Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

“hope.”

  “First order of business,” Bel began, “is getting you safely into Philly-sec. After that we can make arrangements for a new identity for you and Olinda. A fresh start.”

  “Not so fast,” Nick said. “What about the liege-killer? Could he have followed you here?”

  “No. I was”

  “very careful. But what about”

  “the three of you?”

  “Could you”

  “have been”

  “followed?”

  Nick shook his head. “I’ve been checking. No tails.”

  “But we’d better get back across the border quick,” Olinda said. “I’ve arranged with my people for their other Paratwa source to meet us.” She turned to Bel and Nick and explained, “Not everyone in the DOD is onboard with this. Having Mister X there will help smooth the way.”

  Ektor Fang seemed to consider the idea for a moment then nodded in unison.

  Bel was confused. Who was Mister X? Olinda hadn’t said anything about the DOD having another Paratwa informant. She glanced at Nick, knew he was hiding similar confusion. She decided it was best to go with the flow and reserve any questions for later.

  The four of them headed outside. One of Ektor Fang’s tways walked in front and his other half brought up the rear. Olinda nestled up to the tway in the lead and held his hand.

  “I’ve missed you,” Olinda whispered to her husband.

  “I know. But we’re together again. That’s all that’s important.”

  They passed back through the street party with no trouble and entered the house with the DOD’s secret elevator. Nick paused to peer through the edge of the torn curtain. Bel joined him at the window.

  “You see something?” she asked.

  “No. I think we’re good.”

  He moved away, allowing Bel to glance out. But an instant before she was about to release the curtain, she saw two men in hoodies slip around the corner from the same direction as the safe house. The pair reached the far edge of the crowd and stopped.

  The distance and the dim glow of the streetlamps served to keep their faces mainly in shadow. All she could ascertain for sure was that one was taller. Yet she had the strangest impression, no more than a fleeting gestalt, that the shorter one had a melancholy expression while his companion wore a faint smile.

  They stood side by side and scanned the crowd. The taller one looked in her direction. Even though Bel doubted he could see into the darkened room, a chill went through her. Intuition warned that they weren’t two men at all, but a Paratwa assassin that had been following Ektor Fang.

  “C’mon,” Nick urged from the top of the stairs. “We need to get out of here.”

  She rushed down the steps after him. Olinda and Ektor Fang were already in the basement. Olinda accessed the elevator. Bel breathed a sigh of relief when the door closed and the compartment took off horizontally for the first stage of the return trip.

  No one spoke for a time. Olinda nestled up against one of the tways and finally broke the silence.

  “I hope you don’t mind, dear, but I told them about our big plans. About us deciding that in the new year we’re going to try for a baby.”

  Both tways smiled. “I’m glad”

  “you told them.”

  “It isn’t something”

  “we’d be able”

  “to keep secret”

  “for long.”

  “I know. Skinny me. I’ll be showing pretty quickly.”

  Bel’s confusion escalated. Olinda hadn’t said a word about wanting to get pregnant. But whatever was going on, she realized she needed to play along.

  Olinda smiled warmly and held onto the tway’s arm. Bel had a sudden urge to do the same with Nick, to snuggle against him, to feel his physical touch. The evening’s turn of events had interrupted what she’d intended to be some seriously apologetic makeup sex for believing that he’d pitstopped her. But now wasn’t the appropriate time to display her affection.

  “Before we meet Mister X,” Olinda said to the tway, “there’s something important you need to know about him.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He doesn’t exist.”

  Olinda whipped a slate-colored knife from beneath her jacket, stabbed it through the tway’s heart. The short blade erupted out his back, its edges strangely blurred.

  He screeched and fell to the floor, writhing in agony. Even through Bel’s shock she realized the tway had been pierced by a flash dagger, an energy weapon with an extendable reach by means of a hot particle stream flowing down the length of the physical blade.

  The next few seconds became a blur of raging movements.

