by Toby Minton
“Put the pistol down, Major,” Tully said. “And step away from that door.”
Elias didn’t move. “Lower that weapon, Sergeant,” Elias said in an easy tone. “We surprised each other. That’s all. I’m just following the general’s orders here.”
Tully’s weapon didn’t waver. “We both know that’s not true, Major. Now drop the pistol.”
“Tully?” Impact said from behind Elias. Out of the corner of his eye, Elias saw the boy step into the hall with the twins. “Are you coming with us, Tully?”
“Nobody’s going anywhere tonight, little buddy,” Tully said, his eyes staying on Elias.
“Take them back in the room, Impact,” Elias said. “Stay there until I come for you.”
When he saw the kids step back inside, Elias took a step forward. “I’m ordering you to lower that weapon, Sergeant.”
“You know I can’t do that, sir. You’re off the reservation. Drop the pistol or I will drop you.”
Sergeant Tully was a gifted engineer, but he wasn’t the best or fastest shot on Elias’s team. He didn’t have to be. They were only a few meters apart, both with fingers on their triggers. All either of them had to do was squeeze.
“Don’t make me do this, Tully.”
“Drop it, sir!”
“Stand down, Tully!”
“You know I can’t do that! Drop it, Major. Now!”
A hand covered Tully’s mouth. A knife flashed. And Tully fell back, his rifle firing over Elias’s head as he was pulled down.
Elias kept his weapon trained on the two men in the shadows until Tully stopped moving and the other stood. Gunnery Sergeant Lee sheathed his knife then squatted over Tully and rifled though the engineer’s pockets. He stood and tossed Elias Tully’s com pad.
Elias caught it and lowered the gun, spinning the com pad to look at the message on the screen.
Major Henderson has been compromised. If he attempts to remove property from this facility, stop him. Deadly force is authorized.
-Savior
“How did you know he got this?” Elias said, tossing the com pad back.
“I got the same thing,” Lee replied. “Safe bet we all did.”
Lee stepped closer, and Elias flexed his hand on the pistol held at his side. Lee and Tully had been friends, but his broad face showed no reaction to having just killed a man he’d been joking with over a meal a few hours before.
“Why aren’t you stopping me?” Elias asked, steeling himself to draw down his friend.
Lee just looked back at him for a second. Elias tightened his grip on the pistol.
“You’ve met my little boy, sir,” Lee said finally. “I don’t see any property here.” His intense brown eyes darted to the three kids peering around the glass wall. “I see kids, sir, one not all that much younger than my Sam. I’m with you.”
Elias holstered his pistol and nodded. “Thank you, James.”
“Don’t thank me, sir,” Lee said, pressing his earpiece into place. “Just get those kids out of here. We’re on channel eight,” he said, starting to turn away.
“We?”
Lee turned back and gave a grim smile. “You didn’t think I was the only one, did you? Ace and Mos are securing transport right now.”
“Where are you going?” Elias asked Lee, motioning Impact and the twins out into the hall.
“To my post,” he said. “I’m in nest one tonight, so use the south gate when you leave. I’ll cover you if needed.”
“Lee,” Elias said, stopping the man again. “Watch yourself. If he finds out you helped us…”
“Watch your own self, Major,” Lee said. “They’re looking for you, not me. I’ll meet up with you after you’re clear.” Then he disappeared around the corner.
Elias turned to Impact. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Impact said, obviously holding down his fear. But his back was straight, and he was being strong for the twins holding his hands.
“Then let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 16
Elias
“So how’d we end up in the foster care system?” Michael said, pulling Elias’s thoughts back to the briefing room, back to the present.
“After we got you out,” Gideon said. “Savior was hunting us, but as far as the new government knew, you were dead. He couldn’t hunt you, not officially. We decided you’d be better off away from us, in a normal home, where you could live a normal life.”
“Never been a foster kid, have you?” Nikki said.
“It was a mistake, Nikki,” Elias cut in. “We didn’t see that until we’d already lost track of you. We should have kept you with us.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not complaining,” Nikki replied, shrugging. “We’ve done just fine on our own. Besides,” she said. “This nutbag bomb shelter of yours is like a tomb. I wouldn’t have lasted a day in here.”
Michael didn’t share his sister’s sentiments. Elias could tell. But Michael didn’t say anything for a minute. He just leaned forward to rest his arms on the seatback in front of him, staring down between his arms. When he finally looked up, Elias couldn’t see the disappointment that had shaded his eyes a minute ago.
“I don’t see why Savior would be after us now,” Michael said. “Aside from what he said in that press conference, that is. He doesn’t need the money from that soldier program anymore. He owns one of the biggest companies on the continent.”
“Exactly. Savior does nothing altruistically,” Gideon said in a tone approaching a growl. “That conference was a farce. He’s been concealing a new project, something not even our contacts in Generation can locate. Whatever it is, it is consuming an egregious amount of his resources, most notably Savior’s own time. For him to pull away from that project to hunt you, he must have a good reason.”
“But you don’t know what that reason is,” Michael said.
“Not yet,” Gideon replied.
“I think I can help with that,” Kate said.
