One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  The air bubbles no longer leaked between my fingers.

  I had to move fast.

  The problem was he was stuck. No amount of pulling would drag him free. And I was fast running out of lung capacity. So instead, I pushed, putting all my weight on the chunk of masonry that pinned him, and it moved. I knew what I had to do. I had to push that damn thing off of my friend and get him up to the surface, while every muscle in my body screamed out for oxygen.

  I heard his spinal cord snap.

  It was like no sound I’d ever heard in my life. It was absolutely sickening.

  And Tenebrae had been right when she said it would have been better if he’d died down there—or stayed dead. But that was my burden to carry. No one else knew about it. I was never going to tell anyone. Confession isn’t good for the soul. Confession gives your enemies ammunition to use against you. I paralyzed Swann, then brought him back from the dead and made him live as a cripple. It wasn’t the explosions, it wasn’t the collapse, it was me. Our first mission together. But, what happened under the water stayed under the water. I could live with the secret. It wasn’t tearing me apart or giving me sleepless nights. As far as I was concerned, better an exospine than a box in the ground. Now, of course, Swann would be able to tell me if I was right. He’d need a Ouija board to do it, mind you, but if anyone could get a message through from the other side, it was him.

  While the assassin was playing her part, Mel Kamahi had her own job to do, and it was every bit as important. The hurrah was when we took everything Fate thought he knew and turned it upside down. It was when vanity was transformed into paranoia.

  There’s some stuff I should explain, how the world works out there. There is no church, not anymore, but there is a new god: the machine. You get some hackers who have these chairs, rigs they call them, that are biomech stuff, a bridge between the hacker and his wonderland. I’ve seen a few, they are more like the pod of an octopus’s mantle, with these great organic vines and suckers that fasten onto the rig’s occupant, burrowing down into their reptilian hindbrain where thought and action co-exist. It’s one frightening fucking thing to look at, to be honest, but it has to be worse to sit in it.

  Mel’s rig was a little less nightmarish to look at, but who knew what went on when she jacked in?

  Not me, and I didn’t want to. My only demand was that I didn’t want her taking any unnecessary risks. She was committed to the cause, but I’ll be honest, I think there’s a kind of addiction that goes on with flatlining. It’s not normal. It’s like those guys who go in for auto-erotic asphyxiation because it’s supposed to be the ultimate high when you jerk off and blow your brain by flirting with death at the same time. Dumb in other words. The kind of shaming death when it goes wrong that corps have used forever to undermine the credibility of the guy they just took out. But like I said, if the machine is their new god, then jacking into it so completely, separating your mind or soul or whatever it is that’s essentially you from the flesh to exist purely inside the machine must be akin to a religious experience. Think about it, a Flatliner died and become one with the machines they mastered, just for a while, a couple of minutes, never longer than that, and then they came back. No interfaces, no bridges or joins between them, they were a spirit inside the machine, alive as a thought process, digital impulses, nothing else.

  Do that enough, and you’re going to get hooked.

  Nothing is going to be enough after that.

  No matter how on fire they are, there’s just no way they can physically hit keys and trigger commands at the speed of thought—faster—it just can’t be done. There’s always a layer of impulse and reaction to it. And for a certain kind of person, someone who lives and dies traffic and signals and interfaces, nothing less than that is ever going to be satisfying again once they’ve tasted it. It’s like the forbidden fruit, I guess. Bite into that apple, and every other apple’s just going to taste sour in comparison.

  There’s an entirely new breed of short-lived Flatliners out there, earning top dollar for the risks they’re taking, knowing that one of these days the shock paddles won’t bring them back.

  I understood the addiction, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  I didn’t want to be like Fate.

  But, and I hate to admit it, I was happy to use her addiction to get what I wanted in this case.

