by Jack Heath
‘Good.’ Ace scribbled again. ‘Spell the following word backwards: espionage.’
‘Espionage?’
She nodded.
‘E-G-A-N-O-I-P-S-E,’ Six said.
‘Divide 53 by 31.’
Six thought for a moment. ‘One point seven zero nine six seven –’
‘I’ll stop you there,’ Ace said. ‘Roll over.’
Six frowned. ‘To test my coordination?’
‘The brain test’s over, dummy,’ Ace said. ‘Your head is fine. I’m going to apply a regrowth salve to the wounds on your back and your arm.’
‘Dummy?’ Six said, rolling onto his front. ‘Can you divide 53 by 31 in your head?’
‘Can you apply the salve behind your own shoulder-blade?’
‘No,’ Six conceded.
‘Then shut up.’ Ace pulled on some gloves and picked up a bottle from her work bench. ‘I’d like to anaesthetise you again, but I can’t. The new muscle mass and skin are using your own cells as a template to grow, but it’s still basically a transplant, and sometimes the body rejects it. So I need you to let me know if you feel any nausea or chest pain. Everything else is normal.’ She squirted some foam onto her hands from the bottle. ‘Basically, I’m saying that this is going to hurt.’
‘It already did,’ Six said.
‘It’s going to hurt again.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘I wasn’t asking permission,’ Ace said. ‘Just warning you so you’ll keep still. Otherwise your flesh will grow back wrong and you’ll end up losing more.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘Okay.’ She patted the foam down into the holes on Six’s back. There was a soft crackling sound, like milk on rice cereal. Six clenched his teeth. It wasn’t as bad as the acid, but it was close. Like someone had reached into the wound with tweezers and was stretching out the fibres of his muscles.
‘What were you looking for?’ Ace asked. ‘On the ship, I mean.’
‘Are you distracting me?’ he asked.
‘Apparently not.’
Six shut his eyes. ‘I was looking for canisters containing the weaponised strain of the SARS virus. I was supposed to steal them before ChaoSonic could use them to wipe out the population of the South Coast.’
‘Did you find them?’
‘No.’
All Deck medics had the same security clearance as their patients, and were allowed to know most details of their missions. Just the same, Six now realised that Ace was the first doctor Six had ever agreed to answer questions for.
She squirted some more foam onto her hand, and rubbed it into the wound on Six’s bicep. Six winced.
‘So the mission wasn’t exactly a success,’ Ace said.
‘It wasn’t exactly a failure,’ Six replied. ‘Someone stole the canisters before I could. So even if whoever it was got off the ship before it sank, ChaoSonic doesn’t have them. The people of the South Coast are safe – for now.’
‘You mean until ChaoSonic goes back to shooting at them with regular weapons.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know who took the canisters?’
‘No.’
Ace was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Since I’ve known you, you’ve fought robot-making sociopaths, power-crazy businessmen, body-swapping kidnappers, and the private armies they each commanded. Whoever has the SARS – is it likely to be anyone tougher than them?’
‘I guess not,’ Six admitted.
‘Then you’ll find them, and you’ll stop them. No problem.’
Six smiled. ‘Thanks, Ace.’
She peeled off her gloves. ‘Put some clothes on. You’re done.’
He suddenly realised that his wounds had stopped hurting. ‘You distracted me after all.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, patting his shoulder. ‘By the way, King wants to talk to you.’
‘I was going to visit him anyway,’ Six said as he pulled on his shirt.
‘Hope I never see you again,’ Ace said. It was a joke she made every time. Six wondered if she said it to all her patients, or just him.
‘You too,’ he replied.
Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Six’s shoes clacked against the floor.
The Deck had started to look a little decrepit lately. The floors hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and a skin of dust had grown over some of them. One in every four ceiling lights was dead, and a third of those remaining flickered and fizzed. Upstairs, there was a window Six had broken in his escape from the Spades three weeks ago; the empty frame was now covered by a plastic sheet.
