Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

Other than the team’s first firefight in Alvis Qwee’s torture basement, Gillian had adopted the policy of allowing their opponent to attack first. Such a strategic feint gave the assassin the erroneous impression that it was determining the structure of the fight. It enabled Gillian to make a series of subtle moves, surprising the enemy and thus gaining a tactical edge. Surprise was a weakness, inducing it an advantage.

  But Yiska didn’t attack. The tways just stood there, motionless and calm. The Shonto Prong was equally aware of the advantage of allowing an enemy to strike first. Gillian decided to provoke a reaction.

  “Thank you for meeting us, Yiska.” he offered, his tac helmet distorting his voice in case the Paratwa was using vocal ID scanners.

  The tways remained silent. Gillian continued.

  “Should things end with bisectional hemiosis, you have my word that your surviving tway will be dispatched quickly.”

  Ponytail reacted with a faint nod. Albino spoke.

  “Yiska thanks you for such consideration. Yiska is pleased.”

  Gillian had no time to dwell on why the assassin was speaking in the third person. Albino fell into a crouch, pulled out a thruster and propelled a Cohe wand into his other hand from a slip-wrist holster. Ponytail pivoted so that the tways were back to back and made the same series of moves to draw weapons. The assassin’s crescent webs ignited.

  Gillian and the team reacted within microseconds. Guns and Cohe were drawn. Webs came alive.

  Directionalize. Attack one tway, defend against the other.

  Slag, Basher and Stone Face had fought enough battles with Gillian and knew the drill. They required no prompting to carry out the unspoken order. Moving as one, they defended themselves against Albino’s furious attack while opening fire on Ponytail.

  Gillian ducked low, dodged a horizontal slash of Ponytail’s beam. The streak of black light continued across the room, sparked and splattered against Slag’s crescent web.

  Patrons stampeded toward the far exits to escape, morph masks and real faces grimacing in terror, screams filling the air. Even through Gillian’s helmet, his olfactory sense remained potent enough to smell their fear.

  Don’t allow the assassin to shift between offensive and defensive modes.

  The soldiers kept up their barrage against Ponytail, ignoring Albino’s ruthless assault upon them. Gillian charged toward Albino, stabbing and slashing his Cohe, forcing the tway to divert some of its energies toward protecting itself from his beam.

  “Switch!” Gillian barked.

  The soldiers instantly shifted their assault to Albino, continuing to spin as a trio to repel Ponytail’s assault with Cohe and thruster. The tways reacted with seamless precision to the change, not deceived in the slightest.

  Ponytail slammed his beam down upon the dance floor. It formed a curving destructive arc behind and to the right of the soldiers, gouging out chunks of plastic tile and subflooring. The debris, hurled into the air and superheated by the wand’s energy, rained down upon the panicked patrons. The cowgirl screamed as a clump of burning material landed on her bare leg.

  For an instant, Gillian thought the floor hit was the result of a misdirected beam. Then Albino’s Cohe emulated what his tway had done. It ripped through the floor in front of and to the left of the soldiers.

  The three soldiers now stood in the middle of a smoldering circle three meters wide. Yiska, like Gillian, would have dug up the building plans and construction history, would have learned all he could about the combat environment. The assassin would know that the dance floor rested atop the main basement of this nineteenth century building, which had minimal crossbeams and a paucity of supporting columns.

  “Jump!” Gillian hollered as the circular portion started to give way.

  The soldiers perceived the danger. Slag and Basher leaped forward, made it outside the circle just as the floor shuddered and collapsed beneath them. But Stone Face was positioned behind them at that moment, farther from safety.

  He jumped but didn’t make it. He landed on his feet a scant thirty centimeters from the edge. The floor dropped. Stone Face went down with it. A loud boom shook the air as the cut-out section crashed into the basement. Plumes of smoke erupted from the hole.

  The tways went back-to-back, galloped toward the jagged edge. They took a mighty leap. As they soared across the chasm, a small dark object shot out the bottom of Albino’s pants leg and vanished into the basement abyss.

  “Thermic bomb!” Gillian yelled.