  Everything had to be timed just right. It’s difficult to orchestrate a good con, especially when you need the mark to work things out for himself in a certain order, so you are drip feeding them revelations, steering them toward the reactions you want. When you’re a Bleeder, the job’s pretty straight forward. You go into a place knowing that you’re going to have to be prepared to lay your life down to make sure the other guys don’t walk away with whatever it is you’re protecting. I was beginning to grasp exactly what being Randall Fate must have been like, all those strings to pull. It wasn’t just about getting the best price, it was about thinking ten steps ahead of the enemy, anticipating everything they might do to us and making sure we had a contingency in place to counter it.

  I could pretend to understand what, exactly, Mel was doing, but in reality, all I saw were a few fluttering eyelashes and then nothing, she just lay there in that rig, lifeless, the low tone of the heart monitor offering the single longest note known to man. I had the shock paddles in my hands and a clock ticking down over my head. I had no idea if she was in, what kind of defenses she was having to battle her way through, though I envisioned them as something like an arcade game throwing barriers up against her that she needed to defeat to pass on to the next level. What can I say? I like simple. A nice graphical representation of the spider’s web that is the net, with cyber dogs to hunt the hacker down and chow down on their brains if they’re caught. I do know that there used to be communities in there, bulletin boards and message boards, gathering places, but that was before the corporations got a grip on things, now there are just ghost towns no longer curated by a soul. Abandoned. There are relics, of course, but no one would dare go there for long for fear of what traps the corps might have laid. You don’t want to be seen to think too loudly or differently these days. You don’t want to stick your head up above the parapet if you value your freedom.

  Though what sort of freedom is it when the corporations own you, body and soul?

  I counted down the seconds.

  Two minutes was the deal.

  Anything longer than that was asking for trouble. Every extra second increased the possibility of her not coming back. But it also meant she had longer to do what she needed to do. I watched the second-hand tick remorselessly on, counting out the first minute. The dull, flat note of the monitor was enough to drive me out of my mind. It just went on and on and on, never seeming to end. My hands were shaking. I was sweating. I wished she’d been able to just go in normally, but the defenses on these corporation systems nowadays were so intricately layered it would take a team of hackers executing perfectly synchronized attacks to breach their system. This way she could issue an infinite number of coordinated commands all by herself, lightning fast. She’d convinced me it was the only way into GenX.

  I believed her.

  Ninety seconds.

  I wish I knew what was going on in there.

  One hundred.

  Twenty more and I had to pull her out, no matter what.

  Fifteen.

  But I wasn’t charging up the paddles. I hadn’t slathered the conductive gel over the shock pads.

  Ten.

  Was I really prepared to leave her in there longer than two minutes?

  Two minutes is the magic number: when there’s no blood being pumped into the brain, the nerve cells in the cerebral cortex begin to die after that. The nerve cells in the midbrain that control unconscious activity such as breathing can last thirty minutes, though. Thirty minutes. What could she do in there in thirty minutes? If I knew for sure she’d be able to function pulling her out of there would be even more difficult than
it already was, but without the oxygen and glucose of fresh blood pumping through the system the oxygen in the stagnant blood would be used up by the cerebral cortex in two minutes. That magic number.

  Anything beyond that, and even if I brought her back there was the risk of brain damage.

  I watched the clock.

  Five seconds.

  And I still wasn’t reaching for the gel. Even if I did right now, right this second, the paddles wouldn’t be charged in time.

  So how long was I prepared to go to get what I wanted?

  Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. Almost half as long again as was safe. I’d willingly starved Mel Kamahi’s brain of oxygen, knowing exactly how much damage I was doing to her because I needed to know she’d succeeded.

  That was how badly I wanted Fate.

  I put the charged paddles against her breast and shocked her.

  The hacker’s body convulsed, back arcing. Spittle flew from her mouth where she reflexively bit down on her tongue. There was no blood because her heart wasn’t pumping. I shocked her again. There was no change in that damned note. She wasn’t coming back. I yelled at her, willing her to hear my voice wherever she was and focus on it. I cranked the charge up, knowing the jolt would burn her. I didn’t care. She was coming back. She was.

