Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

  He imagined that a night snuggled together under the autosheets just might thaw her icy demeanor. But considering her mood, there was a better chance of the world’s smog magically disappearing than there was of him getting past her bedroom door.

  He shifted the conversation back to impersonal matters. They discussed what the official response should be to the Brazilian government, which had lodged formal protests with E-Tech and a host of other international organizations over the Thi Maloca raid and the subsequent nuking of the site. The country was understandably upset at the violation of its sovereignty and wanted everybody to condemn the EPF’s actions.

  Have I violated your sovereignty somehow? Is that why you’re mad? But Nick couldn’t think of an incident that fit such a scenario.

  “The regents are still considering the Brazilian matter,” Bel said. “They haven’t reached a consensus yet.”

  “E-Tech should stay as neutral as possible. You don’t want to piss off Brasilia but you also don’t want to come down hard on the EPF.”

  “My thoughts as well.”

  Nick no longer had unfettered access to what was discussed by the Board of Regents. Weldon had been his confidential informant among them, had kept him apprised of all notable happenings.

  He hoped Bel would continue passing along relevant information. But even if she did, it likely wouldn’t be as comprehensive as what he’d gotten from his son over the years. And as E-Tech director, she might feel obligated to keep certain information sequestered.

  He couldn’t fault her for that. After all, he’d kept a number of secrets from her over the time they’d been together. It would be hypocritical to deny her the same right.

  His attaboy signaled – a priority call. He thunked a switch and Sosoome’s words sounded in his earpiece.

  “Yo dude, there’s something you need to see. Might want to stop groping your babe for a few minutes.”

  If only, Nick mused.

  “Looks like Humanity’s Avenger is at it again. The firefight’s happening as we speak, inside the Nairobi Securities Exchange. No news yet on the breed of assassin.”

  That can’t be right. The team wasn’t scheduled to hunt another Paratwa until after the start of the new year. And Nick’s target database had no listings for an assassin whose home base was the Kenyan capital.

  “Is something wrong?” Bel asked, noticing his distraction.

  “Yeah. We need to take a look at the newsphere.”

  Bel signaled the drudge, who activated the largest wall screen. The monitor tuned to the hottest story, which not surprisingly was the Nairobi battle. Shaky video from a drone whizzing around inside the Securities Exchange building displayed the tumultuous combat.

  The assassin was in motion, striding boldly across the main floor side by side, its Cohe wands flashing in tandem. Nick was shocked to recognize the tways.

  Ponytail and Albino.

  “Yiska,” Bel murmured.

  The assassin who’d attacked E-Tech headquarters was coming toward the team, which was attempting to flank it. The foursome was in their familiar one-by-three attack formation, Gillian to the left and the soldiers to the right.

  Gillian’s Cohe whipped madly through the air, trying for a kill shot through the side portal of the closest tway, Ponytail. But his beams kept going astray, or were neutralized as they intersected or ricocheted off the tway’s crescent webs.

  The three soldiers were barely holding their ground. Armed with thruster rifles instead of their usual pistols, they were concentrating their fire on Albino. All around the battle, dozens of civilians were huddled on the floor, trying not to move, trying not to become a target. For some of them it was obviously too late. Smoldering wounds indicated they’d been hit by the deadly beams, likely collateral damage from the firefight.

  Nick watched with escalating dread. Not only did the team seem outmatched but there’d been no civilian casualties in its previous three outings. That was an important consideration for maintaining “Humanity’s Avenger” at peak popularity.

  “Why are you doing this?” Nick whispered at the monitor.

  Following Gillian’s initial insistence that he be solely responsible for selecting targets from Nick’s database, they’d come to a more equitable understanding. The two of them would study the list together and only finalize a target through mutual agreement. They’d talked about going after Yiska if Nick could pin down a location, which so far had proved to be an elusive task. Nick was secretly glad that he wasn’t able to locate the Shonto Prong. He didn’t think the team was ready to take on such a formidable assassin.

  But what was happening right now, nearly halfway around the world? Had Gillian and the team gone rogue?

  “Why did you send them out without telling me?” Bel demanded.

  “I didn’t. I have no idea what’s happening.”

  Her look said she didn’t believe him. But her skepticism was the least of his concerns at the moment.

  He returned his attention to the battle. The assassin was starting to drive the team backward, putting them on the defensive. This wasn’t how his sim was supposed to work in real time.

  “I think there’s something wrong with Gillian,” Bel said worriedly. “See how his left arm is pinned against his side?”

  She was right. He appeared to have been wounded.

  The situation worsened. One of the assassin’s beams penetrated the side portal of the biggest soldier’s crescent web. It went through his chest and out the other side. He dropped like a rock, heart and lungs fatally baked by the searing beam.

  “Stone Face,” Nick whispered, hoping against hope that the battle wasn’t lost even while knowing it was.

  Another soldier fell and then the third. The Paratwa was now free to turn its full wrath on the wounded Gillian. The tways slashed and stabbed with their Cohes, looking for the kill shot. Gillian was no longer even attempting to fight back. It was all he could do just to stay alive. He twisted and jerked his body as the writhing beams seemed to come at him from all angles.