While Six and Kyntak had escaped from Vanish, it had only been a partial victory. Not only was Vanish still on the loose, but he had managed to empty out all the Deck’s hidden bank accounts. Six had since donated more than 90 per cent of his considerable wealth to the cause, and he knew he wasn’t the only one – King had put in a few million credits, and the Queen of Spades, of all people, had donated quite generously – but it wasn’t enough. The Deck was functioning at only two-thirds of its usual capacity, and routine maintenance had been the first thing to go.
And it’s my fault, Six thought. Vanish didn’t want the Deck, he wanted me. I cost the Deck a hundred million credits.
Six knocked on King’s door, and glanced up at the camera above it, giving it a clear view of his face.
‘Come in, Six.’
The door buzzed as it was unlocked. Six twisted the handle and walked through.
King looked troubled. He was scratching the back of his clean-shaven scalp with one hand, and drumming his fingers on his desk with the other. And Six could see why. The Queen of Spades was standing next to him, a cold smile on her face.
‘Six,’ the QS said. ‘How lovely to see you.’
Six ignored her. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’ he asked King.
‘I did,’ King said. ‘Something’s come up – your mission report from the Gomorrah will have to wait. Tell us everything you know about Doctor Chemal Allich.’
Six was uneasy. The QS was in charge of monitoring the Deck for corruption. Three weeks ago, she had dispatched all the agents at her disposal, the Spades, to find and arrest Six. She later claimed that she had received an anonymous tip-off that Six was working for ChaoSonic. But Six suspected that she might know about Project Falcon, the experiment that had created him. If she could prove he was a genetic weapon created by ChaoSonic, she would have him locked away forever.
She had rescinded the orders. But for the last three weeks, it felt like every time he turned his head, she was there. Watching him.
Six said, ‘Why is she here?’ She couldn’t arrest him for being rude.
‘Because it’s my job to observe all Deck activity,’ the QS said. ‘Am I making you uncomfortable? Is there something you’d like to tell King, something you’d rather I didn’t hear?’
Her smile grew wider. Six’s guts twisted.
‘Six,’ King said sharply. ‘Chemal Allich.’
Six took a deep breath. ‘Allich is a physicist working for ChaoSonic. She designed the South Coast Tower eleven years ago, and has been working there since it was built. Two years, eight months and four days ago, I was dispatched on a recon mission to the Tower because large quantities of various chemical agents were being delivered to it from all over the City, and it had the highest power consumption of anywhere on the local grid. I was sent to find out what Allich was working on.’
Six glanced at King. King gave an almost imperceptible nod.
‘King of Hearts was the agent in charge,’ Six continued. I hope I’m doing the right thing, he thought.
‘What was Allich building?’ the QS asked.
‘A wireless matter-transmission device,’ Six said.
Her eyes widened. ‘As in a teleport?’
‘Yes,’ Six said. ‘I entered and left unobserved, and I collected plenty of pictures of the WMTD to give to the Diamonds, as well as copies of the trial results. Mission successful.’
&nbs
p; ‘And what did the Diamonds determine?’ King prompted.
‘That the WMTD technology was not a threat. First, it would be impossible to conceal. Each end of the transmitter, each port, is a room at least 8 by 8 by 8 metres. And of that space, 60 cubic metres are occupied by a 2.1 petabyte supercomputer, which runs at 14 megawatts – more than twice as much as a high-speed train. The rooms themselves need to be built with molecular precision out of polyolefin materials. The whole setup takes months.
‘In short, we don’t need to worry about ChaoSonic smuggling a port into the basement of the Deck and then transmitting in a platoon of soldier bots to kill us. They could only use the machine to send cargo to places they could freely go already.’
Six paused. King and the QS waited.
‘Second,’ he continued, ‘it doesn’t actually transmit matter. Port A scans the cargo, then sends the data to Port B. Duplicate cargo is created from banks of chemicals and elements at Port B.’
‘Like a fax machine,’ the QS said.
Six frowned. ‘A what?’
‘Yes,’ King told her. ‘But after the transmission, Port A destroys the original object by stripping it into its individual molecules and storing them in its banks. So it’s like a fax machine and a paper-shredder combined.’
