Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  I didn’t answer. Checker and I drank and watched bad movies together fairly regularly when I wasn’t avoiding him. It was stupid to think I wouldn’t see him anymore if I didn’t need him for the computer junk.

  Stupid.

  “It’s a bit of a long shot, but we can put together a likely vehicle list crossing the boundary,” Checker said absently, his focus on the screen. “Most cars that exit within the right window will be registered to people statistically unlikely to be involved, especially as stealing one would probably put our bad guys on the police radar more quickly and conspicuously. I’m skeptical this will work, though—I’m betting it’s not a coincidence they stopped out of view of any security cameras. These guys are very good at staying hidden.”

  “Because nothing says ‘discreet’ like coming after Arthur and me with a grenade launcher,” I said.

  “You might think that, but I assure you, I’ve been trying to trace that SUV since this morning with no luck. It’s like it popped up out of nowhere. I’m hoping Arthur will at least be able to get me a partial VIN. No, they might go in for the dramatic, but the way they’ve been disappearing in between—”

  His hands froze on the keyboard.

  “What?” I said.

  Checker turned to one of his other machines without answering and started typing very fast.

  “What is it?”

  “I think—” His fingers slowed. “I think I know who it is.”

  “What? What do you mean? You found who has Halliday?”

  “Well, I can’t find them. But I think I would be able to if they weren’t wiped.”

  “Hey.” I snapped my fingers at him. “Make sense.”

  “I think it’s the Lancer.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A black hat hacker. A pretty infamous one. So much of what I’ve been trying to track has been wiped, and I just realized—it’s his style, exactly. The way the information’s gone missing—it’s like a shadow. His shadow.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Does this mean someone else would be able to trace me through data you’ve wiped? Because that doesn’t make me feel terribly secure—”

  “Oh, leave it to you to make it all about you. Come on, Cas. I’m the best. And whoever else—” He cut himself off with a cough. “It’s different. This guy left traces.”

  But whoever this was probably felt confident he’d wiped the evidence clean. Just like Checker felt confident. And with the NSA’s spying eyes being turned toward us right now…my thoughts soured.

  “It’s not like I can tell he did it,” Checker continued. “It’s more like, I can tell things are gone, and the work is trademark Lancer. Thus, I’m assuming. If the Lancer’s not one of the people who has her, then maybe he’s someone close to them. Or works for them.”

  I supposed there was nothing I could do about my own digital footprint anyway. Fucking information age. “How does this help us?”

  “Because I might be able to trace him. Not to his location; he’s too good. But through his activities, by looking for his shadow, so to speak. I can figure out what he’s doing.”

  “We know what he’s doing,” I said. “He’s going to code up an algorithm to Halliday’s proof and then they’re going to rob the world blind.” Shit, we’d been assuming the programming would take time, but these men already had half the equation: a computer expert who could do the work.

  “But at least this is something,” argued Checker. “Maybe we can…I don’t know, lure him out?”

  The idea hit me fully formed—something that would show both Arthur and the NSA, would let me solve this whole catastrophe once and for all. “No,” I said. “We don’t lure him out. We lure him in.”

  “Huh? You mean you want to, to what—grab him and trade him?”

  “No. Even if we got our hands on him, they wouldn’t trade the professor for him. He’s expendable. They can find another computer guy.”

  “Hey!”

  “You know it’s true. Halliday is the one they really need. Unless he’s the one in charge, they’d never trade him for her.”

  Checker leaned back and crossed his arms. “All right, it seems like you’ve got an idea. Let’s hear it.”

  “We don’t make them give up Halliday. We make them take me.”

  “What?”

  “We convince them somehow that she needs help. That I wrote part of the proof. Whatever. You drop whatever electronic hints will make them think that.” I ignored the edge of recklessness limning my brain. This plan was perfect. “It’ll work. I can pass muster.”

