by C. G. Hatton
I squared up to him, standing my ground, heart pounding, every muscle tensed, almost trembling, no idea what was going on, no idea what he was doing, or what I could do if he came at me.
But he just cursed and said quietly, intently, “We were sent to kill the Emperor. I don’t know about you, but I have a problem killing eight year old kids, whoever they are.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding.
He gestured towards the wall of monitors. “We’re surrounded. My unit is following my orders. For now at least. They’ve been programmed to kill the Emperor but they were also programmed to follow my command.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve convinced them I’ve received new orders. I don’t know how the hell this conditioning works but it’s like they have to listen to me. Except what I’m saying conflicts with everything else and I think I’m frying their brains. There are three other units who, as far as I know, are still following the original brief.”
My head was still hurting. “How come we broke their programming?”
“I don’t know how the hell you did. I didn’t.” He turned to the monitor screens showing the outside. “We’re fending off the others,” he said quietly. “But I don’t know how long we can keep them out. We’re sealed inside the inner citadel. The other three units trying to whack the kid are in the outer citadel which they’ve sealed off from the outside. The garrison and security forces are holding off because they’re terrified if they come storming in, the Emperor will be killed. We need to move. I really don’t know how long I can keep these kids believing we have new orders.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t?”
A sharp trill from the desk made us spin around. There was an intercom on there. Old tech, landline style. The kind places have when atmospheric conditions can throw out normal comms.
We stared at it.
Hil reacted first. He got to it, looked back at me with his hand hovering over it and pressed the button.
There was a pause, then a woman’s voice said, “Cadet Hilyer…”
It was her.
I could feel my heart thumping with a dull beat that was pounding down into my stomach.
Arianne was here.
“Zachary,” she said, her voice coming through calm and clear, “I want you to listen to me and do exactly as I say. Whatever misunderstanding has caused this behaviour, we can sort it out if you surrender yourself and your unit now.”
I shivered. A tiny part of me could very easily have believed it had all been a mistake.
But Hil looked up at me and froze.
The implant in my neck engaged with its weird sensation of connection.
She was speaking to him direct and he’d included me in the loop. I had no idea how to do any of that stuff but he did and he raised his finger to his lips as he looked at me.
“…code seven zulu niner acturon. Do you understand?”
I heard him say, seemingly inside my mind, “Yes, ma’am.”
He was shaking his head at me.
“I repeat,” Arianne sent through the implant, “original target Wu is to be eliminated. Acknowledge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And new target Anderton is to be eliminated. Acknowledge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She switched back to the intercom, as if she’d just been letting her previous words hang there to sink in, and added more persuasively, “Come on now, Zach, you are one of our best students. This can be sorted out easily, if you all come out now. But let me be clear…” Her voice got an edge to it. “If we have to come in there to get you, this will not end well. You…”
He hit the button and cut both connections.
The way he was staring at me, I didn’t know if maybe his programming had kicked in after all. I was still half expecting him to pull his gun and shoot me on the spot.
But he just said, “Why? Why do they want you dead? Why, after all this, all of a sudden, do they want you dead?”
I flashed back to Kheris, the IDC guy picking up his access key from the dirt and saying, “Bad mistake, kid…”
“The officer in charge of Spearhead, this whole operation,” I forced myself to say, struggling with anything more than a whisper.
“You mean General McIntyre? Thin guy, black hair, face like a vulture that’s eyeing you up as its next meal?”
“Yeah, that sounds like him,’” I said. “He’s Imperial Diplomatic Corps, or at least he was masquerading as IDC when I met him. He runs an unsanctioned black ops ledger with contacts at military bases and corporations both sides of the line… money laundering, weapons deals, enforced draft arrangements, black market drugs supplies…”
Hil was looking at me, eyes narrow, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “And apparently turning kids into assassins…”
“I’ve seen his ledger,” I said, nausea pulling at my stomach. “I know every line of it.”
Chapter 28
I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to think about it but Hil cursed and said, “Why now?”
I sucked in a deep breath that made me shiver. “They didn’t know it was me. Brennan figured out where I was from. She said she was going to report it.”
To give him credit, he didn’t ask where I was from or how the hell I knew about the ledger. He glanced at the monitors and the growing force of military might amassing outside, and looked back at me. “We need to go. Can you fly a drop ship?”
I nodded.
He gave a harsh laugh. “Shit, I was joking. Are you serious?”
I don’t know how I was looking at him but he cursed again and said, “Don’t look at me like that. For crying out loud, LC, I was wrong. You were right. I was wrong. Okay?”
He took hold of my arm and tied the rag tighter. I almost cried out, flinching away, biting my lip. He ignored me and pulled the knot tight.
“We should be able to access the academy AI from here,” he said. “Can you operate a drop ship by remote, send new orders to one of the crews or something? Get it to land on the roof?”
I nodded, dread clutching at my stomach, but I nodded.
“Do it. Do it now.”
