by Patrick Lee
“Why the hell would he want us to take the Whisper from him?” she said.
“Because it told him to,” Travis said.
The concept cut the air like a blade. Even the typing on Crawford’s end of the call went quiet; whoever was around the speakerphone on that end was listening, too.
“What?” Paige said.
“He mastered it, right?” Travis said. “Learned how to make it tell him anything he needed to know?”
“That’s what the evidence supports,” Paige said.
“So he asked it for a plan. A way to eliminate Tangent, get back into Border Town, something like that. Whatever it was, it was hard. Right on the brink of impossible. Any of the obvious ways to do it, you guys have long since thought of, and built defenses against. So whatever plan the Whisper came up with, you’d expect it to be pretty far from obvious. Like a chess move by a supercomputer, something even the best human players can’t make sense of.”
Her eyes changed. Began to accept the idea, almost unwillingly.
“I can’t even guess what the plan is,” Travis said. “But there has to be one. This has to be one. He let you guys drive him out of this place, that day in 2005. He let you take the Whisper, knowing he’d get it back. He knew LHA in Japan would go active in four years. Knew you’d found his old notebook, and would risk flying the Whisper there to test his old theory. Really, a human being could almost guess those things. So it’d be child’s play for the Whisper. The real question is, what else could it have guessed? Could it have predicted that once Tangent lost the Whisper to him, you’d send a team here to try to contain this place tonight?”
Paige thought about it, nodded.
“Okay,” Travis said. “So then what? Could it assume a desperation move on your part? You said yourself you thought of triggering the nuke, if it came to it. How were you planning to do that?”
He knew what she would say.
“I would’ve done exactly what we already did,” Paige said. “I would’ve opened the doors into this room.”
“Still a move the Whisper could expect. So far, it adds up.”
“What adds up?”
“That Aaron Pilgrim meant for a Tangent team to be here tonight. Meant for them to open these doors and trigger the Ares, and end up fighting off a siege by the whole city.”
“Why?”
Travis thought about it, but could only shake his head. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, the dominoes are dropping exactly like he wants them to, so far. We’re dead-centered in the trap.”
He watched her consider it. Watched her hate it as much as she acknowledged it. It wasn’t so much an assessment of their situation as a diagnosis.
“How the hell we’re supposed to compete against this kind of thinking, I don’t know,” Travis said.
“I might,” Paige said. She looked around the mostly empty room, then back at him. “We exploit the things the Whisper could’ve never predicted.”
“Like what?”
“Like you. Four years ago, or fourteen years ago, whenever Pilgrim got this plan from the Whisper, there’s no way it could’ve known a random hiker would show up at that crash site two days ago. That Ellen Garner would’ve survived and left a note for you to follow. That you’d end up holding the Whisper yourself, and that it would be compelled to tell you how to read this language.”
He nodded. That much seemed safe enough to believe.
“Meaning we were never supposed to know these names,” Travis said, indicating the list carved into the floor.
They were both silent a moment.
Then Crawford’s voice came over the speaker. “We’re on it. I’ll put someone on each name, dig up everything there is, find whatever thread connects them all to Pilgrim.”
His last word was cut off by a scream in Travis’s ear, from one of the snipers over the comm system: “Gun!”
Half a second later, another of them cried out, and then there were two voices shouting that a man was down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sprinting again. Past the nuke. Down the stairs to Level Eight.
Miller, on the landing farther down, saw Paige and shouted, “Sixth floor! Hill’s been hit!”
Travis followed Paige down, past the piles of ammunition Miller continued to stockpile, through the tunnel of wires to the level below. Then more tunnels, across the sixth floor, toward the windows and the sound of screaming. They found two snipers kneeling over a third, who’d lost a good portion of his face and neck but was somehow still breathing. Wouldn’t be for much longer.
Paige dropped her backpack from her shoulders, wrenched open the zipper and brought out something that looked a lot like a pistol, maybe a little Walther PPK, Travis thought. Then he saw it better, and realized the resemblance was only fleeting: the thing’s shape was just stark and practical, a small black tube with a grip and a trigger. It was the Medic.
Paige aimed it at the dying man’s wounds, her body language full of doubt, and pulled the trigger. The effect looked something like a camera flash going off, accompanied by a surge of heat that Travis felt two feet away. The man’s body spasmed in response, and Travis saw the injuries change dramatically. The blood flow seemed to staunch itself in less than a second.
But the guy was still dying. Eyes still wild as he fought for breath. Paige gripped his hand, and her eyes pleaded with him to fight. But after a moment, his own eyes tilted away from hers, and he expelled a hard breath. He didn’t take his next one.
“Shooter was in a window halfway up the block,” one of the others said. “They’re getting smarter about it.”
