by James Knapp
I darted out of the office and stepped through the scattered clothing toward the figure. The young man made a choking sound, and red blood ran from his mouth. He’d been human.
Reloading, I stepped past the body. An exit on the far side of the room was the most direct route to the transmitter. That’s where Fawkes would be.
My footsteps echoed down the long, dark corridor in front of me as I moved farther into the building.
Calliope Flax—Third Street Station
When I came out of the tunnel and saw lights again, the railcar was there, like Nico said it would be. There were other people on the platform, some lined up by the wall, others hanging around the train looking for a way on. I showed them my gun and they got out of the way. The scanner turned from red to green when I showed it my military ID tag, and the doors opened to let me on. Some of the seats still had people’s coats and bags on them from when they ran, and there was an open suitcase in the row to my right with most of the clothes pulled out.
I stepped through then turned and stood just inside the doorway looking out. One guy looked like he might try to push his way past me, but he didn’t. The doors closed, and the staring faces on the platform fell away as the train took off. The last thing I saw before disappearing back into the tunnel was two guys on their knees, robbing a dead body.
To hell with this place.
“Confirm military ID,” the computer croaked. I rattled it off.
“Flax, Calliope,” the computer said. “Citizen First Class. Decorated Emet Corporal. Your destination has been preprogrammed. Do you wish to override?”
“No.”
“Please enjoy your trip.”
I hung on to the pole as the train took off down the tunnel, and stood there like a zombie until the dark of the tunnel fell away and the city lights filled up the windows. I watched Alto Do Mundo, that big, fucking tower of rich assholes, get closer as the slums flew past. It made me think about Luis, that kid I met in the tank a million years ago. He used to live there. I wondered if the rest of my squad was there and if they managed to get in. I wondered if it would still even be there when the sun came back up.
Why do they always die?
Luis died hard. The old man who looked after me when I came back from my tour, Buckster, died hard too, but I was just a dreg back then. I was a soldier now. That kid was right next to me. I could have reached out and grabbed her. I was armed and I knew it was coming. She’d saved my life. We were supposed to get out of there together.
Pain drilled into my head and my knees gave out for just a second. A scramble of code streamed by in front of me, as I grabbed the pole next to me and held on. Spit filled my mouth, and my eyes burned. Everything inside me felt fucked up. I checked my wrist and saw two big, dark veins creeping down my forearm, right across the join where the dead hand was grafted on.
Necrotic bleed-through. I had it too. Between that and the revivor nodes that had formed I wondered if they could even fix me, if it even mattered whether I got out of the city or not.
“You could be a champ,” a voice said. I thought someone said it anyway. When I turned around, no one was there.
The car phased out for a second and I was somewhere else. I was back at the Porco Rojo, in the locker room. It was postfight, and I had a butterfly clip over a cut on one cheek. There was a knot on my right wrist and a nasty purple bruise was forming there. It throbbed, but I felt good. I fought hard and I won. The air smelled like a mixture of BO and soap, along with fifty different deodorants and colognes. The smell took me back, and on the train, I smiled.
I remember this.
“I am a champ,” I said. Leaning against the lockers across from me was Tito Gantz, a fight scout. Getting noticed by Tito was a good thing. I was psyched, but I still had my guard up. I didn’t expect to find him back there waiting, and definitely not for me.
“You’re a good fighter,” he said, “but you’re not a champ.”
“I’m on TV.”
Tito snorted. “TV,” he spat out. “Where your show is so deep in the muck, even the fucking data miners can’t find you.”
“You found me.”
“I’m paid to find you,” he said. “That’s my job. I take people like you and put them in front of actual viewers, on actual networks with actual advertisers. You want to knock heads in this hellhole until you finally burn out? Or do you want to at least have a shot?”
“A shot at the big time, huh?” I sneered.
“I’m not psychic,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it the big time, and it’s a shot—that’s all. Maybe you can hold your own and maybe you can’t. You want to find out or not?”
He didn’t oversell. I liked that. It was a rung, just a bottom rung, but sometimes that’s all you needed. It was the first step up, out of the pit, maybe. I grinned and held out my hand, still with the tape on it.
“I—”
Before I could get an answer out, the word fizzled in my mouth. Three guys I’d never seen before came walking into the locker room like they owned the place; two big guys in suits and one smaller guy in a tight silk shirt. He was lean and looked like he spent way too much time in front of a mirror. His duds looked like they cost a fortune, and I’d have bet money the diamond in his ear was real. He had ice-blue eyes, real light, almost gray. When he came closer to us, he smiled, and I saw he was wearing eyeliner.
“Who the fuck are you?” Tito asked. He was pissed, but when the little guy looked over at him, he just shut up and got real interested in the floor.
“Quiet,” he said. “I’m a fan.”
“I got a lot of fans,” Tito said.
“Not of yours,” the guy said. “Of hers. I like to come here. I like to mingle with the thirds. I like to bet on Flax, here, and I almost always win.”
He smiled, looking into my eyes, and I saw his pupils get big.