I had to force myself to move, to go and sit at the desk and stare at the terminal there. I started using the implant without even realising I was. It was easy to hack past the first few defences longhand, like I always used to. I had to wing it as I went, not wasting any time with finesse and running full tilt into the Academy’s AI.
I nudged around it, fooled it by rearranging all the pathways and crossed data lines as subtly as if I was just refining the logics. It was good but it was nothing like Spearhead. On Kheris, I fried the AI by hacking at its cooling system until it exploded. After the guild showed me how, I could mess with an AI of this level like I was doodling inside its brain with a needle-sharp soldering iron.
I sidestepped my way through, accessed the logistics centre and interrupted the orders for all the drop ships, finding one that was parked up in a maintenance hangar and flagged for repairs but still operable. I made it easy, jumping onto comms that were already in place, and set up modifiers that would scramble the source of the changes. I threw in a lot of smoke and mirrors, and got caught up watching what they were doing, trying to backtrack my way through to Spearhead. I wanted to find it in there, wanted to confront it again. It didn’t register what the muted popping sounds were until someone grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the system. I almost yelled, disorientated and dizzy from losing the connection so fast, and dropping back into a reality echoing with gunfire. Hilyer pulled me down behind the desk and popped off a couple more shots, hissing, “Go,” and pushing me out.
There were three kids lying on the floor, guns by their hands, one with a knife, sprawled, out cold but breathing. I couldn’t help staring as Hil dragged me past. They weren’t just trying to kill the Emperor anymore. They’d come in here to kill me.
We stopped at the door and listened.
Hil pulled me close a
nd hissed, “Does Mendhel know?”
“Know what?”
“About the ledger?”
I shook my head.
“Tell him,” he said. “When you get back, you have to tell him.”
“When we get back.”
Hil gave me a weird look and pushed a gun into my hand.
“When we get back,” I said again.
“Don’t.”
He listened at the door.
I felt cold, like we were about to jump off a cliff edge. “Hil, you have to come back with me.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not going back. Now shut the hell up and help me get this kid out of here alive.”
There was shouting behind the door, still some distance off. It wouldn’t matter where Hil wanted to go if we didn’t get out of there. I switched into automatic, checking the mechanism on the gun, checking the magazine and seeing those orange tags that indicated FTH, stun rounds. It was like the CQB. Except the other kids were using live ammunition. And if we didn’t make it, there’d be no rerun, no second chance to get it right.
Hil put his gun hand next to the door panel and held up his other hand, three fingers, then two then one. I nodded. He pressed the button. The door opened and we both moved, firing and running into cover as shots ricocheted around us.
It was two of our own unit out there. They fell as our shots hit home.
“Go get to the roof,” Hil shouted. “I’ll get the kid, you get that drop ship ready.”
I nodded and ran.
The weird thing about doing stuff for real that you’ve trained for is that you expect it to be different and it isn’t. You expect the nerves to be worse, the jitters to be higher. But when you’re in the middle of it, it doesn’t matter if it’s a sim or for real, you just do it. I didn’t have many rounds left in the gun so I knew I couldn’t shoot my way out if I got cornered. So I did what I do best and avoided everyone, the rest of our unit, the other kids from other units who were gathering and moving in, the troops in battle armour who were shoving them aside and blustering in to rescue their Emperor.
I was running blind, no intel, no idea where I was going or what security they had. All the sensors I saw were dead, all the patrol drones inert on the floor. I had a bad feeling that could have been my handiwork. I must have neutralised the whole base.
I still didn’t make it to the roof.
It was Kat that cornered me. I had the drop on her, gun up and finger on the trigger when she appeared, but I couldn’t do it, not with the way she was looking at me, standing there with her hands up, taking one slow step after the other towards me.
“Luka,” she called, her voice soft and almost pleading, “I need you to listen to me.”
I shook my head, keeping the gun up. “I know you’re working for them.”
She looked dismayed. “Come on, Luka, you’re bleeding. Let me look at your arm.”
I know I’m a sucker sometimes but I’m not that stupid.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “It’s not what you think.”
I didn’t know what to think.
“You set me up,” I said quietly. “You gave me that pass to set me up.”
She screwed up her face. “I had no choice. I didn’t want to, believe me. I want out, Luka. I want to come with you.”
There wasn’t much room to manoeuvre and I could hear people behind me, more behind her, some distance away but moving in.
“C’mon, Luka,” she said. “I need you to trust me.”
That made it easy. I shook my head again. “I don’t trust anyone who tells me to trust them.”
She took another step forward. “They want you dead.”
“I know.” I stepped backwards, keeping the gun up and aimed at her.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” she said, “and I’m not going to let them kill you.”
Another step.
The voices behind her were getting closer.
“I swear I didn’t know what the mission was. And I didn’t know what they were going to do to you. I had no choice. Luka, I’m done. I want out.”
There was something about the look in her eye. Apparently I am that stupid.
I grabbed her hand and ran, pulling her away with me, and disappearing into the depths of the Citadel.