Travis thought of the demo video on the laptop, two of the enraged men conferring thoughtfully and then trying to pick the cage lock. Livid, but not stupid. Not even close to stupid.
He turned to the window. Outside, on the bridges and in the streets between the buildings, the barricades of the dead were now adorned with the burning shells of automobiles. The blazes slowed the forward crush only a little, but had a stark effect on the fog, baking the air and clearing deep cavities through the mist around them. Like lenses through which Travis could now see the carnage, hard and clear in the firelight. He wished he couldn’t.
A small knot of people broke from the crowd and came inward at a sprint. The two snipers near Travis and Paige opened fire again.
Travis leaned close to her and shouted, “We’re not gonna last much longer! Four hundred thousand people out there! They see what’s not working for them, they’ll find a way that does!”
“What are we supposed to do?” Paige shouted. “If they come in, they’ll trip the sensors!”
“How does it normally work with the Ares?” he said. “Are the attackers after the thing itself, or just the people who are tagged by it? It’s just the people, right?”
Another car detonated in the street below, like a mortar round going off.
Paige shouted over the sound. “Yeah! They’re just after us!”
“So let’s leave!”
She looked at him like she’d heard wrong. So did the nearest of the snipers.
“They’ll follow us,” Travis said. “And they’ll forget about the building. We’ll end up dead, but at least we can draw them away from the fucking nuke. There must be service tunnels under the streets, drainage, pipeline maintenance, that kind of thing. Is there access to them from inside this building?”
“Yeah,” Paige said. “There’s a panel in the basement. It’s not huge, but we could fit through, single file—”
She stopped. Caught her breath. A second later Travis realized why.
Then she was on her feet and running again, through the tunnel, shouting into her comm unit as she went. “Second floor teams, get to the basement! Secure the conduit access!”
Travis was right behind her, rifle in hand, hitting the stairs now, down through the wire-choked space, past the feeders running ammo, past the rabbit tunnels branching out to the shooters on every level. Third floor now. Second. First.
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And here were the snipers Paige had just ordered down. Bunched around the doorway to the basement, the door itself torn from its hinges. Four men, firing on full auto at something right there, maybe just feet beyond Travis’s angle of view. Paige’s insight had prevented disaster by a margin of perhaps seconds: the throng had already flooded into the basement through the access tunnels.
At that moment, one of the four snipers took a shot to the head and dropped. However many people were down there, some of them had guns.
Travis realized he could hear their voices, loud as the shooting was. Could hear the screams of anger, could hear even the distinct words, in German and maybe Italian. A noise to Travis’s right made him turn. It’d sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor. It came again, and this time he saw its source. The hallway floor heaved upward an inch, hit by something from below. Some heavy object in the hands of probably a dozen people, being used as a battering ram to come through the floorboards. The third impact cracked one of them, leaving a four-inch-wide gap. Through it, Travis saw the nightmare. The space below was wall-to-wall with writhing bodies, faces twisted in rage. Eyes locked onto him through the gap, and a volley of incensed screams came up.
He turned and saw Paige looking at the same spot. Then, beyond her, one of the snipers took something from his backpack. In the crazed light, Travis couldn’t see what the thing was, but had a pretty good guess.
Paige turned, saw it, and screamed, “No!”
The man pivoted toward her, and Travis saw what he’d expected: a grenade.
“There are gas lines down there!” Paige shouted.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do?” the man yelled.
Paige had no answer.
The floor heaved again. A second board fractured, right behind the first, and a hand gripped it from below and snapped it down into the darkness. The hole would be wide enough to admit bodies soon. A second later, Travis heard the battering impact again, somewhere else on the main floor.
The sniper was still looking to Paige for an answer.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. She repeated it, looking around as if the answer would come to her.
“Yes you do,” Travis said.
She met his eyes. Narrowed hers.
“The grenade,” Travis said, and then darted his own eyes upward. Through the ceiling. To something eight stories above their heads. She followed. Understood.
“It’s all we’ve got,” Travis said.
“Is it a chess move the Whisper would have expected?” she said.
“We’re stuck with it, whether it is or not. Go. I’ll help these guys.”
She considered it for another two seconds, then nodded. She turned to the sniper and held out her hand for the grenade. He looked like he understood the plan. Or didn’t care, so long as there was one. He handed it over.
“Don’t take losses holding this floor!” Paige shouted. “Withdraw up the stairs when you have to! One way or another, this’ll be over in the next two minutes.”
Travis stared at her. Realized he was storing the image. Wondered if he’d ever see her again.
Then she was gone.
He unslung his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and went to the basement door where the others were standing.