  “Of course you can; that’s not the point!”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “That—that you’re trying to offer yourself up as bait to people who nearly killed you and Arthur just this morning, twice, and have already kidnapped another person and what would make you think they’d want to keep you alive once they’d finished with you anyway? This is a terrible idea!”

  “Come on, have you not met me?” I said.

  “What—I don’t—”

  “No one can keep me in a box. They catch me, they’ll take me to Halliday, I’ll get us both out. Easy as pie.”

  “No. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t mean to rain on your frankly impossible skill set here, but even you can’t always bust your way out in a second once you get locked in a cell. You’ve admitted it before! There are so many ways this can go wrong, starting with, what if we make you a lure as bait and they just kill you instead of taking you in? Or what if they kill Professor Sonya because they think they don’t need her once they have you? Or what if—”

  “We’ll just stall them on the math until I can figure a way out,” I said. “And you can drop the electronic hints so they’ll think they still need the professor. I have total faith in you.”

  His mouth worked. “I am not in favor of this idea!”

  “Tough,” I said.

  “Goddammit. Where’s Arthur? Where’s Pilar? Where is some sanity? Why am I constantly surrounded by people who want to throw their lives down as martyrs? I’m not going to help you become—”

  “I’m not trying to be a martyr!” I insisted. This wasn’t about self-sacrifice; this was about winning. “You’re the one who keeps telling me this is for Arthur!”

  He shut up fast at that.

  “They might be torturing Halliday as we speak, and this is the best plan we’ve got.” I stood up. “Start planting the evidence for this Lancer guy.”

  “And where are you going to be?” asked Checker unhappily.

  “I’m going to go find the van. That’s not a large search area—once I get out there, it shouldn’t take me long.” It was something to do, and maybe I’d be able to track their base and blast straight through to rescue Halliday. Besides, I didn’t want to be in the Hole if the NSA decided to check in here—Pilar had probably found Zhang by this point. “We’re going to get the professor back. One way or another.”

  And Arthur would fucking thank me.

  Chapter 7

  I rode my motorcycle out east, to the fringes of the LA sprawl.

  I had a Eulerian path planned in my head for the search zone, spiraling through the dusty, ramshackle streets with my eyes flicking back and forth for any sign of the van. About a quarter of the way along it, I spotted the windowless white vehicle sitting abandoned at the far end of a fast food parking lot, overlooked by a garish cartoon burger over an atrociously comic sign. I pulled up to the van, jacked into it, and drove off, leaving the bike.

  I moseyed around a few corners until I found a patch of empty road under an overpass, where I’d have some time to look suspicious without a danger of passersby getting curious. As I parked and got to work, I cursed Arthur under my breath for splitting off. I wasn’t nearly as good at crime-scening things as he was.

  I scooped up a handful of fine road dust from the gutter and sifted it over various surfaces inside the van, blowing it off gently to look for fingerprints I could photograph and text to Check
er—I’d picked up a burner of my own along with the bike—but the bad guys had been careful. The van was clean, and I only got covered in dirt for my trouble. I picked at the tires, but nothing recognizable in the treads leapt out at me. Mathematics might be useful for a lot of things, but it didn’t give me Arthur’s skills at observation.

  I supposed I could take pictures, in case Arthur or Checker could find something useful in them later. I tossed my phone in my hand, feeling petty about having hit a dead end. Maybe I should drive the whole van back as evidence.

  A screech of rubber on pavement burst against the cement walls of the overpass, shattering the quiet, and I dove behind the van just as three black SUVs skidded around the corner. My first thought was that the NSA had been on the hunt and followed the van here, too—

  Then automatic weapons fire tore through the air, shredding my hearing, and the windows in the van’s cab burst apart in a shattering cacophony.

  Holy shit, they tracked their own van!

  I crouched against the tire well, drawing trajectories in my head and making sure the engine block was lined up between the weapons and me. My Colt was in my hand. I had eight rounds before reloading—how many men were there? With three SUVs, at least six guys would have come, and possibly more like twelve or eighteen. I listened, teasing out the gunfire—five people were firing right now, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more.