  The inevitable happened. A beam got through his web’s left side portal. Gillian crumpled to his knees then fell onto his back.

  “Oh my God,” Bel whispered, throwing a hand over her mouth.

  Nick was too shocked for words. He could only stare at the screen as the triumphant assassin approached the body.

  Albino plunged a hand through Gillian’s side portal. He rammed his fingers into Gillian’s mouth and deactivated the crescent web. Ponytail yanked off the tac helmet, revealing the soldier-hunter’s identity.

  “All right!” Nick shouted with glee.

  The dead man wasn’t Gillian. He was a stranger. That had to mean that the others weren’t Slag, Basher and Stone Face.

  “Success breeds imitators,” Nick said. “But not as skilled as the genuine article.”

  “Thank goodness it wasn’t them,” Bel murmured, smiling with relief.

  He decided to take advantage of the break in her foul mood. Moving toward her, he opened his arms, seeking a hug. But her face instantly defaulted to frost mode, stopping him in his tracks.

  “I’d better get out of here,” he said, backing away. “I need to touch base with Gillian.”

  “That’s probably the right thing to do,” she said coolly.

  The words reverberated with hidden meaning. But whatever the cause of her anger, right now he had more important issues to deal with. He headed for the door.

  “Nick, wait.”

  He stopped and turned, hopeful that she was finally going to get off her chest whatever was bothering her.

  She hesitated, then seemed to change her mind. She shook her head and folded her arms protectively across her chest. “Forget it. It’s nothing.”

  “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  Maybe he was misreading her bad mood and it wasn’t connected to their relationship. Maybe by tomorrow she’d be OK and willing to discuss things.

  In any event, right now he needed to c
oncentrate on more pressing matters. There’d been serious PR damage done by the imposters, whoever they were. The news of their defeat would be spreading fast. The backlash could wreck the careful public relations campaign he and Bel had put together.

  The timeline for the next strike by Gillian and the team would have to be advanced. Humanity’s Avenger required a fresh triumph as soon as possible.

  Forty-Two

  Bel dismissed the drudge and started clearing the dinner dishes. She needed to keep busy in order to stop churning things over in her head. Physical labor might wrench her away from a turbulent amalgam of emotions.

  There was anger at Nick for pitstopping her. There was pain and bitterness at his betrayal. And there was a strong measure of confusion directed at her own cowardice in being unable to confront him about it.

  She’d gotten confirmation earlier today after her third visit to a pharma specialist. There was no doubt Gillian was right. She’d been pitstopped. The specialist had also run the DNA sample of Nick that Bel had submitted, which she’d lifted from his personnel file. It had proved beyond a doubt that the pheromone induction tranqs were primed to Nick’s metabolism. Their sole purpose was to cause her to be subliminally attracted to him.

  Their entire relationship had been the product of the most callous and ruthless manipulation.

  Her anger flared. Trying to corral it, she picked up a stack of dirty plates and carried them toward the kitchen.

  The specialist hadn’t been able to determine the exact date Bel had been drugged, only narrow it down to a two week window. But her first encounter with Nick had occurred during that period. Most likely, the tranq had been slipped into a drink. She recalled the very first time they’d met, the morning of the attack. She’d ushered him into her office ahead of her so she could have Maria Jose check on his background. She recalled that her coffee mug had been in plain sight atop her desk.

  Devious son of a bitch!

  Her hands shook with rage. One of the dishes slipped off the top of the pile, cracked into pieces as it shattered on the kitchen floor. It was authentic china, a platter that had been in her family for five generations. She didn’t know why she’d even used it tonight. Nick deserved nothing better than disposables.

  “Goddamn it!” she hollered, dropping to her knees. Frustration bubbled over and she burst into tears. The drudge came running.

  “It’s OK,” she snapped, waving off the mech. “I’ve got this.”

  Forcing control, she wiped away her tears. She picked up the dish and cleaned up the worst of the mess. The drudge would deal with any remaining stains during its next housecleaning session.

  She should have confronted Nick this evening, got everything out in the open. The reason she hadn’t suddenly became clear to her.

  It’s up to him to come clean.

  Nick must have known from the way Bel had acted tonight that she was on to him. But instead of admitting what he’d done, he’d pretended to have no idea why she was so angry.

  If he wants to play it like that, so be it.

  Her final visit to the specialist was slated for the day after Christmas. By then, the unique pitstop antidote would be synthesized for her metabolism and the first of seven daily doses ready to be ingested. After that week-long drug regimen, Nick, quite literally, would be out of her system.

  Forty-Three

  “They never had a chance,” Gillian said as he watched the multicam videos on the cargo pod’s ceiling monitor. Split screens showed the killing of the imitators at the Nairobi Securities Exchange from various angles. The assassin had also murdered a score of people unlucky to have been conducting business in the exchange.

  “Strictly amateurs,” Basher said, commenting on their fallen doppelgangers. “They had no business going up against a Paratwa.”

  “Not complete amateurs,” Gillian argued. “They had some skills.”

  “Maybe, but they were in over their heads,” Slag said. “They didn’t know their own weaknesses and limitations.”