  The warning came too late. A savage explosion rocked the building. A shaft of blue-white flame as hot as burning metal erupted from the hole, hissing as it splattered and danced across the fireproof ceiling. In the basement debris below, the detonation and heat flash would have reduced Stone Face to clumps of charcoal.

  Gillian had trained the team to fight with a missing man. Slag and Basher reacted fast, went into back-to-back mode. They kept spinning in tandem, limiting the exposure of their weak side portals as best as possible.

  But Stone Face was gone and with him, the team’s delicate balance. Yiska came at Slag and Basher from both flanks. Cohe wands slashed and stabbed. Thrusters fired alternately in a machine gun rhythm. Gillian was forced to modify his own assault, strike at both tways in an attempt to keep the soldiers from being overwhelmed. But the tways moved with terrifying precision, dodging his beams with ease.

  Slag was hit first. Ponytail’s beam penetrated his left portal. It lanced into Slag’s arm, went through part of his torso and exited through his lower back.

  The gun fell from the soldier’s hand. He staggered three steps, stumbled and collapsed onto his back.

  Basher, whooping with maniacal fury, made a suicide charge at Ponytail. Albino’s Cohe caught him low. The slicing beam gutted his right leg from knee to ankle. He stumbled forward, fell toward the gaping hole. An instant before he went over the edge, Ponytail finished him off with a Cohe stab up under the neck and into the brain.

  The battle was over.

  Gillian eased hand pressure on the Cohe, assumed a neutral posture. Not surprisingly, the tways did the same and lowered their weapons. As he’d anticipated, they would make an effort to take him alive.

  He felt no fear, only a sense of remorse at the team’s first – and last – failure. Another emotion hovered beneath the surface, however, one he couldn’t shape into words. The closest he could come to defining the feeling was to perceive it as a kind of disappointment, yet one not directly related to the team’s defeat. Instead, it seemed to revolve around an ethereal desire for some momentous event to have occurred during the battle. Whatever the nature of that event, it clearly hadn’t happened. Hence the disappointment.

  Movement caught his eye. Slag was still alive. Mortally wounded after being pierced by one of Yiska’s beams, he was struggling to crawl across the floor and reach his fallen thruster.

  There would be no last minute heroics. Gillian knew that Slag couldn’t be saved.

  Two Cohes ignited, one microseconds ahead of the other. Ponytail’s leading beam stabbed into Slag’s skull just above the right ear. An instant later, Albino, with a series of strange wrist contortions, coiled his beam around Slag’s neck.

  The second beam squeezed inward like a crushing noose, decapitating the soldier. Even as Slag’s head rolled away from his body, insight flooded Gillian.

  The head hadn’t been sliced off, it had been garroted. No Shonto Prong had ever developed such precision with the wand. The technique was called the lariat and the delicate skills necessary to employ it required special training, beginning at an age when most Paratwa were barely toddlers.

  Only one breed had ever been taught to master the lariat. In a moment of utter clarity, the mysteries of Yiska’s behavior unraveled.

  Transcending the limitations of his breed. A piece on a chessboard that doesn’t move in accordance with logical rules. A shift from elegant assassinations to savage massacres.

  Yiska wasn’t Shonto Prong 2.0, merely an exceptio
nal assassin. He was a different breed altogether.

  A Jeek Elemental.

  Gillian didn’t try to hide his surprise. He stared at the tways, who’d assumed side-by-side formation. The Paratwa, gazing back, realized Gillian had grasped the truth. No longer needing to hide its true identity, the Jeek allowed its faces to default into their natural expressions.

  Ponytail adopted a smile, Albino a sad, melancholy look.

  Sixty-Three

  “Reemul,” Bel whispered.

  Nick was too stunned by the team’s defeat to say anything. The revelation that Yiska and the liege-killer were one and the same only served to amplify the tragedy. Detailed analysis of just how and why such a substitution had taken place would have to wait. Yet even with Gillian at the precipice of death or worse, a theory streamed into consciousness.

