Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3)
Page 23
Not that any other nation knew, because he did this under the proverbial table. Such secrecy shrouded the program the Communists had him working under, that unless one really knew to look, even the Yathi probably had no opportunity to find out about him. Somehow, Stadil did. He had turned Kim to the cause.
Of course he had.
So Walken got to play secret agent. The Agincourt carried him to Korea. He strapped himself into a new suit and the gear provided to him via Jacinto’s contacts. Communist air defenses would stare straight through them as they flew overhead, and he would drop from a belly hatch, riding a zipline straight onto the roof of a secure complex. He had maps, he had target information, he even had the ability to speak the entirety of North and South Korean dialects thanks to an uploaded language database.
He wore a heat-and radiation-absorbing sneak suit, something out of the best American military labs, where the long tradition of discovering new and interesting ways of killing people remained alive and well. The polycarbon skin was inlaid with the newest in optical camouflage materials. He also carried a sleek pistol, a silenced Ferox automatic loaded with penetrator darts dosed with a fast acting tranquilizer, very much a last resort measure, however. Walken was to sneak in, get Kim, and get out, not leave trails that might trigger an international incident. The only real question for him was if he could get down the zipline without getting shot to pieces by some sharp-eyed guard. He also carried a short-lived holographic mask, a breathable membrane that when stretched over the face would project a convincing image of another person for a short time, as well as emulate a new voice. Finally, a military ID that would match the identity under certain levels of scrutiny.
Imagine. Six years ago, he was a Fed, and then a popsicle. Now he’d turned into Bruno Silas from the holofilms, secret agent for a vital but violent cause. He took hold of the Agin court’s wire spool and clipped himself to its cable. Hmph. Bruno Silas… Only my cause isn’t so nebulous as terrorism.
The other side of the coin, old son. He hailed Jacinto.
Another grunt over the line.
Walken checked over his gear one last time before pulling the hood of the sneak suit over his head. He had disabled the suit’s vision mode capabilities, as he stared out through the suit’s tinted visor with his superior eyes. He could see in multiple spectra, sense with ultrasound, even sample and follow chemical trails. He didn’t need a HUD for all of that.
Jacinto grunted.
One of his systems they had been able to work out was an active psychological analysis rig, a component that allowed him to sniff out feelings and probabilities of reaction when he listened to them. Part of the whole emotional suppression thing that he had going on. Already missing huge pieces of his biochemical puzzle, the psych rig apparently also cut back the chemical response in his brain to ensure he could clearly pick apart interpersonal reactions. Sorting out the static, as it were. It didn’t work as well over a pure voice connection, but video was okay. You just had to be able to see the person, read their body language along with their vocal inflections. It already came in handy where fitting in with Jacinto and Strikeboy were concerned, or at least being able to read them better emotionally. The software wasn’t complete, however. The most he’d be able to get out of it was a much better toolset for making social choices.
A laugh from Jacinto.
Walken edged up to the drop anchor as it lowered to foot level and stepped onto its rim, the bay opened, letting in the cold breath of night. He gripped the clip with one hand. Below, the lights of the complex glittered against the vast spread of the land, star points shining up at him in expectation of his arrival. They illuminated stretches of bare concrete, steel barns of motor pools, the hard geometrics of concrete bunkers arranged around a squat tower that rose several stories above the rest Walken had never seen a compound like it. The lack of spotlights raking the sky surprised him. All the old movies had them, and he amused himself at the foolishness of thinking the Communists would play to such a stereotype. So much of what he thought of was framed in old films these days. He didn’t know what to think about that.
The plane shuddered slightly and stopped, high over the drop position.
A thought came to mind.
He tried to remember a Zen koan: before shooting people in the face, chop wood, carry water. After shooting people in the face, chop wood, carry water. Close enough.
He fell.
The sudden motion tripped his accelerated senses. The world slowed as it came to meet him, sauntering rather than rushing up as it should have. He braced himself, knowing it unnecessary, and after what felt like a geological age, his feet touched down on the concrete roof of a bunker near the central structure. He dropped off the anchor and flattened himself against the roof.
He received no response, only the tether’s rapid ascent into the cloudy sky. This close to Wonderland, the veins of green vapor marbled it heavily. It looked like a heavily pixelated skybox from an ancient video game. Walken turned his eyes back to the base, finding a scene he’d more or less expected—except for the lack of searchlights. Red stars and fierce-looking Hangul characters spray-painted on gray concrete, as drab and unpleasant as the view above. Troops in dark uniforms with automatic rifles marched crisp circuits around the complex, faceless thanks to combat visors. They could see him if he wasn’t careful, even with his general lack of heat signature. Ultrasonic or UV was damned hard to fool at close range.