  Nick whipping out his Glock, taking aim at Olinda…

  The surviving tway launching a Cohe wand from a slip-wrist holster and igniting a crescent web…

  The din of Nick’s gunfire in the enclosed space pounding Bel’s eardrums…

  Olinda lunging left…

  …causing Nick’s three rapid-fire shots to miss her and deflect off the far wall.

  One of the shots ricocheted, ripping into Bel’s flesh.

  Whether it was the sudden pain from the bullet hitting her shoulder or some form of hyperawareness taking control, Bel realized what Nick didn’t.

  He was aiming at the wrong target.

  “Nick, no!” she shouted at him as he jerked the Glock’s barrel toward Olinda’s new position.

  The surviving tway remained fully functional. It displayed no signs of bisectional hemiosis from the mortal stabbing of its other half.

  “Look at him!” Bel hollered. “He’s not a tway!”

  The survivor stabbed at Olinda with his Cohe. She ducked low. The black beam flashed over her head. She sliced the dagger toward the survivor’s weak side portal.

  The survivor jerked sideways. The tip of Olinda’s dagger crackled against his front crescent in a burst of crimson flame.

  “It’s not a Paratwa!” Bel screamed.

  Her words finally registered. Nick switched targets, plunged his gun arm through the survivor’s right side portal. He fired once, into the ear. A spray of chunky scarlet exploded out the far side of the survivor’s head, tattooing the back wall of the elevator.

  The tway that wasn’t a tway crumpled to the floor.

  It was over. Olinda and Nick knelt beside the two bodies, checked to make sure they were dead. Bel sat down in the corner, clutching her shoulder.

  Nick realized she was injured. He rushed to her side.

  “It’s OK,” she assured him. “The bullet just grazed me.”

  It was painful but not unbearably so. That likely would change shortly when her adrenalin-pumped system returned to normal levels.

  Nick shook his head, angry at himself. “I misread things. I thought Olinda was showing her true colors.”

  “I know.” Nick’s hatred of servitors created a huge blind spot for him. In the pulse of the moment, that blind spot had almost led him to make a bad call.

  He dabbed at her wound with a hankie. “I’m really sorry. I could have–”

  “But you didn’t. Anyway, it’s not me you should be apologizing to.”

  Olinda was running her fingers across the dead men’s necks, feeling for something.

  “They’ve got attaboy implants as I suspected,” she said. “This compartment is com-shielded but as soon as we’d have reached the surface, they’d have been able to contact their masters. I had to stop them.”

  The elevator eased to a halt and switched to ascent mode for the final part of the journey.

  Olinda used her silver ring and a marble-sized unikey to deactivate their facial wipes. They weren’t even twins like the real Ektor Fang. The two faces bore no obvious relation to one another.

  “Recognize them?” she asked.

  Bel and Nick shook their heads.

  “Servitors?” Bel wondered.

  “Even more extreme, I’m guessing,” Nick said. “Biwannabes. Fanatics willing to do anything the Royals a
sked…”

  He trailed off, exchanged a knowing look with Olinda. He lunged to his feet.

  “Stop the elevator!”

  Bel was closest to the controls. She jumped up and slammed the emergency button. The compartment jerked to a stop.

  Olinda withdrew a scanner from her pocket, ran it across the bodies.

  “What’s going on?” Bel demanded.

  “If they’re biwannabes, they could be on a suicide mission,” Nick said.

  “Not could be, are,” Olinda said, grimacing at the scanner’s readout. “Their midsections are packed with K-90. Must have been surgically implanted.”

  “Phony tways turned into human bombs,” Nick muttered. “Ready and willing to die for the cause.”

  “How’d you know they weren’t a binary?” Bel asked Olinda.

  “I suspected the moment I set eyes on them. Something didn’t feel right. And then when I hugged him…”

  Pain flared across her face. Bel knew she was struggling not to dwell on the fate of the real Ektor Fang.