  The attack on E-Tech headquarters may have been the beginning of the substitution, of the liege-killer pretending to be Yiska. The Ash Ock urgently needed to have Director Witherstone silenced before he could pass on the Thi Maloca intel, and Reemul must have been in Philadelphia that morning or close by. He’d been tasked with the murder.

  Yet the Royals, likely guided by Sappho’s shrewd perception, may have realized that using the notorious liege-killer would focus even more attention on the director’s killing, perhaps inspire investigators to delve deeper and seek the real reason behind the attack. Rather than risk the possibility, they’d ordered Reemul to disguise his identity.

  Then again, Nick’s entire theory could be wrong. Perhaps a simpler motivation was behind the substitution. A sick twisted freak of a binary, Olinda Shining had called Reemul. The liege-killer might simply derive some kind of bizarre pleasure from pretending to be someone else.

  Whatever the truth, the fate of the real Yiska likely would never be known. Perhaps he’d been ordered to lay low or change his identity. Or maybe the liege-killer had eliminated him, either by Royal decree or to satisfy a personal grudge.

  Nick forced his attention back to the screen. A sickening sensation rumbled through his guts knowing that the last survivor of Humanity’s Avenger was doomed. In the time they’d been together, he’d come to like and admire Gillian – in and of itself pretty strange, considering that the man was in many respects a manufactured personality, his true identity buried by the most advanced surgical techniques.

  And then an even weirder conclusion hit Nick. Against all reason, he realized that he’d come to think of this former Ash Ock tway as a friend.

  Sixty-Four

  Gillian gazed calmly at the tways, aware that he faced the Jeek Elemental known as the liege-killer. A year ago, almost to the hour, Nick and Bel had experienced a frightening adventure in the zoo. They hadn’t shared all the details except to say that they’d had a close encounter with Reemul. Bel had made mention of the assassin’s contradictory expressions.

  Smiler and Sad-eyes. What was going on in such a mind? How did the liege-killer reconcile those two distinctive faces? Then again, maybe disparity was the whole point and reconciliation fundamentally impossible.

  Maybe Reemul, a creature inhabiting polar opposites, was just plain crazy.

  Gillian recognized that branding the halves of a binary, giving them individual names, was inherently illogical. Did it make sense for a normal human to use different nomenclature to describe the left and right sides of his body? Still, from a tactical standpoint, naming the tways had proven useful for the team.

  Now there was no more team, no more complex tactics to be employed. Gillian’s future, at least as far ahead as he could envision it, had collapsed into two disagreeable courses of action. He could surrender and be tortured for intel and subsequently executed. Or, he could die right here and now, and in a way that cheated the Royals out of hooking him up to postmortem accumulators and wringing information out of him.

  The decision was easy. “Let’s end it, Jeek.”

  “My!” Sad-eyes said. “So very eager!”

  “What shall I do?” Smiler added, his face brightening even more, as if unable to contain the pleasure of his triumph.

  “You might want to consider suicide,” Gillian suggested.

  Reemul unleashed stereo laughter, a hideous expulsion that rose and fell as it alternated between the tways. Smiler’s right palm and Sad-eyes’ left palm slammed together in rapid succession, a barrage of claps.

  Such supreme confidence, Gillian mused. The very idea of losing has never occurred to this creature.

  And in Reemul’s cocksure attitude he perceived a third course of action. Possessing an ego incapable of acknowledging defeat harbored a potential weakness, something that Gillian might use against him. This third option had an infinitesimal chance of success. But compared to the other two, it was deliriously appealing.

  His crescent web remained active as did Reemul’s. He knew that the hole in the floor that had taken Stone Face and Basher was slightly more than two meters behind him and just to his left.

  Gillian lifted his Cohe wand to his face and pressed the weapon’s needle under his chin. One mild squeeze and the black light would pierce his brain, incinerating the limbic system, the heart of memory formation, as well as the majority of his cerebral cortex. Postmortem accumulators would be rendered useless.

  Reemul’s expressions didn’t change. But Gillian knew the Jeek would be experiencing internal conflict. His Royal masters would have made clear to him their strong preference to take at least one member of Humanity’s Avenger alive.