  I shocked her again.

  The shiver ran from her into me.

  The note didn’t change.

  Again.

  I cranked the charge up as high as it would go.

  She was dead. We were moving into four minutes, and she wasn’t coming back. I didn’t know what to do. But I couldn’t give up. Another shock.

  Her breasts came up to meet the paddles, then her back slammed back down into the rig. Two things happened at once, the note broke, the sound fractured by silence, and her eyes opened.

  She stared at me.

  She couldn’t speak. She was choking on that breath that had been almost four minutes in coming.

  I wasn’t about to tell her how long she’d been out.

  “Is it done?”

  She nodded.

  “You… left me… in there…” she accused.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, I looked down at the paddles in my hands. “I couldn’t get you out. You weren’t coming back.”

  “Liar,” she said.

  Now, all we could do was wait.

  I’m not the most patient guy at the best of times, but I was itching for something to happen.

  I was half tempted to take a job, just to keep my mind occupied.

  There’s nothing like shooting something to stop you from being bored.

  But I couldn’t concentrate, not properly, and the last thing I wanted to do was get myself perforated by some stray hollow point before I’d finished playing with Fate.

  So I did the only thing I could do.

  I waited.

  Thankfully not in some flea pit motel now, but in a rather comfortable suite rented out by the broker, Imsen, through a shadow company that traced back to our old friends at Warwulf-Blaze. Close to the action, but not too close. The view was incredible, looking out over the amazing crush of humanity, all of the bright lights of the big city blurring through the streaks of rain—climate controlled, not natural. It never rained here naturally, but the men with the money made it happen, just like they made everything else happen. Each one of those raindrops had probably cost someone somewhere a small fortune. I would have laughed if it wasn’t quite so tragic. Rain farms. Who’d have thought we’d ever get quite so environmentally fucked up?

  “Why isn’t he freaking out?” I asked, without turning around.

  The others were behind me, playing a hand of cards in a scene that mirrored my memories of Wan Chai plaza what seemed like another life ago. The waiting never changes. Neither does how people do it.

  “He will,” Mel assured me. “It’s all in there, everything he needs to know to realize the sky is falling.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But can’t we just give it a helping hand?”

  “Maybe,” Tenebrae said, taking me by surprise. “Hire him to steal the information, or at least something related to it, something that names him as patient zero.”

  In other words, hand it to him on a plate.

  It was a risk.

  But I really hated waiting.

  “No,” I said, an idea already beginning to take shape. It was outrageous enough that it just might work. “We turn it around. We hire him to protect the information, not steal it.”

  “Who from?”

  “Me,” I said, smiling. I knew the one thing that was guaranteed to make him take the job—the chance to go head-to-head with Marco Guerra one last time.

  “That’d put the cat amongst the pigeons,” Gant agreed. He had that look on his face. The one that said he was itching to get into trouble. I knew exactly how he felt.

  “He’ll bite. He’ll want to know what it is I’m so desperate to get my hands on, which means he’ll take the job just so he can get his hands on it first, then he’ll find what Mel planted and slowly but surely the implications will settle in. Then all the money in the world won’t feel like enough to that greedy bastard.” I turned to the broker, Imsen. “He can’t know it comes from us, obviously, so you’ll need to use a third party to broker the deal, and make it irresistible.”

  “You’re not really planning on going up against him, are you?” Rowell Gant asked.

  “What do you think?”

  Gant looked at me. I looked at him. We weren’t exactly having a ‘moment.’ He grinned. “I think you’re just about mad enough to.”

  He was beginning to know me. I half-nodded. It wasn’t a shrug. It wasn’t a no or a yes.

  “It needs to be convincing,” I told the broker.

  He nodded. “Leave it to me.”

  Things were getting interesting.

  Fate had a new team. He’d put the word out a few hours after the broker’s man had made contact. Despite a couple of catastrophic failures, Bleeders were lining up to die for him. I’ll never understand that kind of desperation. He had his team picked before nightfall.

