by Lee Doty
“Bai?” Xian asked from behind him, voice drawing out the single syllable into a question. Bai felt as if he’d been caught, discovered, as if his darkest, most incriminating secrets had just shown up on YouTube. “What just happened to your team’s captain?”
Bai didn’t flinch, but only because he had long practice with fear. Since he could remember, the Forbidden City had ruled his life. It was well named, he thought. It had been named after the Zijin Cheng, the imperial palace in Beijing, from which the Ming emperors had ruled the people as Gods—selfish, capricious Gods with well-used fists. Now the intelligence organization that bore the palace-fortress’s ancient name was much the same.
The Zijin Cheng had been his authoritarian father, merciless disciplinarian—his all-knowing, all-powerful provider since Bai’s first memory. Its merciless bureaucrats had been the only parents he had ever known. The first time Bai had seen one of the Forbidden City’s middle managers murder one of his classmates, he had been eight years old. The first time he’d had to perform a complicated task with a gun pressed into his ear was at the age of nine.
“Checking…” he said, voice tight. His long practice with fear allowed him to work, even though his insides had turned to chilled water and he wasn’t sure he could stand. His tingling fingers flew across the console before him and he replayed the last few seconds of telemetry from Crow’s internal transponders.
After half a minute of scanning the data through a variety of filters and from multiple perspectives, he answered. “Signal just went dark. It was abrupt, and it ended noisily.”
“Is he dead?” Xian asked, voice flat.
“Possibly.” Bai pronounced, thinking desperately. His only chance now was to provide clear analysis of a bad situation. “If he had died from something like a bullet or blade, we’d have seen him die. His heartbeat would stutter then go flat, his brainwaves would have gone through a number of predictable patterns, depending on the type of death, and we’d have a lot more information than we do here.”
“What if whatever killed him also killed the transponders?” Xian asked with mild curiosity.
“Again, unlikely.” Bai said, simultaneously displaying the feeds from the four major transponders in the missing Falcon, “All of his transponders went offline at exactly the same time index, down to a five hundred nanosecond precision. No injury could have done that.”
“An explosion?” Xian prompted.
“No.” Bai said, shaking his head, “Three of the transponders went out with about forty microseconds of static, and the static from all of them was in a very similar pattern, oscillating at nearly the same frequency, if slightly different amplitudes. The other transponders died quietly, but at exactly the same time.” Bai turned to face their handler, “No explosion short of a nuclear blast would have been able to disable the transponders that completely, that quickly, and even then it would have been the EMP that killed…” Bai broke off, an idea blooming in his head.
“Yes?” Xian prompted.
“An EMP.” Bai pronounced. “It would explain the timing, the similar patterns of disconnect static, as well as the complete loss of all the transponders.”
Xian nodded thoughtfully, “Makes sense, but why only the team lead? Aren’t EMPs notoriously indiscriminate? How far was he from his other teammates?”
“We’ve got no hint of an electromagnetic pulse from our external sensors.” Lee reported from the chair at Bai’s right.
Lee was hoping to increase his chances of survival both by making Bai look bad and showing initiative, Bai thought. Bai bit back on another sarcastic comment and focused on being helpful himself, “Shadow was about four meters away, Tinkerbelle was about forty meters behind Shadow.”
“So, not an EMP…” Xian started.
“Wait.” Bai swung his chair back to his console again, bringing up telemetry logs from the two remaining Falcons on his team. “Yes, there is a static pattern on Shadow’s feed at the same time index that Crow’s went dark. Tink’s feed is clean.”
Bai again swung his chair around to face their handler. “I’m guessing it was maybe some kind of beam or localized field that only affected Crow. It happened as he was moving forward while the other two remained stationary. Shadow was close, so he caught some splash from the event, but Tink was too far away.” Bai looked sideways at Lee, who was still poring over his console, looking for other theories, or a way to discredit Bai’s again. Bai turned his gaze back to Xian, “It’s also why the more distant scans that Lee’s looking at don’t show the pulse.”
Xian nodded, “Did Crow survive?”