  “Anyway, I was pretty sure they were fakes at that point. I thought they might try to kill us in the safe house. That’s why I made up the story about the other Paratwa source.”

  Bel understood. “Give them incentive not to take action until we reached Philly-sec by tempting them with a high-value target. Then they could kill us and take out this unknown CI as well.”

  “Can the bombs be disarmed?” Nick asked.

  Olinda shook her head. “Not with any gear I have on me.”

  “Then we’ve got a serious problem. When we get to the surface and open the elevator door, our com links will start functioning again. Whoever is running these two will know in an instant that they’re dead. They’ll immediately trigger the bombs.”

  “Why don’t we cut out their attaboys and smash them to pieces?” Bel suggested.

  “Wouldn’t work,” Olinda said. “The attas will have been linked directly to the bombs, just in case these two came to their senses and decided against suicide.”

  Nick agreed. “If we mess with those coms, they’ll blow for sure.”

  Bel had another idea. “We might have at least a few seconds before the controller is able to pull the trigger. Maybe enough time for us to get out of the elevator and shut the doors?”

  “You don’t understand,” Olinda said. “We’re talking about military-grade K-90. When the bombs go off they’ll take out a city block. We’d never get clear in time, not to mention a lot of innocent people dying along with us.”

  “We have to do something. Obviously we can’t stay here.”

  “No, we can’t,” Nick said. “But there might be another way. Messing around with the bodies won’t stop the bombs from going off. But we may be able to create enough electromagnetic interference in this elevator so that when we reach the surface, their com links won’t function.”

  Olinda followed the direction of his thoughts. “I have an attagirl, you have an attaboy. If we connect them together…”

  “Yeah. The two of them physically mated ought to generate enough EMI to do the trick. Which means we need to do a little amateur surgery.”

  “I’ll cut yours out first,” Olinda said.

  Nick shook his head. “No, I’ll go first.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “Hell no. Have you?”

  “No. But is this really worth arguing–”

  “It’s not worth arguing about,” Bel interrupted. “I’m the one who once studied to be a doctor. I’ll do you both.”

  Forty-Eight

  Olinda had a tiny medkit with a single dose of anesthetic, the same as Nick’s safak. That meant the two of them would have at least some relief from the pain of having the subcutaneous com links cut out of their necks. But it also meant there was no painkiller left for Bel. She’d have to endure the increasing agony of her shoulder wound while performing two delicate surgeries.

  Olinda taped gauze around her bullet wound to stem the bleeding. Bel forced herself to ignore the pain.

  Nick went under the knife first. Using the safak’s smallest blade, Bel carefully made three intersecting incisions and peeled back the flap of skin to expose the attaboy. Nick grimaced but gave her a thumbs-up.

  She sliced through the thin band of neural connectors and yanked out the com link. There was a lot more blood than she’d anticipated. She put a clump of gauze in Nick’s hand and told him to press it over the wound.

  Five minutes later, Olinda’s attagirl was out too. By this time, the pain in Bel’s shoulder was getting bad. Clenching her fists, she leaned against the back of the elevator and watched Nick and Olinda wire their com links together.

  Nick placed the joined attaboy and attagirl between the bodies. “It won’t have much range but it should be enough to knock out their com links.”

  Olinda went to the control panel to restart the elevator.

  “Shouldn’t we test it first?” Bel asked.

  “No way to do that,” Nick said. “It either works or…”

  Olinda pressed the button. The elevator continued its ascent. In seconds they reached the terminus in Philly-sec.

  The door opened. They exited into the basement. Bel was pleasantly surprised to find herself still among the living. Olinda quickly closed the door, sealing the explosive bodies in the com-shielded compartment.

  She accessed an emergency pad inset into the wall, made contact with a DOD official and related their situation. Nick and Bel sat on the bottom step, nursing their respective injuries.

  “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

  “It hurts. Your neck?”