  I wanted him to see me coming.

  That was important to me.

  So, the first thing I did was make sure we got in there first, infiltrating the site—which we’d scoped out to make sure was suitable, not too high profile a location, not too remote or well-defended— we’d be hiring him to protect, and planting a series of squibs and other devices to make it appear that the place was coming under attack when it wasn’t. Smoke and mirrors. I wasn’t about to risk my own skin if I didn’t have to, but I wanted him to think I’d come out from under my rock and really sell the idea that this information hidden away on their servers was that important to me. He was like a child. If I wanted it, he’d want it. Simple as that.

  Swann had been an idiot savant when it came to blowing shit up; the guy just had the touch. He could plant a charge and trigger a chain reaction that would have toppled bricks and mortar all the way to heaven’s gate if he set his mind to it. Gant wasn’t Swann. They didn’t have the same warped mindset. But they did share a love of blowing things up which meant he was the man for the job.

  I think it’s a male thing.

  We went in together dressed in the bland coveralls of workmen. No one ever looks twice at the grunt labor they think of as beneath them. It means you can hide in plain sight. Mel Kamahi made sure we had all the paperwork and work orders we needed to make it look as though we were meant to be there. It’s amazing what lies you can tell with a computer terminal. No one questioned us as we went about the business of rigging the tower up, including secreting audio speakers in the vicinity to relay what would sound like all hell breaking loose when we wanted it to. Mel jacked into the security system, piggybacking their video feed so we could stream surveillance footage directly to our own monitors and watch Fate, which, I’ll admit, gave us an unfair advantage, but who said we had to play fa
ir?

  With eyes and ears on the place, and the pyrotechnics show rigged, Imsen’s man closed the deal, offering a contract that wasn’t too good to be true, but was far from insulting. He sold it with the one hook I knew Fate wouldn’t be able to resist: “Marco Guerra’s got a crew together, and they’re after stuff we’ve got buried deep on the n-server. Under no circumstances is he to be allowed to get his hands on it, bring the place down around his ears if you have to, but do not let him walk out of there with that information. Do we understand each other?”

  I smiled as the two shook on it and Fate’s downfall was sealed.

  We took up positions and waited.

  It didn’t take long. We’d dangled just enough intel to ensure Fate didn’t hang about.

  I watched Fate’s boys roll in, and gave my old mentor time to batten down the hatches. He looked ten years older than he had when we’d gone into GenX. Time wasn’t being kind to him. I hoped that meant the bastard wasn’t sleeping. Yes, I’m that petty. I wanted to get inside his head and crawl about in the filth of his mind for a bit, making enough mess to be sure he’d never sleep again. That, in my book, would be a win.

  The crew he’d brought with him looked wet behind the ears. I couldn’t understand why he’d turned us over for them, but of course, he hadn’t. This motley crew was the best he could get at short notice. There was no loyalty or experience there, which helped. They’d spook. And spooked, they’d abandon Fate.

  I gave him time to make his preparations. I knew his routines. He was a creature of habit. Then I had a young guttersnipe I paid a few bucks move in to set up the remote-triggered hologram, knowing he’d have his eyes focused on the outside, looking for my approach.

  I waited.

  I wanted him antsy.

  Itchy.

  A couple of minutes later, there I was, large as life, on all of the monitors he’d got focussed on the plaza outside, far enough away he wouldn’t see through the illusion too quickly. I’d made sure he knew that was where the threat came from—mirroring our last job. There was sewer access to the left of the plaza, through a drainage network. We’d set up barriers and a tent in broad daylight. The holographic specter hinted that my team had gone in that way. There was a nice symmetry to it even if I’d got no intention of going inside. I just wanted to keep him in there long enough for curiosity to finally get the better of him. We’d put on a show, of course, but it was all about time. Eventually, locked in there long enough, Fate would start digging.