Bai steepled his fingers. “No way to know without telemetry. I doubt the pulse killed him, but if it set off his kill switch…” Bai left the thought unfinished, shrugging his shoulders. “My guess is that we might be able to guess based on what Shadow and Tink do. If Crow moved forward and fell dead, they’re likely not going to move that way.”
Xian turned his head to the large tactical display. “Looks like they’re holding position for now. Clerics Yuen and Liu, please send your teams to Phoenix’s current location. Tell them to investigate, establish contact if possible then coordinate the breach of the lower installation. Advise your teams of the situation with Phoenix. Advise them to caution, and let’s get the helmet cams activated. Now that they’re in the installation proper, I’m less concerned about our targets tracking the signals.”
“Yes sir.” The two Clerics said in unison, then began to communicate with their teams in the low, overly formal cadence all Clerics used to communicate with their Falcons. That, together with some slight electronic filtering and modulation on the line, gave the Clerics their synthetic sound on the command channels and when they had to interact with the Falcons under the hood.
“I’m inclined to agree with your assessment of the situation, Bai.” Xian said, with a small nod. “Maybe the enemy techs were trying to trigger Crow’s kill switch. They undoubtedly know about them from the one in Ash’s head. We will know more when the other two teams arrive.”
“My birds have Phoenix in sight. Cleric Liu said. “It’s Tink. He’s down at the intersection of two halls.”
“I see where he is, Cleric.” Xian said, gesturing absently to the tactical display. “What is his condition?”
“He’s down.” Liu said, “Sprawled out. Looks unconscious.”
Xian looked inquiringly at Bai. Bai scanned Tink’s telemetry quickly, “Biometrics indicate that he’s at rest. His brainwave activity shows nominal… He’s not drugged, he’s not been incapacitated in any way I can read… If I wasn’t seeing the helmet video from HoldFire, I’d say he was uncompromised.”
“Proceed with caution.” Xian said with a controlled patience that felt like menace to the Clerics, “What happened to Phoenix can happen to your teams. At least this time, we’ve got the helmet camera feeds. Yuen, keep Delta close, but out of sight… no closer than one hundred yards.”
Liu and Yuen communicated the orders to their respective teams and HoldFire moved cautiously forward.
***
Storm gave three sharp signals with his right hand and his team moved. Reach moved down the right side of the hall and Cat moved down the left, each covering an overlapping fire zone ahead. Zip, their sniper, took up a position in an office doorway on Storm’s right side and covered his teammates. Their Cleric had ordered them forward and informed them that Delta was covering them from a position one hundred yards behind them, so Storm felt comfortable being the sole person covering their rear, and keeping only half his attention making sure the hall behind them was secure.
Reach and Cat arrived at the fallen player in the intersection of the hallway ahead and paused to sweep the three other hallways. The team channel opened with a distinctive chirp and Reach reported in, “It’s Tink. He’s alive. Seems unconscious. Two hallways clear, another player is laid out near a guard post and a narrow hallway about thirty yards away.”
Storm keyed the command channel. “Orders?”
There was a pause, then the channel chirped, followed by the hollow metronomic voice of their Cleric, “Telemetry on Tink reads green. He does not appear incapacitated, or even unconscious. Same for the other player down the hallway to your left. Proceed with extreme caution.”
“Do we think that Phoenix has become a threat?” Storm asked.
There was a longer pause, then the Cleric spoke again, “Unlikely. But they have been out of contact since the operation began, and they seem to have been incapacitated without an event in the telemetry to indicate it. Whatever happened to them can likely happen to you. See if you can rouse Tink.”
“Where is Crow?” Storm asked.
“Unknown.” Their Cleric responded, “We have lost all telemetry from him. Move, child.”
Storm keyed the team channel and passed their orders along. Cat bent down to shake Tink lightly, while Reach covered the three hallways.
“Tink,” Cat said, shaking him a bit harder, “Tink… can you hear me?”
“Is that you, Cat?” Tink said, voice sleepy. His eyes fluttered open and he smiled. “I feel like the cat after the mallet.”
“All stars and birds?” Cat asked, smiling.