Walken recalled the maps uploaded into his head. He perched on top of a waste recycling shed, from which he would need to get to the central tower, access the security systems, find Kim, get to his position and spirit him away to an extraction site. Because first assignments should never be milk runs, right? Several vents and other machines crowned the waste shed though, and that made it the perfect place to start. Walken crept across the concrete on all fours, his arms lengthening like a spider’s, keeping him low as he made his way swiftly across the roof toward the vents. His eyes imaged different spectra at once, allowing him to see the infrared beams that ran across their open mouths, while his retinas served as receiving dishes for the ultrasonic pulses a device in his skull projected forward in a narrow cone. It made for perfect sight in the dark when overlaid upon his already enhanced field of vision. He passed the vents, searching out the control system for the sensors, and found it in a small box bolted flus
h against the roof a few feet away. He drove his finger through the thin metal of the door and pried it back, and it took a second to reach out and bypass the alarm. The way thus cleared, Walken frowned at the mouths of the ducts, mused for a moment on how sneaking through tight spaces appeared to be something of his destiny, and slipped into the dark.
He cut the suit’s optical camo the moment he entered in order to conserve power. The ducts weren’t big enough for most people. His body, however, had no trouble shifting around to conform to the space. Walken wondered how absolutely horrible he must look with his body distending and compressing as he worked himself through the ventilation system, creeping forward while reaching out with his mind to look for seismic sensors or infrared beams. Compared to what he experienced trying to flee Berne, the maze of ducts felt simplistic. No drones to sneak past, no sensors to baffle, and no grids of exotic particles meant to destroy vermin or potential intruders. He only had to worry about time―time and outdated maps.
The latter, at least, turned out to be accurate. The former, merely a psychological barrier. For an hour, he crept along, until finally he reached ventilation hatch B37. Upon confirming it unguarded, he engaged the camo system again and poured out of the hatch like poison, invisible and heavier than air. The maintenance corridor had a conveniently painted blue guideline running its length, guiding him toward his goal.
He was a stalking phantom, searching not for prey but for a security terminal. As Walken turned a corner, he saw a lone guard patrolling the hall. Concern bubbled up inside of him while he cut the ultrasound . He looked down through himself as the camo perfectly reflected his surroundings. For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost, and the sight disturbed him. He began to understand how some spec ops people became haunted by the concept they might have become the living dead after extensive use of the stuff. Steeling himself, Walken approached the guard, silent as death, then past. He drew so close that he could have checked his reflection in the trooper’s goggles if he had wanted to. The man showed no hint of reaction, short of a masculine grunt and a shifting of tackle through the fabric of uniform pants. Perfect. Walken thanked the vengeful spirit of American military science and went on.
He couldn’t bypass the next guard he reached, however. The woman sat behind a security console he needed to access, housed in a booth made of transparent alloy and a heavy door with a passkey lock. The booth didn’t show up on the map they’d downloaded, which made him wonder what else might be different. Where there were sealed booths, however, there would have to be ventilation.
He moved with care, shifting past the bored guard and back into the vent. He concentrated on the maps as his body flowed grotesquely through the ducts toward where he believed the booth to be, trying to see where they lined up. It wasn’t long until he located the hatch, right over the soldier’s head. The severe bun of her dark hair bobbed methodically as she watched the monitors. Unlike her male counterpart down the hall, this trooper had her head on a swivel. Walken reached out for the security console, but it was too far away. How had he misjudged the distance?
Shit. He considered his options. He could shoot her; she’d go down instantly and be out for several hours. On the other hand, someone was bound to find her and lock the facility down. Walken could get out through the vents, but somehow he doubted that Kim’s body could warp itself like his did. How else? A distraction? What if he just…dropped out through the vent as quietly as possible? No; she’d hear that, too. He watched her stare at the monitors, her attention fixated on the console as if she could divine the future from the holographic panels.
Walken reached around the edges of the vent hatch for a release catch. He found it, and eased the hatch open, having little difficulty keeping it under control. His arms stretched hideously as he moved with its weight, easing himself out of the duct above her.
In his mind’s eye, he pictured himself unfolding from the ceiling, unfurling like some horror-movie alien. He could kill her now, certainly, but that would be utterly foolish. He only needed a few extra feet to make the wireless connection. Tension knit in his brain as he lowered himself foot by foot, the relative dimness of the room the only thing keeping the hatch from being visible. He was graceful, so very graceful, straightening like a spider as he hung from his knees, so close he could caress her cheek with the palm of one overlarge hand. Instead, he let the wireless unit in his body reach out and connect with the console, found a wall of counter-intrusion software in the process, and pushed through it with ease. His machine telepathy was of a different kind than the hacker’s, limited by range and his own inbuilt software. But whatever lack of subtlety he might have as a datanaut, his software swam through human-built security as if it didn’t exist. Walken felt the files load into him, Kim’s location, and the frequency of the data tag he wore in his flesh. He hung there for what felt like hours, looking down into the woman’s wealth of harnessed black hair, praying – or something like it – that she did not let up on her vigil.