  Screw it. I counted down from thirty, popped up as they reloaded, and fired at the first human being my gun crossed—a guy still in the driver’s seat of one of the SUVs. A pistol barked just as I pulled the trigger, and a line of fire lanced through my shoulder as I sat back down, hard. A round had clipped the skin between my shoulder and neck, on the right side. Less than an inch over and it would have hit my jugular.

  Shit. Well, at least I’d nailed one of them. And I’d gotten a glimpse. Eight people at minimum, and maybe more I hadn’t been able to see.

  There was a slight pause. Then a Molotov cocktail hit the ground right next to me.

  My eye registered it in the instant before it landed, and I launched myself up in the breath of a split second, wrenching open the front passenger door of the van and pivoting behind it. An explosion crashed across my impromptu shield and the metal slammed against me like it wanted to flatten me.

  My head ricocheted off the side of the van. My vision was vibrating. I couldn’t hear. I’d lost my gun.

  What the fuck, Molotov cocktails didn’t explode—

  Except this one had.

  My hearing buzzed in and out, muffled and badly tuned. Shouts. Doors slamming. Boots tromping on the ground.

  I stumbled back from the door that had protected me. The other side of it was on fire. So was a good part of the pavement where I’d just been sitting next to the hood, napalm or something like it coating every surface, flaming globs dousing the side of the overpass spectacularly. The heat scorched my skin, and my lungs strained with every breath as if someone were smothering me.

  Somewhere in my head I registered that this must have been their own brand of modified incendiary, a nice little bomb helping splash the napalm around. A thousand times deadlier than a normal Molotov cocktail. Great.

  A smattering of automatic fire tore into the van again, and I ducked, covering my head as more glass rained down. They couldn’t see me—did they know I was still alive?

  A soft click. I wasn’t sure how I heard it; everything was still muffled and ringing; but my brain immediately knew: lighter.

  Another flaming bottle soared over the roof of the van.

  The world slowed only to the parabola of projectile motion. The bottle sailed down, tumbling end over end, the flame on the soaked rag flaring as the wind of its passage whipped at it.

  I swung my arm down and around in a circle and came up right underneath it, like my arm was a freaking golf club, and smacked the heel of my hand against it, cupping it with infinite gentleness and then following it up with increasing speed until I let it fly back the other way, bottle strength estimates ricocheting through my head along with maximum decelerations because the one thing I absolutely did not want was for the bottle to break against my hand—

  I felt the momentum transfer echo through my arm and the flame blistered me, and then the bottle was flying back the way it had come. Exactly the way it had come.

  The world sped up again. My sleeve had caught fire. I smashed it against myself to smother it as I ducked.

  The math of free fall meant I knew exactly when the bottle would hit the ground: height of zero, solve for time. I didn’t hear the bottle shatter, because the explosion was too loud.

  The van rocked against me like a giant had smacked it, the metal bowing and rippling as the concussion ripped through. My hearing rang out into complete silence for an instant before tuning back in. Screams tore through the air, the screams of men coated with flaming chunks of napalm, men being devoured by third-degree burns. The other side of the van was on fire; the napalm had splatted against the metal, and the flames lit up what was left of the driver’s side window and licked up to rise in hungry spirals above the van’s roof.

  I dropped to the ground and pawed around until I found my Colt. The crushing heat pressed against me, making me heady and faint. The air molecules scorched my trachea.

  My unseen enemies had devolved into chaos, shouting and shrieking. I rolled under the van—the narrow band of visible ground across from me was full of blood and fire and flailing limbs curdling into blackness as they burned. A few of the men had escaped the carnage and were still standing. I shot them all in the legs. And I didn’t shoot to wound. I shot for the arteries.