‘Anyway,’ Six said, ignoring their archaic terms, ‘at the time of the mission, Allich had only built one port. In each of her experiments, she scanned the cargo, dematerialised it, and then tried to duplicate it in the same location. She probably thought transmitting the information was the simplest part of the process, so there was no point building a second port until the scanning, dematerialising and duplicating stages were perfected. Which, at the time, they weren’t.’
‘What were the flaws?’ the QS asked.
‘You’d have to ask the Diamonds for a complete list,’ Six said, ‘but most notably, the machine consumed too much matter and energy duplicating the cargo. There would be no point transmitting guns, for instance, or food – it’d be easier to make them from scratch at the other end. Plus, the machine couldn’t transmit anything with significant iron content. An exposed MRI is used in the scanning, and the magnetic field would rip the object apart. You can’t send anything over 500 kilograms, which rules out most vehicles. Another problem is, the machine can’t transmit people. The pain of getting assembled at Port B sends them into shock 68 per cent of the time, immediate cardiac arrest 31 per cent. None of her test subjects survived.’
The QS looked disappointed. ‘So essentially, Allich almost invented a useless piece of technology.’
‘No,’ Six said. ‘There’s a difference between “not a threat” and “useless”. If she ever got it working – which she may have done since my recon mission – one-of-a-kind objects could be instantly transmitted from one end of the City to the other. Signed contracts, valuable paintings, human remains, plant life …’ He shrugged. ‘The machine has applications. Just none we need to worry about.’
‘Enough about Allich, for now,’ King said. ‘Tell us about Straje Sammers.’ He pronounced it Strah-yay.
Six felt a chill wriggle up his spine. Straje Sammers. A name he hadn’t heard for a long time – and would be glad never to hear again.
‘I don’t see the connection,’ he faltered.
‘Just tell us what you remember,’ King said.
Six nodded grimly. ‘Two years, four months and nineteen days ago,’ he began, ‘Sammers and a twelve-man squadron of soldiers broke into a top-secret ChaoSonic facility and killed everyone inside. They cracked the vault, and they stole …’ he hesitated, not wanting to relive the nightmare, ‘… its contents.’
‘Which were?’ the QS demanded.
‘The last nuclear warhead in existence,’ Six said softly.
Her eyes widened. ‘Impossible. They were all dismantled and destroyed before Takeover.’
‘Officially, that’s true,’ King said. ‘And the old governments did destroy most of them. They even destroyed all the designs, in the hope that no-one else would ever wield the power of nuclear weaponry. But one remained.’
‘How did they miss it?’
‘It was assembled by rogue operatives,’ Six said. ‘No country sponsored it. So the governments missed it because they never knew it existed in the first place. ChaoSonic found it, and instead of destroying it, they kept it in a bunker.’ Because, Six thought, they don’t learn lessons.
‘And then Sammers stole it,’ the QS said. ‘What did he do with it?’
‘He took it to a building a few kliks from the Seawall,’ Six said. ‘ChaoVision Headquarters – CVHQ. He set it up on the top floor and tried to detonate it, believing that the blast would kill some, the fallout would kill others, and when the Seawall collapsed it would flood the City and take care of the rest.’
‘Why?’
‘If I recall his ranting correctly,’ Six said darkly, ‘he believed the City was filled with sin. He said the solution was to introduce all its citizens to God in person.’
‘Wait,’ the QS said. ‘You were there? In the building?’
‘Yes – but he also announced his intentions to the public via webcam.’
The growling voice of Straje Sammers echoed through Six’s mind. You are powerless, boy. There is nothing you can do to thwart the divine plan.
‘Sammers’ father was the leader of a doomsday cult,’ King told the QS. ‘When he died, Sammers took over the congregation and decided doomsday wasn’t coming fast enough.’
‘So what happened?’
‘My mission,’ Six said, ‘was to infiltrate the building, neutralise Sammers and his men, disarm the nuke, and get out with enough pieces of it to ensure it could never be detonated.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I failed. I got in okay, and managed to take out all the disciples. But the nuke was already gone. And the soldiers had turned on one another; three of them were already dead when I got there …’
‘Could Sammers have taken the nuke somewhere else?’ the QS asked.