After an agonizing seventeen seconds, the upload ended. He knew Kim’s current location: a laboratory elsewhere in the complex, and his shift ran well into the night. Slave hours, or perhaps just those of a scientist whose work ethic played well with the needs of those who held him at gunpoint. The upload made him feel slightly stupid, as though he had always known this information and had only forgotten it for a time. Walken drew himself back up into the duct, arms crossed over his chest as his legs retracted and his spine worked like a bicycle chain. He barely made it inside before a buzzer sounded and the door to the booth slid open.
“Comrade Song.” Another trooper stood in the doorway. “Shift change.”
“Comrade Park. Certainly.” The woman rose from her station.
Walken stared at them, praying that neither noticed him ease the hatch back up into place. It swung upward on its low-friction hinges, every millimeter a chance to be discovered. But neither soldier spotted him, not even when Song put on her helmet and gave the booth one last survey as her relief took the station. She picked up her rifle and saluted the other guard before marching out into the hall.
Walken killed the camo and went back down the duct, thanking all powers he could think of that he could not sweat or breathe at that moment. The not-fear was a problem, white noise that hissed and spat at the corners of his vision like static, but it faded all too quickly as he worked his way back to the waste shed. Not entirely human anymore, at least not biologically. For a brief moment, Mother surfaced in his mind, her lectures in the dark, suspended in fluid. Then he thought of Kim, another captive audience, and pushed the image of her away.
Eventually, he made his way to the shed again, and emerged from the opening at the top of the duct. He kept low to the roof and scanned the complex from his vantage point. Everywhere, the guards kept marching, no alarms blared, and no searchlights raked the sky. He must not have fucked it up. Plenty of room for that yet, though. Invisible again, he stood and looked across the complex for his target: another squat, angular bunker, the same size as the shed and other buildings, but differentiated by the heavy doors that sealed it and a lack of easily accessible ventilation stacks. A wide, empty yard separated this bunker from the other buildings, as well as the complex’s sizeable wall.
The borrowed grace of Walken’s body carried him across the rooftops without a stumble. The suit absorbed noise as well as impact, something he was grateful for as he moved toward the lab building. As he got closer, he noted the louvered shutters in the concrete walls that controlled vent exhaust, strips that ran the entire length of the walls up near the roof. Too small for him, unfortunately. The front doors, heavy slabs of armorplast or steel painted a gray and covered with warning markers, served as the only entrance. He stopped at the rooftop of a munitions storehouse that faced the lab through the yard, flattening again and watching the entry side of the building. A number of troops lurked behind low concrete cordons that formed an aisle across the lot, which could be easily circumvented. The pair
of tank suits guarding the door, however, could not.
In a time when combat bionics riddled even the most basic battlefield soldier and whole cyborg battalions filled the ranks of the world’s modern fighting forces, the concept of the tank suit seemed almost quaint in its antiquity. The heavily armored powered suits carried a variety of heavy battlefield armaments, while being small enough the suits bristled with antipersonnel weapons. The hulking, slab-like bodies bore a pair of heavy gatling cannons where their arms should have been, and automatic grenade launchers on torso mounts. The blankness of their faces made them look like deadly sculptures, painted dull military green.
Walken considered his situation. With no other way into the building, he could not sneak by the lot of them and go in through the front door. Camo system or not, nobody would chalk that up to a glitch. The mission had no real time limit, however, so he could afford to wait for an opening.
He checked his suit’s battery. More than half, which was good. He cut off the camo system again and lay flat on the roof, watching. Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Forty-five. Nothing. The cold air of the highlands and the bodily stress of lying on concrete for long stretches of time had no effect on him, of course, but the strain of constant vigilance, especially for someone who was no old hand at such things, began to wear at him after the first hour had come to a close. How curious to have all these magnificent physical powers, and yet be limited by the one piece of meat still left to him. He had expected the exercise to be much like the stakeouts he used to run as an agent and a policeman, but this was nothing of the kind. After all, he had no power behind him, no authority save the fury of his blazing hands.
Ninety-seven minutes in, a sound came from elsewhere in the complex. A truck drove down the lane toward the complex, a heavy, six-wheeled affair that still managed to whine under the weight of its load. Boxes, armored, locked, and stamped with Korean state seals. Lots of markings that indicated sensitive electronic equipment. A particularly large refrigerated unit containing unnamed biomedical. Plenty of room to get himself into.