Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

  Thirty-Three

  Gillian awoke from his dream to the cool air and faint vibrations of the unheated cargo pod. The three soldiers sat across from him in the narrow space. Like him, they were garbed in black fatigues, with tactical helmets propped in their laps.

  Slag had the business end of a squeeze bottle in his mouth and was heartily sucking down the contents, live maggots infused with blueberries and cocoa. He claimed that the protein-antioxidant blend was his favorite pre-battle snack. Basher was hunched over beside him, fast asleep and snoring. Stone Face, whose impressive bulk and granite lump of a head belied a quiet intelligence, was engrossed in a book, a vintage hardcover entitled Law and Commerce in Pre-Industrial Societies. He’d borrowed it from Doctor Emanuel.

  The cargo pod was attached to the belly of an unmanned stormlacer flying at fifteen thousand meters. Nick had bought the craft on the black market and arranged for the pod to be retrofitted.

  The countdown timer on the forward wall indicated they were four minutes from the drop zone.

  Gillian sat up straight on the hard seat of the shadowy pod and rubbed his brow. He was nursing a mild headache. It was a common symptom on those occasions after he’d had a dream or waking flashback about his wife, Catharine. Oddly, they seemed to happen about every four hours. He had no idea what the time interval signified.

  In his latest dream, the two of them had been sitting across from one another in some sort of meditation chamber, a hexagonal room bathed in warm pastel hues. A mélange of pleasing scents circulated: bright gardenia, jasmine, apple, vanilla, the vaguest hints of rosemary and sage.

  Some of the scents emanated from Catharine’s perfumes; others came from the chamber itself. They conflicted with one another yet produced an overall ache of familiarity, tapping into memories that weren’t memories, attempting to invoke something deeper. But try as he might, those depths remained unfocused and out of reach. He couldn’t resolve them into authentic recollections.

  Although the scents were distinctly Catharine, particularly the gardenia, they also produced an olfactory image of another woman, Annabel Bakana. He’d experienced an immediate attraction to her that day at the clinic when they’d met, primarily because of that gardenia scent. Yet the attraction was neither sexual nor emotional. He had no desire for Bel, didn’t want her as a lover or as a friend.

  Then what do I want from her?

  The answer eluded him.

  Another phenomenon of the Catharine dreams and flashbacks was a contradictory voice in his head that seemed to be trying to steer him away from such memories. The voice didn’t utter actual words but the idea came across nonetheless.

  Don’t dwell on what happened to your parents or to Catharine. Think about what you’re going to do about it.

  Whatever the voice’s cryptic source, Gillian found its advice appealing. A Paratwa assassin had murdered the woman and man who’d brought him into this world and raised him. Later, another Paratwa took away his beloved wife.

  And I am going to do something about it. I’m going to kill every last assassin on the planet.

  He recognized the impracticality of such a goal. It didn’t matter. All that counted was the sentiment, real and potent enough to drive him toward a life’s mission with relentless momentum. Yet in the back of his mind hovered a vague thought that everything was not as it seemed, that he was being impelled by more subtle forces.

  “Two minutes to drop zone,” the stormlacer’s bot announced. “Beginning final descent.”

  The floor tilted downward at a sharp angle in the direction of flight. Gillian returned his attention to where it belonged, in the moment.

  “Are we ready?” he demanded in a booming voice.

  Basher came instantly awake. Slag put away his snack tube and tongued a fat maggot that had escaped onto his lower lip. Stone Face bookmarked the hardcover and slid it under his seat.

  “We’re ready!” the trio snapped in unison.

  “Suit up!”

  They donned their helmets. Faceplates swept down into position. Transparent from the inside, the faceplates not only provided unimpeded sight lines but enhanced peripheral vision. From the outside they remained opaque. Additionally, distorters rendered their countenances into throbbing multicolored blurs in case anyone tried scanning them with see-through technology. It was vital from this very first mission that the teams’ faces never be glimpsed or recorded, their identities never compromised.