“Mostly the stars.” He smiled back.
“What happened?”
Tink shook his head slowly, thinking. “Not sure. Crow had just gone down that hallway on the other side of Shad and then…” Tink shrugged, “stars and birds.”
“Can you stand?” Cat asked.
“Let’s see.” Tink said, then got slowly to his feet with Cat helping at one elbow, taking some of his weight.
“Thank you, Cat.” Tink said, meeting her eyes.
She returned his smile. “Command says you are to enable your communications and cameras immediately.
“Oh… of course.” Tink said, gesturing toward his fallen teammate, “Is Shadow okay?”
***
“You are to switch to the HoldFire team channel and follow Storm’s commands. Their Cleric is now your Cleric.” Bai said to Tink with the slow and empty affectations he had to use on the command channel, “Shadow is to do the same when you rouse him.”
“Affimative.” Tink said through the slight static on the channel, “Switching channels. Out.”
Across the table with the four workstations, Liu, HoldFire’s Cleric, didn’t quite smile. He didn’t do anything overt, anything that Bai could exactly put his finger on, but there was some self-satisfaction that Bai could see in his face or manner somehow. Bai ground his teeth, half frustration, half to keep them from chattering in terror. Bai had just lost his team. He could see how this was a wise tactical move: Phoenix had been down Ash from the start of this mission and they’d just lost the team’s captain to an unknown fate. His two remaining Falcons would likely be more effective when assigned to another full-strength team, but Bai remembered Mae clearly.
The only other time Bai had seen a Cleric lose a team had been when Cleric Mae had lost Terminus. She’d not been effective in communicating up to the standards of the handler, and she’d had her team pulled mid-mission. Well, technically, she’d been pulled from her team, as the team continued but she did not.
He remembered Mae clearly. Not because she was beautiful or charming or ugly or dull… he remembered her because he’d been there when she’d lost her team. He remembered the taste of her blood as their handler had removed her from her team, from the Forbidden City, and from this sorrowful world. Bai had been seated at the terminal across from her, and hadn’t been able to step away to wash his face until after the mission completed nearly two hours later. The handler had executed Mae with a shot to the back of the head that had left Bai rattled and covered in Mae’s blood.
“Cleric Bai.” Xian, their handler said.
Bai’s stomach dropped so hard he felt as if he’d just gotten shorter. He flinched, but managed to abort the reflex before it turned into a cry of alarm. He swallowed and turned deliberately toward the handler, expecting to see a pistol from the business end, and then nothing more. The expression on Mae’s face flitted before his mind’s eye: no time for shock, no twitch, no look of betrayal or surprise. Her expression had simply gone from a drawn look of controlled terror that Bai likely now wore, into nothing at all. Her eyes had simply gone from terrified to empty and she’d fallen limp to the desk across from him.
Bai had never believed in the soul, not until he had seen Mae’s flee. One moment alive, the next—nothing. It’s easier to not believe in fire when all you’ve seen is burning or ashes, but when you see the fire snuffed out…
But when Bai turned to face Xian, he was not holding a pistol. Bai experienced a whip crack of relief and renewed terror in less than a second. He realized that unlike all other Handlers, Xian didn’t need to be holding a weapon to be ultimately dangerous. Xian could kill Bai with his bare hands before Bai realized it was happening. Xian was a child of the Beta. The only survivor of the second generation of what had become the Falcons, the only one who had not been destroyed when they rose against their makers in a bloody insurrection that had left over sixty operators, scientists, and members of management dead. Xian had demonstrated his loyalty by turning on his genetically modified brothers and saving the installation’s commander and a visiting high-ranking party official.
Unlike the current generation of Falcons, Xian had the dead stare of a man trained to be an attack dog, conditioned simply with fear, pain, and chemical rewards. There was a cold intelligence there as well, but it was as a dead, soulless light behind his eyes—sterile and synthetic like the cool flicker of a fluorescent light— an icy calculus of options, advantages and objectives.
Where the current generation of Falcons were kept ignorant of the implications of their deeds, their psyches wrapped in insulating layers of lies and a false religion, Beta had been engineered to enjoy the fire, to enjoy making the world burn and to fear only their masters’ terrible punishments. Beta had failed on an epic scale.