‘No,’ Six said. ‘He died.’
‘How?’
Sammers’ righteous grin flashed through Six’s mind. ‘He … exploded. Right in front of me.’
The QS raised her eyebrows. ‘Exploded?’
‘There was a small explosive charge in his backpack,’ Six said. ‘I don’t know who put it there. The official theory is that one of his disciples was working for ChaoSonic. But that doesn’t make much sense, because –’
‘Tell us what happened next, Six,’ King said.
‘ChaoSonic troops landed on the roof of CVHQ,’ Six said. ‘They couldn’t find the nuke, so they ordered that the area be sealed off. Roadblocks went up at a three-klik radius. The didn’t let anybody in or out.’
‘And then what?’ the QS asked.
‘They bombed the place,’ Six said, teeth clenched.
She stared at him. ‘Wouldn’t blowing up the nuke, well … blow up the nuke?’
‘No. Plutonium isn’t like gunpowder. The warhead would have needed the right electrical signals to detonate. So ChaoSonic dropped bombs on the area and then went in to sift through the wreckage. Most of the buildings were flattened, including CVHQ, although it has since been rebuilt. The few that remained standing were inspected thoroughly. The warhead wasn’t there. It had been destroyed in the raid.’ He paused. ‘I hid in the basement car park of the Northmoon Shopping Centre, on the outskirts of the blast radius. Then I managed to blend in with some of the survivors –’
‘The bird-flu strike!’ The QS drew in a startled breath. ‘That’s what you’re talking about, right?’
‘Yes,’ Six said. ‘ChaoSonic told the public that the air strike was to suppress an outbreak of avian influenza, and that they evacuated everyone they could. In reality, they killed almost the entire population of the area to make absolutely certain that no-one got out with the warhead.’
‘Ironic,’ the QS said. She was smiling. ‘Earlier today they put up roadblocks around almost exactly the s
ame area, and tried to release a dangerous virus for real. And then they couldn’t, because it was stolen too!’
‘The irony is probably lost on the thousands of people who were vaporised on that day,’ Six said, glaring at her. ‘Not to mention the ones still being oppressed by ChaoSonic.’
His anger faded. Something she’d said was troubling him. Roadblocks around almost exactly the same area.
Yes, CVHQ was inside the zone ChaoSonic had quarantined this morning, when they were preparing to release SARS into the population. But that wasn’t all.
So was Allich’s facility. The Tower. It was very close.
That’s the connection, Six thought. No way. He looked at King, who nodded severely.
‘You think Allich did build a Port B,’ Six said. ‘Somewhere else in the City. You think whoever stole the warhead took it to the Tower and used her machine to teleport it out of the sealed zone before the air strike.’ He felt goosebumps ripple up his arms. ‘You think the nuke is still out there.’
‘Sit down, Six,’ King said. ‘Your next mission is lined up.’
INVITATION
‘Okay.’ King rested his palms flat on his desk. ‘We have no way of knowing who has the warhead. The City’s too big to start a random search. So our first step is finding Allich’s Port B.’
‘But the nuke went through more than two years ago,’ Six interjected. ‘The trail’s ice-cold. What are we supposed to do once we find Port B?’
‘I’ll get to that,’ King said. ‘Allich’s guarded around the clock by ChaoSonic agents – three in uniform and who knows how many in plainclothes. Taking her in for interrogation isn’t an option.’
‘An employee?’ the QS suggested. ‘Someone else working in the Tower?’
King shook his head. ‘All the staff we know about work only at Port A. We’ve been watching them. They go from their homes to the Tower and back again. Nowhere else. It’s likely they don’t even know where Port B is. So our best chance of getting the information we need is to break into the Tower and steal the latest experiment data.’
‘Wrong,’ Six said. ‘That’s our worst chance of getting what we need.’
‘Insubordination, Agent Six,’ the QS said.