Elias looked up to see her poking her head into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt, boss,” she said to Gideon, stepping inside flashing a smile of triumph and holding up a satellite photo. “But you’re going to want to see this.”
Gideon
“You know those idle warehouses you had me monitoring?” Kate said, striding down the aisle of the briefing room. “A couple of hours after that Sky City thing, one of those warehouses lit up like a Macau casino. Sent a big shipment of Savior’s old junk somewhere.”
“Where?” Gideon said. He leaned forward and gripped the rail around the platform, feeling the hard wood give under his right hand.
“Don’t know,” she said. “But they’re prepping another load as we speak. Easy money this load’s going to the same place. And if so, five will get you ten it will lead you right to whatever Savior is working on.”
Gideon stared straight ahead for a long minute before he looked to Elias and nodded.
“I’ll get the team prepped,” Elias said, pushing off the rail and starting up the aisle. “We’ll be in the air in twenty.”
“We’re going with you,” Michael said, standing up. He looked down at his sister, who smiled and stretched, her joints popping as she arched her back.
“Sounds like a party,” she said, standing as well.
“That’s not a good idea,” Elias said, on top of Gideon’s simpler, “No.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Michael said, keeping his eyes on Elias. Gideon couldn’t see the look in the boy’s eyes, but he could see Elias preparing himself for a fight.
“Yes!” the sister cheered, contorting herself in some sort of dance. “WhaBAM!” she shouted as she slapped her brother’s backside. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
She pointed at both Elias and Gideon, swiveling her head between them. “You guys might as well give in now. My brother gets that look in his eyes only once every couple years. When he does, there’s no stopping him. And I mean even for me. That means you guys
are screw-ew-ewed.”
An argument ensued with the twins on one side and Elias and Kate on the other, but Gideon’s mind drifted away from the here and now. Somewhere in the chaos of his visions of the twins’ future, images of a conflict around a cargo caravan flashed through his memory. What eluded him, as it so often did, was this conflict’s role in the future he was trying to prevent.
Gideon sifted through other images from his visions, but he couldn’t piece together a cohesive scene to tell him the outcome of this conflict. The only thing he knew for certain was the information this mission might acquire could lead them to Savior’s hidden site. His visions concerning that site were clearer than any other. It was there he stood the best chance of altering Savior’s destiny. It was there he would have to make his choice.
Gideon retreated behind the emotional barrier from his creature side. He was doing so more often of late, and no surprise. A part of him feared his reliance on the creature’s detachment was leeching away what little humanity remained in his twisted body. But the draw of logic without remorse was too great for Gideon to ignore. If only he had all the information he needed in this instance. Lacking more data about this mission, he had to do something the scientist in him railed against. He had to guess.
He looked back at the increasingly heated debate. Heated between Nikki and Elias, that is. Michael was still calmly obstinate, Kate calmly pleading.
“Take them,” he said, his low voice cutting through the clamor.
Elias looked at him, his emotions closer to the surface than Gideon would like. The man couldn’t fall apart now. Gideon still had need of Elias. As hazy as much of the twins’ future remained, it was clear Elias would play a key role in bringing Savior down.
“This information could be vital,” Gideon said, toying with the idea of outright deception. That time would come, he was sure, but for now he kept to logic and reason. “You stand a better chance of success with them on your team, as long as you keep them together.”
Elias looked like he would argue, but after a long pause he nodded and headed for the door.
“Now this flight, it includes snacks, right?” Nikki said, following him up the aisle.
“Nikki—” her brother tried to head her off.
“Ooh, can I drive?”
“No,” Elias said as he walked out.
“Weiner. Shotgun!”
Gideon watched them file out of the room, Nikki haranguing her brother and Elias the whole way. His shielded mind was fascinated by the twins, even more so by how they’d come to be. The genesis element had divided the person they should have been as sharply as it had combined Gideon and the creature. The twins truly were two halves of the same coin. The sister had the passion, courage, and hedonistic abandon. The brother had the compassion, reason, and conscience.
Gideon’s choice seemed simple based solely on this evidence. The sister was the obvious choice to fall to Savior’s charm, given the right temptation. She was rife with moral weakness. But Gideon couldn’t be sure she was the one. The brother’s devotion to his sister could become a liability as well. Given the right circumstances, the boy would betray everything for her.
So Gideon would bide his time in the cold void behind his emotional walls until he was sure, until he had gathered enough information to outweigh his doubt. If he acted too soon, if he sacrificed the wrong twin, the world would pay for his mistake.
Necessary Risks
Chapter 17
Michael
The cool breeze blowing through the open side windows of the cockpit gave Michael the first breath of calm he’d felt in days. He was still about as mixed up inside as he’d ever felt, but for once he had some answers. Disappointing answers, yes, but answers nonetheless.
He was a construct. A thing. He and Nikki didn’t have a home somewhere out there—they had a lab. They didn’t have parents who wanted them back—they had a team of scientists. But that was OK.