  “Not bad. I feel kind of naked without an attaboy, though. Guess I may as well get a new one wired in while the wound is still fresh.”

  Olinda completed the call and perched on the edge of a rickety wooden chair. “We need to wait here. A DOD scram unit is en route to evac us. A bomb squad won’t be far behind.”

  Bel gripped Nick’s hand. She didn’t like waiting, not with the explosives this close. Nick sensed her concern.

  “If they didn’t blow by now they probably won’t go up,” he said.

  Probably didn’t sound very reassuring. But she trusted his judgment.

  “I made it clear to the scram unit that this is a high-level counterintelligence matter,” Olinda said. “They’ll be discreet and won’t reveal your identities. And I’ll make sure your involvement with what happened tonight doesn’t leak.”

  “What exactly did happen?” Bel asked. “I mean… your real husband?”

  Olinda stiffened, fought to keep her voice free of emotion. “Obviously, Ektor Fang was caught, probably right after he called me. While he was being interrogated, those two biwannabes would have been prepped to assume his identity. There wouldn’t have been enough time for them to undergo a full-blown sapient supersedure. All that was required was for them to have similar builds. The rest was done with facial wipes and some minor flesh sculpting. It was never meant to be a long-term deception.”

  “He sounded like a real binary,” Bel said. “His speech, his movements.”

  “The most fanatical of the biwannabes train to be passable,” Nick said.

  “We have to assume that the three of us have been compromised,” Bel added. “The Royals will know our identities.”

  “Certainly that’s true for me,” Olinda said. “But I think you two are still safe. Ektor Fang had a plan in case he was exposed. He wouldn’t willingly give up any information. Of course they’d have attempted torture. But it never would have gotten to that point. He had a suicide implant. It was thunk-triggered, instantaneous.”

  She stared blankly into the distance and clenched her fists before continuing.

  “They would have used postmortem accumulators on him, of course. But the implant would have wiped out everything but his most recent short-term memories, and then only those with a strong emotional component. They certainly would have learned that I existed and garnered a good
physical image of me, as well as enough intel to know where we were supposed to meet.”

  Nick nodded. “Their plan would have been flexible. I assume that option one was to capture us right then and there. But when you made up that story about a Paratwa source, this Mister X waiting for us across the border, they elected to go with option two. Accompany us back to Philly-sec and then trigger the bombs. Take out us and the source, along with any other of Ektor Fang’s human contacts.”

  Bel mentioned the two figures she’d glimpsed through the window. She voiced her suspicion that they were a Paratwa.

  “I don’t think they – or it – saw us. The pair seemed to be following us, though.”

  “Did one of them look kind of sad and the other amused?” Olinda asked.

  “Yes. How’d you know that?”

  “We may have been luckier than we thought. I’m pretty sure you saw Reemul.”

  Bel shivered at the idea of how narrowly they might have escaped. Being blown up in a blinding instant was one thing. But being captured and tortured by the liege-killer…

  She shook her head, pushed such dark thoughts from her mind. The night had been turbulent enough without imagining more dire events.

  Nick had further questions. “You said you suspected immediately that those men weren’t your husband. But you must not have been absolutely sure until you ran that flash dagger through his chest.”

  “If it had been the real Ektor Fang, I wouldn’t have been fast enough. The blade never would have touched him. But by that time I knew for certain anyway.”

  Bel understood. “That comment you made to him about the two of you planning to get pregnant. It was a lie.”

  Olinda nodded. “We never discussed such a thing. There was no need. The truth is, I’m already pregnant. Seven and a half months from now, Ektor Fang would have been the father of a baby girl.”

  The admission shattered Olinda’s carefully maintained veneer. Her face contorted with pain. She slithered to her knees. Her words emerged as a whisper.

  “I c-can’t believe he’s gone.”

  The dam burst. Tears streamed down her face. Bel rushed over to comfort her. There were no words to be uttered that could lessen her agonies. Bel simply hugged Olinda and let her cry.