Beyond it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. The basement, a vast space maybe twelve feet deep, crawled like a snake pit full of bodies, the living and the dead so intermixed it was hard to differentiate them. As the leading edge of the wave advanced up the stairs and was cut back by the autofire, those behind dragged the bodies aside, between themselves or above. The corpses that rode the crowd pumped arterial blood from bowl-sized exit wounds, spraying and coating the throng.
Men, women, children. No fog to hide them now. The crowd was the sort you might encounter at a mall, or a supermarket, or anywhere. Some of the parents were holding seven-year-olds by the hand, as if unwilling to lose sight of them. Even as they dragged them forward into the gunfire. And even the seven-year-olds looked ready to kill someone. Would have tried to, had they reached the top of the stairs.
The forefront continually surged and was seared back, ten to twelve steps below. Travis shouldered his rifle. Lowered the sights to the crowd on the stairs. Didn’t fire yet. Suddenly wasn’t sure he could. They were just people. Bloody and screaming, and furious enough to come forward into machine-gun fire. But still just people. It wasn’t their fault this was happening to them.
One of the snipers stopped to reload. It took him only three seconds, but in those seconds of reduced fire, the crowd gained four steps, and the back-and-forth cadence resumed there. Their progress was like a ratchet, locking in each little burst of progress, never really losing it.
A moment later, as the first sniper resumed fire, the other two ran dry in unison, and fumbled for fresh magazines. The crowd rushed upward at full speed; the lone shooter could only cover any one spot at a time. An old man wearing a ridiculous green bow tie, like a St. Patrick’s Day reveler drunk off his ass, came scrambling up out of the pack wielding a steak knife, aiming for the thigh of one of the reloading snipers, who wasn’t even looking his way. Travis pulled the trigger and took most of the old man’s head off. The body pitched back and was immediately grabbed and hauled upward, out of the way, by the next two attackers: a teenage boy and a woman no older than thirty. Travis shot them both in the chest, and didn’t stop shooting as each new target presented itself. He understood within seconds what it took to do it: you just didn’t look at the faces. That was how the snipers were managing. It was a miserable fucking tactic, he knew. And it wasn’t a real coping method for what he felt. It was just a kind of debt. He’d pay it back later. If there was a later.
Behind him there came a violent crash. He turned, along with the others, to see some kind of steel shelf unit sticking up through the floor, having broken a wide hole through. It dropped away a second later, and then there were hands gripping the edges of the hole, people below no doubt hoisted on the shoulders of others.
“Fall back to the stairs!” Travis shouted.
A head came up through the hole. Covered in someone else’s blood. Could’ve been either sex, any age. Travis put a bullet into it and watched it drop back through the opening, like the shelf had.
He and the others were moving now. Backing up in stutter-steps so the crowd on the basement stairs didn’t surge. They reached the stairs to the second floor and made their way up, reloading and firing as they went, the throng matching their pace as they climbed.
Paige rounded the landing on Level Seven. Miller was still there, doubling ammo and spare rifles. Feeders were running armloads to the snipers.
“Get some down to ground level!” Paige yelled, and didn’t wait to see her nod. She continued on. Up to Level Eight, then Nine.
The warhead. The red star like an eye, watching her. Daring her.
This would either work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, well, there were worse ways to die than standing near the heart of a thermonuclear blast. Truth be told, there was probably no better way. It would reduce her to loose atoms about ten thousand times faster than her nerves could send the pain signals to her brain. Faster than her eyes could report the sudden light to her visual cortex a few inches behind them. It would literally feel like nothing at all.
Still, pretty goddamned scary.
She knelt before the thing. Considered the grenade and the available space inside the warhead. Right against the primary would be the best place to put it. This primary was an implosion type. A uranium sphere surrounded by shaped charges, precision wired to a detonator. Properly triggered, the shaped charges were designed to blow in millisecond unison, crushing the uranium to critical mass and setting off a fission reaction. That was the A-bomb aspect of the device. The A-bomb, in turn, would set off the H-bomb portion. But if the grenade went off right up against the shaped charges, and scattered their careful arrangement before any of them blew, then none of that would happen. The
uranium crush would fail, and the whole sequence would stall.
That was the idea, anyway. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone had tested.
She set the grenade in place, between the shell of charges and one of the aluminum struts that braced the primary. She held it in place with her left hand, and with her right she pulled the pin. The handle swung open, and she heard the fuse ignite with a pop.
Turning now. Running hard. Into the room full of blazing white-orange light and not much else, past the inscription in the floor, past the nest of wires and the Ares and the amplifier and the silvery bond between them. To the far side of the room, putting as much space as possible between herself and the grenade blast. Wondering if she’d hear just the first crack of it before her life ended mid-thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.
“Landing!” one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above.
Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.
She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn’t slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood—but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.