He wouldn’t lie to himself. At first, Michael had been devastated by what Gideon had told them. In the wide realm of possibilities, failed experiment fell squarely in the middle of worst-case-scenario territory. But it didn’t change who he was as a person. It didn’t change how he felt about himself. It surely didn’t change how he felt about Nikki. When it came right down to it, learning where they’d come from had been little more than a temporary disappointment.
Michael still had a few questions about his could-have-been parents, but they weren’t weighing on him the way they had before. What he really wanted to know now was what Savior wanted with them. The man had somehow found them, far too quickly, and sent armed soldiers and a monster robot after them. Gideon seemed to think Savior wanted them alive as part of some deeper scheme, but Michael wasn’t so sure. That robot thing had nearly killed Nikki, which had Michael wondering if maybe Savior was just tying up the loose ends of his old failed experiment. It made sense. And it was simple. In Michael’s admittedly limited experience, the simplest answer to a riddle was usually the correct one.
Figuring out Savior’s plan wasn’t the main reason he was on this roof though. In fact, he had a feeling this surveillance wasn’t going to lead them right to any secret base—that would be a little too easy. He was up here because of Nikki.
When he’d demanded to come on this scouting mission, he’d done so to get his sister out of that bunker before she exploded. He knew there was nothing she hated more than sitting around doing nothing. She wanted to be out in the middle of things. She wanted to be out doing something, anything rather than sitting around in a bunker. After the support she’d given him, getting them on this mission was the least he could do to pay her back.
Michael looked through the windshield across the pitted and weathered rooftop to where Nikki and Elias were keeping an eye on the warehouse in the valley below. Well, at least Elias was keeping a watch, checking through his binoculars every few seconds. Nikki was sitting on the sloped face of a ventilation fan, drawing patterns in the built-up dirt on the metal between her feet.
“Mind if I ask something about your sister?” Coop asked from the pilot seat beside Michael.
“Nope. Shoot,” Michael said, his eyes still on Nikki and Elias.
“Is she, uh—”
“Crazy as a carnie? Yes,” Michael said, looking over at the pilot with a small smile. “But she’s mostly harmless, so don’t worry, too much.”
“No. Is she like…available?” he finished, dragging out the last word with his southern drawl.
“You do know how old we are, right?”
“Not really. I’m guessing—”
“Seventeen,” Michael finished for him, eyeing the thirty something soldier. The man was a laid back tower of muscles that hadn’t missed a day at the gym since puberty, topped with a suntan and a generous application of hair gel.
“Yowza. No shit?” Coop said, his eyes wide as he looked at Michael and then over toward Nikki.
“Living on the streets tends to age you,” Michael said. “Lot of people assume we’re older.”
“I guess so,” Coop agreed. “Damn. I would have said twenty, twenty-one.”
“And that’s better?”
“Well, yeah,” Coop said, watching Nikki in a way that was starting to irk Michael. “Still, she’s—”
“My sister,” Michael cut in. “And I was wrong. I do mind.”
“OK, OK,” Coop said, raising his hands and grinning. “I’m just messing with you, man. I wouldn’t dare.”
“Good,” Michael said, turning his attention back to the roof. He was suddenly less than enthused about their assignment on this little outing. He hoped Nikki at least was appreciating it.
“Spook Two in position,” Padre’s voice came over the transport’s com system.
“Copy, Two,” Coop said, holding down a key on the overcrowded console as he answered. He stuck his head out the other side window and shouted, “Catch that, boss?”
Nikki
Nikki looked up at Disney’s shout
then back to Elias, who just nodded his head and continued to watch the warehouse.
This outing had turned out to be more boring than Nikki had imagined. What she’d hoped would be an active distraction from Michael’s depression was just a bunch of sitting, followed by more sitting, interspersed with brief bouts of even more sitting. Instead of participating in a sweet covert raid on some top-secret facility, they were watching a surveillance mission, which meant they were watching Elias and his team watch a building. Wow.
Nikki wasn’t complaining though. She was out in the fresh air in the cloud-filtered sunshine, looking out over a run-down section of a coastal No-Cal town she’d never seen before. And even though it was a bit on the boring side, she wasn’t here to entertain herself. She was here because of Michael. She knew he had to be torn up over finding out they were test-tube babies, despite the calmness she was feeling through the link. So she’d pushed for this mission to get him out doing something to keep his mind off all that garbage.
“So you’re OK with what you learned today?” Elias asked, looking over at her briefly before going back to his binoculars.
Speaking of all that garbage...Elias had been probing for hidden pain and anguish for the past few minutes. Good thing Michael had stayed in the parked transport with Disney.
“Me?” she replied. “Hell yeah. Doesn’t mean anything to me. In fact, I’m happier not to have parents out there somewhere.”
Elias lowered the binoculars and watched the area the old fashioned way for a minute before looking at Nikki again. “So you don’t want to know who you came from?”
“What, you mean the donors? Why would I care about them?”
“You don’t want to know who they were, or why they did what they did?”
“Uh uh.”
“You don’t want to know what your last name might have been?”
“We have a last name,” Nikki said with a wry smile, looking over at Michael in the transport. “We made it up when we were little, after we figured out what we could do. Flux. Nikki and Michael Flux. Get it.”