If the first generation of synthetic operators, the Alphas, had proved anything, it was that raw power without the subtlety of intelligence was worthless. Alphas could follow orders generally, and their physical skills made up for some of the lack of intelligence and initiative, but in the end they were useless for the kind of surgical operations the Forbidden City required.
If the second generation of Falcons, the Betas like Xian, had proved anything, it was that power corrupts… or possibly that you can’t train people—even the synthetic ones—like attack dogs, or if you do, prepare to be eaten eventually. Simple control, no matter how ruthlessly, carefully brutal—could not keep control of operators built to be so flawlessly bright and powerful.
Staring into Xian’s black beetle eyes, Bai understood the subtle genius of the current iteration of Falcons. They went straight from the birthing tanks to the Hood. The Hood was the simulated world of one hundred years in the future, where a plague had long ago decimated humanity and left them crippled by a fictitious palsy. A palsy that had broken their nervous systems so that they could not taste, smell and had only the rudimentary and unreliable sense of touch.
Of course, being unable to smell or taste and barely being able to feel were actually the ragged limits of the simulation itself. The hardware and software simply couldn’t support it. The cloud of computers that injected the electronic lie of a dim future world directly into the sleeping Falcons’ minds was not capable of simulating the more subtle senses.
Part of the genius of the current system is that it took this weakness, the inability to sense, and turned it into a strength. The dim “future” world in which the Falcons thought they lived only made them more willing to focus on their training and their time in the Hallow. Of course, the Hallowed World was actually just the real world, whether it was training or actual field work.
“Theories?” Xian said simply.
“Sir?” Bai didn’t stammer, but it had been a near thing.
“What happened to Phoenix?” Xian’s dead stare see
med to be looking through Bai, “Your theory of what happened to Crow was respectable… what happened to the other two?”
Small sparks of hope began to break through the hot terror in which Bai’s mind steeped. He could still be valuable. He might yet live through this. Though he no longer had his team, Xian valued his analysis, at least for now. Bai had hoped to move into management, maybe this was his opportunity. He pushed aside the fear, tried to step back from the situation enough to see the larger picture.
“It doesn’t make sense.” He said after a moment.
Xian was silent, dead eyes giving Bai no clues of his thoughts.
Bai swallowed, then continued, “Other than the flicker in Shadow’s telemetry when Crow went dark, neither registered an event that would explain their unconsciousness.”
Xian stared, motionless—it was unnerving.
“And we’ve seen the location that Crow went off the grid through both Cat and Reach’s camera feeds… no body, which leads to several possibilities…” Bai paused again, thinking furiously, “It is possible that the EMP coincided closely with another event, one that our telemetry doesn’t read, but which incapacitated the entire team. If this happened, then the OSI could have snatched Crow, knowing that we couldn’t track him.”
“Unlikely.” Xian pronounced.
“Yes,” Bai said quickly, before Xian could correct him, “They would not have left Shadow and Tink unharmed for us to revive and use against them.”
Xian nodded, “What kind of event could have incapacitated our Falcons without their telemetry detecting it?”
Bai’s eyes widened, “That’s not the question.” He said, glancing to the tactical screen behind Xian, “The question isn’t why we didn’t detect the cause of their unconsciousness…”
On the screen, he noticed that Tink was advancing behind Cat, and the newly revived Shadow was standing behind Reach.
“Contact! Dead ahead!” Shadow shouted, bringing his rifle into shooting position. Each operator swiveled, aligning their weapons forward, and—more importantly—directing their full attention ahead. In that instant, Bai could see what was going to happen next, but he knew he could not provide warning fast enough to make any difference. His adrenaline-shocked mind seemed to race stupidly over possible warnings, but none of them would help. “Look out!” would only have reinforced Shadow’s command, “Danger!”—same. It seemed in that stuttering heartbeat of terror and realization that a multitude of unhelpful warnings held a pageant on his mental stage, but he stood there mute as that critical instant passed and the action began.