with us. We need to delay that for as long as possible, then we need to
round up and contain the lepers before they hit Brezno and kill three thousand more, and I can't help with that if I've got Inchcombe half-assing things or Montcliffe trying to kill me. And after we get that done, we'll need to spin up a mobile shield or find another way to cure your people so we can get out of here, and I need someone like you for all of that, Helen. I don't trust anyone else not to try and lock me up or shoot me down. You're the first person I've seen from below who's kept her humanity, so let's do this. Can I rely on you?"
Helen's pale, pretty features shifted. Her face set with a new resolve.
"Montcliffe's coup. You stopped them by doing that thing in the air, in our heads, just when you were collapsing? Did you take them out alone?"
Anna nodded.
Helen drew herself up, gaining another inch so she actually stood taller than Anna. "You have to stop doing it. Whatever it is. No more, just like you wouldn't fire a gun, because it's obviously a weapon. It stops here."
Anna nodded sharply and held out her hand. "Deal, as long as no one draws a gun on me."
Helen reached out. Her arm was slender and willowy but her grip was strong.
"Deal."
"Then come on," Anna said. "We need to pull this place into order."
Helen looked around at the ward, doubtless seeing a dozen patients who needed her immediate attention, putting the cap on her decision. She was leaving them now, and perhaps a few more of them would die because of it, but if they saved two thousand for the sacrifice? There were other doctors and nurses, and she could save more by getting them the help they needed.
She nodded.
Anna led her out. The real work began.
INTERLUDE 8
The raids blew a smoking hole in James While's control of the SEAL.
First thing on his jet, rising up out of the Alps and the attention trap of Olan Harrison's mutilated corpse, he savagely cut back his inner circle, throwing up fresh walls of security around every secret facility and classified information silo. There was still a giant enemy infrastructure out there, bent upon shredding the SEAL and leaving James While holding the tatters, and he had to respond.
His response only shredded the SEAL further, but there was no choice. Tens of thousands of staff, associated with only the slightest hint of possible collusion, were lopped off like rotten branches. Root and branch he scoured the organization, dissolving the sixteen current departments along with their Heads, raising only a handful of people he trusted most to positions of czar-like power.
There were twelve of them, each responsible for the Ark bunker in their global geographical slice; building it, staffing it, stocking it, hiding it from the world. The world was shifting and the SEAL's old priorities of environmental protection, famine-mitigation and war-reduction no longer mattered. What mattered was the Ark project. If he couldn't protect that, and build that, and stock it with enough people to restart civilization once the threat was past, then nothing would survive the apocalypse to come.
He drafted in army, navy and air force units from a hundred nations, under the guise of emergency preparedness operations he'd laid the groundwork for years earlier. He dispersed logistical delivery as broadly as possible, to keep the locations of the Arks as secret as possible. He doubled down on interrogations of all the suspected SEAL staff he still had in custody, but as the hours and days passed by, he expected less and less.
He barely slept; catching an hour or two at a time as his jet circled the Earth one, two, three times, refueled in mid-air. He paced round the empty cabin, bringing up screens and data, trying to narrow the focus for an investigation into what had happened, where his people had been taken, what was coming next. The loss of Rachel Heron was stinging, leaving him with only the lower echelons of seniority from the Logchain to draw information from, though he had one trump card left.
Joran Helkegarde.
They talked frequently, in brief bursts and updates at all hours of the day and night. Joran had transformed himself in the days since his Array erupted; diving deeper into the hydrogen line than ever before, bringing in experts on the T4 and genetic splicing, exposing for the first time the brittle points of contact between the T4 and the hydrogen line of research, all the while searching for a unified theory on what was happening, and how to stop it.
He had taken over the running of both the Istanbul and Bordeaux bunkers in large part, turning swathes of their limited real-estate over to outsourced labs and research bays, stocked with staff drawn from across the dissolved Arrays, the Logchain and the Apotheo Net. James While saw no choice but to trust him fully, sharing everything with him about Olan Harrison and Rachel Heron.
Joran asked for Rachel's 'samples'. His scientists and tech-experts went to Sakhalin with overwhelming military guard, where they raided the remnants of Rachel Heron's data, gathered the earliest expressed samples, the gray and the red ones, and brought them back to Istanbul, where Joran ordered up destructive testing.