  One thing bothered Gillian about the helmet, however. It limited his sense of smell, blurred together the more subtle odorant molecules. Olfaction, his most acute physical input, was reduced to mundane functionality. But he realized there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Crescent webs on!” he ordered.

  The four of them lunged to their feet and slid tongues across the rubber pads attached to bicuspids and molars. Four crescent webs ignited, sparkling and hissing as they touched one another in the pod’s tight confines.

  “Activate jamscram!”

  The technology was also tongue-activated. Gillian doubted their target would be defended by autotargeting robots but, if so, any advantages would be neutralized. In fact, this latest version of jamscram even enabled him to disrupt and take control of enemy robotic systems. Nick claimed that it had only recently been developed by EPF researchers.

  “Mount up!”

  They activated wrist controls in tandem. A stack of skyboard drones elevated off the floor and separated. There was just enough room for the quartet of boards in the pod’s tight confines.

  They hopped on the boards luge-style – on their backs, feet forward. Rear crescents compressed and sizzled as they made contact with the boards’ metallic surface. Belts automatically tightened around their ankles, waists and chests.

  “One minute,” the bot announced. “Altitude: eleven thousand five hundred meters and descending.”

  “Affirm target,” Gillian ordered.

  “Target location is grid 1-A. No defensive shielding detected. No countermeasures detected.”

  “Affirm drop zone.”

  “Drop zone is grid 1-B. No defensive shielding detected. No countermeasures detected.”

  Gillian panned his gaze across the team. Combat veterans one and all, they’d gone up against Paratwa before, although never like this. Then again, who had? The four of them were about to engage an assassin in a style of battle never before attempted.

  But the team had trained hard these past weeks, had mastered Nick’s sim and Gillian’s subtle modifications of it. They’d adapted well to the somewhat counterintuitive techniques such combat demanded. Still, he figured one last reminder couldn’t hurt.

  “What’s the word?” he asked.

  “Directionalize!” they shouted as one.

  “How do we directionalize? Basher?”

  “Attack one tway, defend against the other,” Basher recited.

  “Why? Stone Face?”

  “To neutralize the assassin’s single greatest advantage, force it into a situation where one tway is always on offense and the other always on defense.”

  Gillian nodded. “We make it fight us on our terms. Slag, why?”

  “To prevent the tways from randomly shifting back and forth between offensive and defensive modes, a common tactic to confuse and overcome opponents.”

  “How do you know when to directionalize? Basher?”

  “We don’t know. Your actions provide the signal. We follow your lead.”

  Gillian nodded. They were as ready as they were going to be.

  “Twenty seconds to target,” the bot said. “Altitude: four thousand eight hundred meters.”

  Nick had protested vociferously at Gillian’s choice for the team’s first assault. “Pick one that’s easier to start with, like an Energía,” he’d begged.

  “Too easy. I could take down a handful of those squabs on my own without breaking a sweat.”

  “OK, then how about a Fifteen-Forty or a Granular-D. You don’t have to go
up against such a dangerous breed on your first mission. And particularly not this Paratwa. Christ, you saw the videos. You know what this bastard’s capable of.”

  Gillian had been unmoved by Nick’s arguments. He’d rattled off the reasons why he’d made the best choice.

  “First, there’s psychological value to taking down such a repulsive enemy. When word spreads, we’ll be thought of as saviors. The mythmaking process – a secret band of soldier-hunters fighting the good fight in the service of humanity – couldn’t be launched in a better way.

  “Second, the team’s initial battle needs to be against a truly formidable enemy to build up their confidence. Not some second-string assassin that most of the population has never even heard of.”

  Nick had grudgingly admitted the validity of his reasoning.

  “Ten seconds to target. Altitude: three thousand five hundred meters.”

  One other factor had prompted Gillian to select the target, a reason Nick and Bel fully supported. The location. Few people lived in this mountainous wilderness some seventy klicks east of Seattle, Washington, which meant there was little chance of civilians being caught in the crossfire. If the team’s first battle produced innocent casualties, support for the team’s exploits could be severely compromised.