“Even when I don’t,” he said, “it’s always entertaining.”
He turned to Tito, who was still looking down at the floor.
“She’s not interested,” the little guy said. “Just forget this ever happened, and go back to your business. Both of you.”
Tito looked like he was on dope or something, but even so, he didn’t look sure.
“But I could book her in the Capital,” he said. “I mean, the suburbs, but still, the Capital, man…. ”
The little guy with the eyeliner looked annoyed.
“I’m not driving all the way out there,” he said.
The locker room faded, and I was back on the train. All of a sudden, Alto Do Mundo was practically on top of us. How long had I been zoned out?
What the hell was that?
I didn’t remember ever getting a meeting with Tito Gantz. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said you were crazy, but I knew what I’d just remembered was real. It was real. It happened, then it got wiped out….
“Wait,” I said. The train kept moving.
“Wait,” I said again. “This is Flax. I changed my mind. I want to change my destination.”
“State your override destination,” the computer said. I thought for a second. My heart rate was starting to pick up again, cutting through the fog.
“Voodoo Proper,” I said. “Heinlein Industries.”
“Destination is blocked,” the computer said. “Would you like to choose another?”
“Piece of shit …”
“Would you like to choose ano—”
“Alto Do Mundo Station,” I said, pointing out the window. “There. Pull in there.”
The car veered so suddenly, I almost lost my footing. It went down into the nearest tunnel and picked up speed.
I chewed the inside of my lip until I tasted blood. I wanted to bite something. I wanted to sink my teeth into something so bad, I wondered if maybe I had turned. Maybe the inhibitor died, and I was one of them and I didn’t even know it.
The train evened out and air whooshed as it came out of the tunnel and into the station. Lights popped up outside
the windows again and I saw a wall decorated with little, fancy colored tiles that spelled out the station name.
ALTO DO MUNDO CENTRAL STATION
Sorry, Nico.
As the platform flew past, I saw a few bodies facedown among the trash. A bench was knocked over on its back, and glass was scattered across the tiled floor. Black stains trailed along one walkway, and I saw spent shells. No revivors, though. The underground looked secure.
The train slowed, then stopped. The doors opened, and I drew my pistol and stepped out onto the platform. Voices echoed through the station from back up at street level, a dull roar over the pop of gunshots. The toe of my boot scattered shell casings that jingled off across the floor as I started to move toward the closest stairwell. There’d been a major fire fight down there as well.
ADM Station looked to me like some third-world thug’s palace. Even the stations I’d seen in what I’d call the good parts of town were nothing like it; before the fighting it must have looked like the inside of a fucking five-star hotel. Instead of pizza joints and food carts there were fancy restaurants, and bars. There was no graffiti, and the floor was tiled and shiny. There were green plants arranged to make the inside look like a park, and water ran down the walls at either end into a pair of big fountains. Right in the middle, under the huge vaulted ceiling, was a bronze statue of a huge, ripped dude with a giant globe on his back. It was hard to believe I was still in the same city.
The place had seen fighting, though. From the look of it, revivors must have pushed their way down to try to get in from underneath, then been forced back. There’d been a lot of gunfire, and blood, both human and revivor, ran across the stone-tile floor. Up ahead, divots were dug out of the sides of a fountain where a body lay facedown in the rubble. Glass from the storefronts had been blasted out and covered the floor. I counted more than twenty bodies before I got halfway across.
I didn’t see any sign of Singh or the others. Checking through the squad’s last orders, it looked like they were tracking their target using a GPS signal in one of their phones up in the penthouse. I punched in the ID and picked up the signal. According to the map, it was close, maybe half a block from where I was, but the signal strength put it high up above me.
Past the statue, I saw a wall of elevators and a big, fancy sign that said LOBBY ACCESS. The call lights were lit, so it looked like they were still running.
I punched up the closest one and the doors opened into a car big enough to hold fifty people. There was only one in there at the time, though. It was Ramirez, sitting on his ass, leaning into the corner of the elevator with a hole in his head. The mirrored wall behind him was shattered and specked with blood.
Stepping through broken glass, I leaned down and pulled his ID off his belt. It looked like the elevator only went to ground level. I hit the button and rode it up.
As it rose, I could hear the racket above get louder: gunfire, screaming, and someone yelling over a bullhorn. The doors opened onto a landing where all the gold, marble, and crystal was still in one piece, but across the lobby on the other side was the main entrance, and outside it was chaos.
The entryway was all bulletproof glass, scarred with gunshots where bodies lay slumped on the other side. It looked out over that huge, semicircular stone stairway I’d only ever seen from the other side, where bodies clashed in a huge, sprawling mass.
There were hundreds of revivors out there. They’d surged through the streets from all sides. The square was completely mobbed, and they pushed toward the building front where Stillwell had set up a makeshift military barricade. Bodies thrashed on the other side of a row of military trucks and a wall of soldiers holding up riot shields. Flood lamps shone down over the crowd as the revivors tried to break through, fingers clawing through gaps in the line. Shots cracked through the night air, but there were too many of them. Even as I watched, a group of revivors shoved their way through the gap in the shields and made a run for the line of vehicles. A turret opened up and an arm flipped back into the crowd in an explosion of gray meat. Across the square, another group managed to get over the trucks, and I saw a body throw itself against the glass before it was pounded with gunfire. A thick, black streak was smeared down the surface as it slumped to join the other bodies.