  Their feet splayed and collapsed under them, and blood spurted along with a few abortive bursts of gunfire. Bodies hit the asphalt and weapons clattered to the ground, and more people screamed.

  It was hard to focus through the flames. It was hard to breathe. The sips of hot air kept choking me.

  I’d counted six burning bodies on the ground and shot three more. That was nine, plus the one I’d killed in the SUV made ten. Would they really have sent more than twelve? Would they?

  I might’ve gotten them all already. If there were any left, they were probably fruitlessly trying to stop their friends from bleeding out or burning to death…

  Or they had their sights set on the van, ready to pop me the instant I showed myself.

  I tried to think. My brain felt like it was cooking in my skull. My eyes scratched and watered; I tried to blink them clear. Options. What were my options?

  Only one back quarter panel of the van wasn’t on fire. I rolled in that direction and scooted back out from underneath, then snuck toward the tailgate, shrugging out of my jacket as I went. I stuck my gun hand under it like a tent pole, and then poked the jacket-covered gun out past the back of the van.

  More gunfire deafened me, and I yanked my arm back down, tearing the cloth off my Colt. It had one hole torn in it.

  One hole. They’d fired fourteen rounds in two seconds with those freakin’ automatic rifles, and only one had hit. Idiots and their automatics.

  I had no time: I wasn’t behind the engine block anymore, this heat was undoing me, and if these guys let loose, one of the rounds would eventually go straight through the van and hit me. But I didn’t need time, because the gunfire had pinpointed their locations.

  A little less than one chance in fourteen I’d get my hand shot off, depending on how fast I pulled the trigger. Thirteen in fourteen that I wouldn’t. Those were pretty good odds.

  I closed my tearing eyes, drew the trajectories in my head, and poked my Colt out again, this time with the muzzle pointed out and without a jacket covering it. My finger jumped against the trigger twice.

  The second guy got a four-round burst off. Then I heard two thumps.

  Better than I expected.

  I took a choking, ragged breath and leaned against the side of the van. I had to move, I kept telling myself. Had to move.

  I pushed off an
d stumbled away, at an angle so I was still hidden from the SUVs and the majority of the men I’d taken out. Just in case there were any more. I smacked into the cement of the overpass and slid down, breathing shallowly. The cement was cool. I pressed myself against it.

  My head was ringing—or maybe it was my ears, or maybe it was a combination and I was concussed again. I concentrated. I have a fine-tuned awareness of my own body—it’s necessary for me to align with the mathematics to take out mooks, but it’s also terribly convenient for injuries.

  Of course, that assumes I can concentrate.

  It took me a few minutes, but I figured it out. Both ear trauma and another concussion. Fantastic. And I was suffering damage from the heat, my system going haywire in a dozen minor ways. Lungs. Skin. Eyes. Throat. My stomach flipping into nausea in response, as if it thought it could vomit up everything that was wrong.

  The top of my shoulder was bleeding, too, though not badly. I mashed my torn jacket against it and concentrated on breathing. Inhaling stung, the air scraping through my trachea like it wanted to shred me from the inside out. Oh, and my left hand was in a lot of pain. Blistered. Some dermal trauma. Because it had been on fire. Right.

  I kept my eyes and ears open—at least, as much as I could, through the tearing and the ringing—but the street was calm, and apart from the soft whoosh of the flames continuing to burn, I heard nothing. Good. I wasn’t inclined to investigate until I’d definitely given the gentlemen I’d shot in the legs enough time to bleed out. There was still a chance one of them would have enough strength to pull a trigger, and why tempt fate?

  I dug out a fresh magazine and reloaded my Colt. The metal was heavy. My fingers fumbled on it before managing to click the new mag home.

  From here I could see the two men I’d shot last. The bodies were still, a pool of red gleaming around them, their rifles fallen across their chests. AK-47s, I noticed. Cheap and reliable, like a Molotov cocktail. I wondered what they’d put in the bottles to add the explosion—that was a neat trick.