  Of course, from a standpoint of sheer practicality, the Paratwa’s isolated location made it susceptible to a far easier means of taking it out. In this case, a few missiles launched from stratospheric bombers or stormlacers could have done the job.

  But vaporizing the site would have done nothing for the team. Besides, there probably wouldn’t have been enough evidence left to confirm the assassin’s death.

  Bel had voiced objections based on another reason: political concerns. In addition to the citizens of this region being strong E-Tech supporters, Seattle and its environs were part of the GNR, the Greater Northwest Respirazone.

  Thus far, even the Paratwa and most terrorist groups had spared such areas from harm. Respirazones had acquired a cachet similar to that of medieval churches, the notion that they were sanctuaries from the brutalities of the outside world. Dropping bombs on a GNR, no matter what the reason, was unacceptable.

  “Five seconds,” the bot intoned. “Bay doors opening.”

  Bright afternoon light and colder air swept into the pod from below. The sudden wind was turbulent enough to cause the skyboards to shake and rumble. With the pod’s floor no longer in place, only thin hydraulic struts kept boards and riders from falling into space.

  Gillian silently mouthed the bot’s final countdown…

  “Three… two… one…

  “Drop!”

  The struts retracted. The boards fell into the cloudless afternoon skies. Turbulence from the stormlacer sent them tumbling. Gillian felt himself somersaulting violently out of control.

  The drones’ stabilizers kicked in and the autopilots took over. The boards righted themselves and went into a steep descent toward the drop zone, flying in a diamond formation. Gillian led the way with Basher and Stone Face flanking one another behind him and Slag bringing up the rear.

  A fierce headwind rushed up from the hilly forests below. It buffeted the boards, forcing the stabilizers to perform countless micro adjustments. Still, Gillian had been on rougher rides. Oddly, he couldn’t recall any details of when and where such rides had occurred. Muscle memory constituted the only proof.

  The skyboard drones boasted full sensor shielding that blocked them from being picked up by ground or air-based detectors. The boards were also equipped with state of the art Abernathy sound muters, rendering them as silent as the gentlest of breezes.

  They’d had to forego optical camo, however. It was too tricky to use on fast-moving objects against a plain sky backdrop. Imperfect camo would call more attention to them than its absence.

  They’d opted for a simpler means of visual disguise: blending into the crowd. They’d chosen this weekend for the assault because it happened to be one of Seattle-sec’s frequent skyboard acrobatics festivals, which brought hundreds of aerial teams to the region. A significant number of the competitors were four-person units and their standard flight formation was the ever-popular diamond. Should the assassin happen to be outdoors peering up at the sky, he likely would mistake Gillian and company for festival participants.

  At least that was their operating theory. As in any surprise assault, there were always a number of unknowns.

  The soldiers had lobbied for a nighttime assault, Delta-A’s standard operating mode. But Gillian saw no real advantage and some potential disadvantages, and had ruled it out. Maybe in later firefights he’d opt for the cover of darkness. But considering that this was their very first test, they faced enough challenges already without having to engage the enemy with night-vision gear.

  Nick had found the target’s base of operation – the assassin’s home – via his specialized tracking programs. Technically, their target adhered to the twenty-five thousand square kilometer rule of thumb. But instead of dimensions based on a roughly circular area, this Paratwa’s kill zone was linear, a relatively narrow strip along the west coast of the USA and extending into southern Canada.

  Among the biggest unknowns was whether the Paratwa was at home, a modest cabin deep within these woods. Nick’s tracking programs and probability grids indicated a sixty-five percent chance of that being the case, based on an analysis of the assassin’s known kills and his projected movement patterns over recent months.

  As for real-time intel, the entire region was within Seattle-sec’s domain, which thankfully meant that orbital surveillance remained functional. Nick had bought scan time on a couple of EPF satellites that passed over the area on a regular basis. As soon as they landed, he’d update them with the latest sat intel.