  “My secrets will die with me,” Gillian taunted him. “You’ve failed.”

  “Jeek be nimble,” Smiler said.

  “Jeek be quick,” Sad-eyes finished.

  “Not that quick,” Gillian countered. “We both know I can kill myself. You can’t stop me.”

  Two sets of eyes flashed malice.

  He’s almost where I want him.

  “You shouldn’t have been so sloppy in killing the others. The fire brain-baked two of them.” He nodded toward Slag’s body. “And you weren’t satisfied with just garroting him, you had to lance a beam through his head. Now you can forget about postmortem accumulators for any of us.”

  Smiler and Sad-eyes were fighting to maintain their composures, not give in to rage. But Gillian knew that anger was the prime underlying emotion of a colossal ego, and thus the assassin’s weakness. And it was a weakness he could exploit.

  A bit more of a push and he’ll make his move.

  Gillian filled his face with a smug expression and his voice with contempt.

  “What will your Ash Ock masters think of your inability to retrieve an enemy alive? Will they scold you like a child for failing to carry out such a simple task?”

  The tways’ expressions were frozen now, Reemul struggling to keep madness and fury from burning through those conflicting faces. Gillian continued scratching at the wound.

  “I understand that Sappho considers you her special errand boy. I imagine she’ll be pretty disappointed.”

  A faint tremor passed through the faces, briefly distorting the sad look and the smile. Gillian realized he’d touched a particular sore spot.

  “Sappho.” He shook his head with mocking laughter. “I can see you now, Reemul, standing before your witch-bitch, babbling excuses about why you failed.”

  Gillian perceived the infinitesimal muscle twinges that signified the liege-killer’s explosion into violence. He was ready. As Reemul madly lashed out with two Cohes and fired both thrusters, he lunged to the left.

  One beam glanced off his web, the other missed entirely. But he didn’t try dodging the thruster blasts, nor lean into them to stay upright against the double impact. Instead, he relaxed his muscles, allowed the blasts to propel him backward.

  He flew toward the hole. At the perfect moment he wrenched his body into a backflip and went over the edge.

  Hot darkness.

  Waves of heat cascaded up from below, remnants of the thermic bomb. He rolled into a ball in midair as he fell into the
shadowy void, using the crescent web to shield him from the worst of the hotness…

  …tensing muscles for the inevitable…

  Crash!

  His rear crescent compressed as he slammed into the debris pile. The hit was bearable but the remnants of the collapsed dance floor remained superheated. Small pieces of sizzling material slipped through his weak side portals, scorching his bare arms.

  Ignoring the pain, he rolled off the pile and bounced to his feet. The building plans indicated east and west exits but his landing had messed up his sense of direction as well as stirring up a fresh outpouring of debris smoke. The web’s side portals created enough of a protective layer to keep him from choking, but he couldn’t see more than a meter ahead.

  Reemul’s Cohe beams lashed into the hole from above, crisscrossing the spot where he’d landed. He lunged away from the pile…

  …and tripped over some large object, falling forward onto his front crescent. Even before he scrambled to his feet he realized the object was Basher, his body a blackened mass.

  He ran until he reached a wall. From somewhere behind him in the smoke-filled space came a pair of loud crashing sounds.

  Reemul had jumped into the basement.

  Gillian felt along the wall. Hands found the knob of a fire door, an old manual one made of steel. He yanked it open. Leading upward was a long staircase. A dim light at the top revealed another closed door, egress to the first floor. Smoke was already cascading up the steps.

  He heard movement behind him. The tways were coming.

  Reemul’s too close. I can’t make it.

  The staircase was essentially a tunnel. If he entered it, he’d lose all freedom of movement. He’d be unable to dodge the liege-killer’s beams and thruster blasts.

  I need a diversion, something to slow him down.

  An idea took shape. Almost directly above the basement’s west exit door was a large propane tank that served to power the club’s emergency generators. Propane was heavier than air and extremely flammable. The problem was, he had no idea if he was at the west exit. It could just as likely be the east one.