In one update eight days in to While's two-week sojourn around the world, Joran announced he may have unlocked a means to shield the twelve Arks. On the video screen his eyes shone like fevered jewels, high on any number of illicit substances. His lab coat was rumpled and smeared with blood samples. At that pace he would be dead within a month, While recognized, but he took no action to slow him down. They might not even have a month.
"The people in comas," Joran muttered rapidly, his eyes flickering back and forth from James While to whatever readouts lay in front of him. "There's something different about their signals on the line, a flattening aura that extends to anyone within a few feet of them, meaning they provide a kind of buffer from the signals sent on the line, which may explain why-"
"How can we use that?" While interrupted. Joran frequently rambled off into explaining the depths of his research.
"Use it?" Joran blinked as he refocused. "We can't yet, not yet, but with the Prime Array coming I've got twenty fresh subjects slow-baking, transmitting data signals up a spine, and I'm recording results in a full double-blind trial, and the results are positive so far."
James While often lagged behind when Joran was on a roll. He'd authorized the Prime Array, Joran's idea for a final massive Array perhaps a thousand minds strong, to be located in the middle of Eurasia, and satellite facilities for testing, but the rest of it was new to him.
"Positive in that they're providing a shield, something we can use? Will it be enough to block another infection signal?"
"Another infection?" Joran asked, again briefly confused as his train of thought was redirected. "Well yes, no, but perhaps. Not as is, but with augmentation?" His eyes zipped multiple times to the readouts. "Look at what they've been doing in the Logchain, James, to restrain their samples, some combination of magnets and DNA manipulation? We can't use them for that, because there's no way to get in and change the DNA so much, but with some? Their brains are special, they have the buffer, so we could use them and blow them open, but that would mean personality death, suspending core brain function, and scrubbing off the gray matter, if we-"
James While focused on the key question, because the details were lost in Joran's flow. "You're talking about blowing open human brains. Killing people."
"Of course I am!" Joran snapped. "I can extract the coma brains, the bits we need, or expand them, and marry that with whatever magnetic resonance amplification I can create, then it may be possible to extend the protective buffer wide enough to cover ten feet, even a hundred, a bunker. This is how we can water-proof your Arks."
"So you're talking about sacrificing twelve brains?" James clarified. "Twelve people turned into shields?"
Joran shook his head. "Much more than twelve. Twelve for the core, perhaps, but most likely twenty-four at minimum, maybe thirty-six, forty-eight, so they can function in unison. And before that, I'll need probably a hundred or so for experimentation. There's too much we don't know, too many variables; we need to learn to rewrite the personalities out, remove the humanity to make for purely
mechanical protection. It's all happening at the core, James, as if we were always wired for this, but-"
While cut him off again. "You're asking for permission to round up and kill two hundred people in comas. Is that correct?"
Joran frowned, as if that was obvious and no moral quandaries came attached. "At least. Right away. Now."
"Do it. Spread your acquisition distribution, I don't want the balance in any one area depleted too much."
Joran frowned. "Of course." He'd been the one to explain the necessity of an even spread of coma sufferers around the globe, when James had first asked him why they shouldn't just gather them all up and kill them at once, to stop whatever fuse was sizzling within them from going off. Apparently they were on some kind of parallel dead man's switch.
"I've already sent out scouts," Joran said. "I expect-"
While cut the transmission.
* * *
The investigation powered on.
James While tore into the mountain of evidence with a team of thousands; digging through paper trails, money flows, logistical logs dating back decades, affidavits from hundreds of interrogations, satellite evidence, SEAL records and witness testimony, but little concrete emerged; bare slivers that led to dead ends. The trail of every raid ultimately vanished down the rabbit hole, lost in blind spots in global coverage, tucked into obscure folds in the world, spiraled into disintegrating hearsay.
For all the mustering of the SEAL's resources, he had no answers.
So he dug into Olan Harrison.
DNA analysis back from Harrison's body suggested extensive gene therapies had already been conducted, pressuring his cell walls nearly to mush. In the Alps facility's storage old samples showed catastrophic attempts to lengthen his telomere strands via a dozen different methods, thereby extending his life, though all had failed. Deep tissue analysis of the scars in his skull showed that Apotheo Net transponders had been inserted deep into the gray matter of his brain multiple times, through eleven holes drilled in the bone, and a complete picture of his working mind had been captured.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 185