We didn’t stop until we couldn’t hear anyone anymore, then I pulled her into a dark alcove and pressed my finger to her lips.
She reached, moved my hand, and had her arms around my neck, gentle, pulling me into an embrace before I could react. Her lips were so soft I felt like I was melting. I closed my eyes. I wanted her to be Maisie. I wanted to be back on Kheris and I wanted everything to be okay. I could almost smell the shampoo Maisie had always used. Except it wasn’t Maisie, it was Kat.
A shiver ran down my spine. I pulled back and said quietly, “You told Brennan about the snow. How I’d never seen snow. You were working me the whole time.”
Even in the low light I could see her expression flash with frustration. “I didn’t want to,” she said. “You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know why I had no choice.”
“Tell me.”
“You really want to know?”
I didn’t. I didn’t want to care but I nodded.
She leaned in and whispered into my ear. “I was on death row. Fourteen years old and nothing ahead of me but a death sentence. They offered me a deal. Hate me if you want but I never meant to hurt you.” She stopped, pulled back and looked at me. “And believe me, I don’t fall lightly. For anyone. But then I’ve never met anyone like you. I should hate you for doing this to me.”
I was kissing her again before I realised I was. To shut her up, I told myself.
We froze as the giveaway hum of powered armour sounded down the corridor.
“I know a way out,” she said. “Where’s the Emperor?”
I bit my tongue to stop what I was about to say. “In the armoury,” I said instead.
She touched her hand to my cheek in a soft caress. “We need to go.”
We waited until it was quiet then ran out and through dark corridors. They must have cut the power, only emergency lighting illuminating the way, giving that weird red cast to everything. Her blue hair looked purple. She kept tight hold of my hand as if I was her lifeline. We saw the bouncing beams of flashlights every now and then, avoiding them and circling round. It was close a few times, then we ran towards a set of blast doors that slammed shut ahead of us.
I stopped, heart pounding, glancing back over, expecting to hear powered armour, the clatter of grenades skittering across the floor. My chest constricted, ears ringing.
I don’t know when she’d let go of my hand, but I sensed she wasn’t there and turned.
She was backing away from me. “I meant it,” she called out cheerfully. “Every word. But I can’t afford to fall for you, Luka. Not when you’re about to die.” She stopped and shouted, “He’s right here.”
Arianne stepped out of the shadows next to her.
“Well done, Katarina,” the older woman said, curt, like she was used to having her orders obeyed. “Drop the gun, Anderton.”
I stood there, sideways on to them, trying to figure out if I could raise it and shoot them both before she could shoot me. The blast door was still closed behind me. There was no other way out.
Arianne walked forward. “Don’t be stupid, Anderton. Now are you going to tell me where the Emperor really is?”
I couldn’t see any way out. I stared at her, seeing in her the woman in Mendhel’s file, the picture of them both together with their little girl. It was definitely her. All I could think about was Mendhel’s face as he was told she’d been killed.
Her expression changed, as if she’d suddenly become immensely curious about this stupid kid in front of her.
“Who are you working for?” she said, a frown creasing those familiar features.
“I’m not working for anyone,” I said but I might as well have blurted out my whole life story.
“Who taught you to manipulate an AI like that? Where did you learn…?” She paused, then she said it, so abruptly I couldn’t not react. “The Maze. You’re from Kheris? Holy shit, you’re Charlie Anderton’s kid.”
I blinked, shutting down every emotional response that surfaced but it was too late.
“You’re Thieves’ Guild,” she breathed and her arm snapped up, pointing a gun right between my eyes.
Chapter 29
“Drop the gun,” she said again.
I let it fall from fingers that were numb anyway.
Kat was watching from further down the corridor, tying her fingers in knots, excited, like she wanted to watch Arianne pull the trigger. I’ve never been so badly wrong about someone. Kat was my first big mistake. Like I’d finally made it into the big bad world and that’s what had been waiting to pounce the whole time.
I looked at Arianne. “Why did you kill Markus?”
If she’d needed proof, that was it but she was going to kill me anyway so what did it matter?
She narrowed her eyes. “Was it Mendhel Halligan that sent you?”
There was an edge to her voice that sent ice into my veins. Just hearing her say his name.
I stood my ground, asking obnoxiously, “Why are you doing this?” I wanted to know for Mendhel, even though I’d never be able to tell him. I wanted her to tell Kat to scram and turn to me to explain that she was undercover, that Markus wasn’t dead, that it was all part of a game they were playing to infiltrate Spearhead.
She didn’t. I think she was talking to someone else, or listening, because she nodded vaguely, the same way I’d seen Mendhel react outside the briefing room.
She blinked slowly, looked me in the eye and said, “Time’s up, kid.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger and it wouldn’t be the last.
Kat screamed like a harpy and for a flash, I thought she was protecting me, but she flew at a figure in the shadows. There was sharp double pop. My heart jumped, the shot fired at me whistling past my ear as I flinched away, and Arianne twisting and falling as she caught the edge of the charge fired at her, dropping the gun but rolling to her feet.