  Should the target be at home and alone, they’d attack immediately. Should the cabin be deserted, they’d switch to Plan B, stake it out and wait for the assassin’s arrival.

  The forest canopy was approaching fast. At three hundred meters, Gillian gave the order to switch to manual controls. Taking command of the skyboards, they fired retro braking and slowed to a crawl. Vertical jets ignited. The four of them dropped slowly through the trees, touching down on the forest floor within sight of one another.

  Disguising the boards with foliage in case hikers happened to be wandering through the area, they activated the optical camo for good measure. As prearranged, Gillian contacted Nick on a tight-beam sat line. For added security during the stormlacer flight, which had launched from an abandoned Canadian Army base in the Yukon, they’d maintained radio silence.

  “We’re down,” Gillian reported. “What’s the word?”

  Nick’s voice sounded in their earpieces. “Good news and bad news. Satellite shows the target is definitely at home. Arrived about ten minutes ago.”

  “And the bad news?” Gillian asked.

  “He has company. A family of four. Two female parents and two teens, ages eleven and fifteen. Kidnapped them in broad daylight from a Positivity Clinic they were attending in downtown Seattle. Bold son of a bitch.”

  The contingency option in case the assassin was found to be in the company of civilians was a temporary mission hold until the civilians were clear, and if conditions didn’t change, a mission abort. Nick was adamant that from a PR standpoint, the death of innocent bystanders during this, the team’s initial battle, was to be avoided. The team’s actions had to be unsullied, unimpaired by any tragic incidents that could lessen the hoped-for psychological impact of destroying an assassin. People needed to experience only positive feelings as they were led into rooting for “Humanity’s Avenger.”

  Gillian analyzed the situation. If he overrode Nick’s concerns and went forward with the mission, the family might die during the battle. Then again, if they put the mission on hold, they would certainly perish. Their target, Alvis Qwee, would again act out his ritual, torturing to death three of the kidnap victims while making the fourth one watch in a state of unadu
lterated horror as his or her loved ones were slowly murdered in the most excruciatingly painful ways.

  He acknowledged that he didn’t know exactly how to feel about that. He should be experiencing revulsion, a normal human emotion, at the very idea of such cruelty. Yet he wasn’t as bothered by the possibility to the degree that social mores suggested he should be. Innocents died every day. It was the way of the world.

  “I know it’s a tough call,” Nick said. “But I think we need to go straight to an abort. There’ll be a permanent blemish on the mission if you do a temporary hold until the incident with the family is resolved.”

  “Resolved?” Basher growled. “Don’t you mean put through hell?”

  “Hey, I get it. But no matter what you do, there’s no guaranteed good outcome. Even if you attack immediately, that family’s probably going to die, if they’re not dead already. If you choose to wait, same outcome. But for our overall purposes, waiting could be even worse. Rightly or wrongly, the impression will be that the team failed, that you didn’t arrive in time to save the family. As terrible as it is to say, we have to stay focused on the larger issue of building public support for your actions.”

  Slag, Basher and Stone Face were focused on Gillian, their faces unreadable. It was his decision. They would accept whatever choice he made.

  Nick continued lobbying for an abort. “Call it off now and come on back. I’ll contact EPF. With a little luck, they can dispatch a battalion and be onsite in time to rescue the victims.”

  Gillian knew the chances of that happening were slim to none. Even if the EPF arrived and triumphed, the family would perish in what was sure to be an all-out firefight. And if by some miracle they didn’t die in the crossfire, a cornered Alvis Qwee would surely kill them out of spite.

  He turned to the others. He’d come to a decision. But he wanted it to be unanimous.

  “What do you think?”

  “An abort is the smart move,” Basher said.

  “Absolutely,” Slag affirmed.

  Stone Face nodded.

  Basher’s face dissolved into a lopsided grin. “But hey, what the hell? I say fuck smart moves and all of this PR bullshit.”