  Gillian nodded. It was a fair appraisal, especially for someone believing they could handle an assassin as deadly as Yiska.

  Slag and Basher traded more disparaging comments about the slain team. Stone Face ignored the discussion, his attention buried in a book.

  The Kenyan battle had occurred less than fifteen hours ago and the team was already airborne. Once more they were in the pod hanging from the stormlacer drone, flying toward Mexico’s Pacific coast and the hastily chosen target Nick had located. It was an El Sigiloso, a breed originally created by CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency.

  They didn’t know the target’s name, only its domicile, a spacious hacienda on the outskirts of Puerto Vallarta. The assassin had recently murdered a judge known for dispensing harsh sentences to binaries of the non-assassin variety who appeared in his courtroom for minor crimes.

  Nick’s best intel revealed that the assassin had parted ways with CISEN and was serving the Ash Ock. Nothing out of the ordinary about that: an estimated ninety percent of the assassins were now believed under the sway of the Royals. What was unusual about this El Sigiloso was its sex: female-female. Not quite as rare as a mélange but not mainstream either.

  Nick had set things up fast. Gillian agreed that it was important for the real Humanity’s Avenger to make a public splash with all due haste. Bel and Nick had already flooded the net with stories claiming that the Kenyan firefight had been carried out by a brave but foolhardy imitator. A quick public kill of the El Sigiloso by the genuine article would confirm those stories.

  Gillian returned his attention to the video and replayed the battle. He wasn’t seeking further insight into the slain team. His interest was on the assassin that had defeated them, Yiska.

  He’d reviewed the Kenyan incident several times already, as well as videos of the assassin’s earlier attack on E-Tech headquarters. What had troubled him about the first assault was apparent in the Nairobi incident as well. The Shonto Prong betrayed none of the usual weaknesses common to its breed. There hadn’t been so much as an infinitesimal moment’s hesitation or the slightest misstep. Yiska was a perfectionist of the highest order.

  The assassin had managed to escape from the Securities Exchange without a trace. That indicated full-blown physical alteration, probably via facial wipes and morphing attire. Although not impressive in and of itself, it was notable because the tways had managed to disappear without being spotted on any of the numerous surveillance cams inside and outside the building. That took careful planning and impeccable timing. Yiska had displayed similar timing during the E-Tech killings when he’d crashed through Bel’s office windows and landed on that skyboard.

  Gillian had studied the characteristics of all the breeds. He couldn’t remember just when or where he’d studied them, which was odd. Then again, that seemed to be true of many of his long-term recollections since he’d suffered those grave injuries, being beaten by the mokkers. Nick had warned that some of his memories were probably gone for good.

  Whatever. The bottom line was that Yiska somehow had transcended the limitations that kept his breed from reaching the very pinnacle of the assassins. He seemed to have become his own unique category. Shonto Prong, version 2.0.

  Nick and Bel very badly wanted to locate Yiska. Their reasons weren’t wholly rational, were driven in part by a mutual desire for vengeance upon the assassin responsible for the death of E-Tech’s former director and many others. But as much as Gillian hated to admit it, he was glad that Nick’s efforts to find the Shonto Prong had so far been thwarted. The team needed more experience and additional training before attempting to go up against such a masterful foe. But someday…

  “Five minutes to drop zone,” the stormlacer’s bot warned. “Three minutes to final descent.”

  “Ready?” Gillian asked.

  “Hell yes,” Basher said with a grin. “Ready to stomp some twofer.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” Gillian warned. “An El Sigiloso is no pushover.�
��

  “Maybe not. But at the end of the day, just another asshole with two assholes.”

  “Female assholes,” Gillian pointed out, making sure the soldiers kept that in mind. There was a well-documented phenomenon of male hesitation when the enemy combatant was a woman, something psychologists believed spoke to the very essence of maleness, a predisposition to protect the childbearing members of the species from harm. He’d stressed the issue to the trio throughout the team’s compacted training schedule even though they’d assured him they’d faced female fighters before without incident. Still, it was best to keep them aware of the phenomenon lest they fall prey to it.

  He would have preferred more prep time, at least another day or two for the team to study the El Sigiloso’s strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, they were ready. He would have scrubbed the mission if he’d felt otherwise.

  And Gillian found himself hungering for a new battle. They’d taken down three assassins thus far, and for hours or sometimes days after each triumph, he found himself replaying the fight in his head, relishing every detail from beginning to end. There was something about pursuing and killing assassins that made him feel more alive, that tuned his psyche to some indefinable frequency at the very core of his being. The feeling went beyond notions of vengeance against Paratwa for the death of his parents when he was a boy and his wife Catharine years later. It was something more fundamental than that, a simple truth.

  I was born to hunt them.

  Forty-Four

  Sosoome had headed out earlier in the evening in search of coitus. It was more than a bit depressing that Nick’s mech was probably going to get laid tonight while he spent New Year’s Eve alone in his apartment. That hadn’t mattered so much to him in previous years. But since Bel had come into his life – and then ruthlessly exited it – he’d become more attuned to feelings of longing, of loneliness.