On the other side of the lobby was the main elevator hub, and I ran to it. At the far right end was an express that went up to the penthouse. According to the last reports, that’s where she’d be.
The doors had a security scanner. I put Ramirez’s ID to it and the light flashed.
“Ramirez, Edward,” the door said. “First-Class Citizen. First Sergeant. State the nature of your business.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“State the nature of the emer—”
“National security. Open the fuck up.”
Outside, more revivors had pushed through. One jumped over a fallen body, and when its coat opened, I saw black wiring bundled around a blue LCD readout. It pitched forward as automatic gunfire tracked across its back. It hit a pane of glass and began to go down onto the concrete. I saw the detonator flash in its hand.
“Open the doors!” I barked.
The blast shook the floor, and the glass panel exploded through the entryway on a blast of hot air as more bodies began to storm past the barricade. One of the vehicle-mounted turrets spun around and opened up, cutting two revivors in half as they approached the hole but it was no use. I saw more of them climb up the side of the vehicle and grab the gunner from behind. They were through.
The elevator doors opened, and as the jacks began to fill the lobby, I jumped in.
“Destination?” the car asked.
“Penthouse!”
Through the doors I saw another explosion go off, and there was a surge of screams as another turret opened up. More revivors had made it to the lobby and begun to scatter. Figures broke off in every direction. A stairwell door banged open and some of them crowded through. Others were heading in my direction, toward the elevators, and a bullet whined past my ear, punching into the glass behind me.
“Can you shut down all elevators but this one?” I asked the computer.
“I am unable to complete your req—”
“Just go!”
Bodies scrambled across the lobby toward me, while the soldiers fired after them. The last thing I saw before the doors slid shut was a strung-out-looking female with black gums breaking through the pack. I heard her body slam against the other side.
My gut dropped as the elevator launched like a rocket, and the number on the LCD above the door began to count up.
Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries, Pratsky Building
Once out of the cooling ducts, I moved quickly through a large metal locker whose walls were covered in frost. At the far end, I pushed open the heavy door, and fog blew out into the corridor after me. As I made my way down, I heard a loud boom from somewhere in the building and felt a tremor through the floor. The lights overhead flickered.
Nico was inside the building now, and he’d begun tracking my signal. As I reached the end of the hall, he opened a channel. I wiped the suit’s faceplate and picked up.
Faye, how are you able to be in here?
I have an environmental suit. Be careful; there are still living people inside.
Fawkes is heading for the transmitter.
I know. He’s going to destroy it.
I’m going to try to head him off.
He’s destroyed the original Huma stores. You won’t be able to revert the units in the field to their original state without them, but a member of his team held on to a single sample without his knowing. I have it with me now.
Is anyone left there who knows how to set up the code transfer and issue it?
My foot kicked through a pile of revivor components bundled inside empty clothes. A bayonet clattered across the floor and struck another pile. As I began to run, I saw there were remains everywhere; boots, clothes, and wires all crumpled in the shapes of shriv
eled bodies. In the offices and cubicles I saw more remains, dissolved away so that even the blood was gone.
When he first arrived, Fawkes made sure there would be no one left who could operate the transmitter, I told him. Dulari Shaddrah and Robert MacReady are dead.
What about Ang Chen?
He can work the transmitter, but even if he’s alive and you can find him, he won’t. Dulari provided me with instructions when she gave me the sample.
Can you set it up?
I can try.
As I passed by one of the offices, I saw a woman inside. She sat, wearing a vest that was strapped with explosive bricks over a white silk blouse, behind the desk. She didn’t look up as I passed. Even when my movement caused the device to begin emitting a shrill beep, she stared at the desktop, mascara dried in lines down both cheeks.
I picked up speed and ran through a doorway at the end of the row. The device went off, and light flashed bright enough to cast a long shadow in front of me before I felt air rush over my back. I stumbled forward as something flew past me and crashed through a window to my left. Glass rained against the wall next to me.
Faye? Are you there?
A shape ran through the smoke. I couldn’t make out who it was. He struck me with his shoulder as he passed and spun me around.
Faye?
I’m here.
I ran past another series of cubicles. Down the row, I saw a man sitting in a swivel chair, staring sadly at the stump of his forearm. A prosthetic, maybe, that had been dissolved away. I could make out wires around a flashing LCD, but I seemed to be out of range of the motion detector. I kept my head down as I passed by him. One tear in the suit is all it would take. If enough of the Leichenesser got inside to begin the reaction, nothing would stop it.
The ones he left alive are dangerous, I told Nico. They’re rigged with explosives. The devices are motion sensitive.
Got it, Nico said. I’m going to head off Fawkes and his men. Get to the control room and get ready to send on my mark.