Hammer of Angels

by G T Almasi

  In the center of this room is a doughnut-shaped counter, like an information desk at a museum, except the top surface is one big computer screen. Two blond women in white lab coats stand behind the desk and stare at us. One of them wears glasses, and the other has short curly hair. Victor and I aim our weapons at them. Brando calls out to the women to put their hands up.

  Four-Eyes grabs for something in her coat pocket. I squeeze off a few shots that pound into her chest and blow her backward over the desk. Curly screams and cringes as her coat and face are spattered with Four-Eyes’s blood. My partner yells at Curly to stand still. The terrified woman is trembling so hard, I think she might faint. She cries and breathes in shallow gasps.

  Brando walks through a small gap in the desk that serves as the entrance. He takes Curly’s hands and leads her toward the stairs, speaking softly. Brando gently rummages through Curly’s pockets and removes a few pens, a small notebook, and a short silver cylinder. He dumps all this stuff on the floor and kicks it away.

  I comm, “What’s that silver thing? A cigar tube?”

  He replies, “I think it’s a suicide needle. If Carbon gets breached, this woman is supposed to kill herself to protect what she knows about this program.”

  “Ask her what’s on the fourth floor.”

  Brando asks Curly a hushed question. She continues quivering as she answers him.

  “She says the Originals are all kept upstairs. The specimens here are clones.” He indicates the metal boxes along the walls.

  The clone chambers all have clear panels on the front. I inspect the nearest techno-coffin. A young, fair-skinned blond woman is inside. She’s strapped into place and wired up all to hell. Blondie has a tall forehead and a long straight nose with a strong jaw. Her fair skin is smooth as polished marble, and her light blue eyes are open—wide open—like she’s startled. Blondie’s frozen expression of terror makes the fine hair on my forearms stand up. I check the next box and do a double take. It’s the same woman.

  Duh, Scarlet. Clones.

  This Blondie is all strapped and wired, too, but her eyes are shut. I circle the room. Each box contains the same woman in varying postures and restraint systems. Three of the chambers are filled with a light amber liquid, with the specimen inside hovering motionlessly. These floating clones don’t wear any breathing apparatus.

  “Hey,” I say, “why haven’t these three drowned?”

  Curly answers in a mild German accent, “Perfluorocarbons.”

  My perplexed expression telegraphs that I have no idea what she just said.

  “Liquid breathing,” she clarifies.

  “Like deep-sea divers,” Brando says, “or premature babies. It looks like the Carbon engineers are testing multiple approaches.”

  I back away from the jumbo-size box of scientific creepiness. Even though my partner is a clone, he seems much more natural than these poor creatures. Yes, he spent exactly zero time in a real mother’s womb, but he and his brothers were raised from infancy as normal kids. Plus, there were only three of them, like triplets. There are thirty copies of this blond woman in here.

  There’s no way making so many of the same person can be a good idea. People aren’t Ford Mustangs. You can’t just crank out an endless number of them. The moment these women emerge from these tanks will be the moment they go completely bonkers.

  Eisenberg has stopped pointing his gun directly at Curly but holds it ready in case she tries any funny stuff. Brando says to him, “Mr. Eisenberg, will you watch this woman while we go upstairs?”

  The man’s lean face creaks into a smile. “Anything for you, my friends. And please, call me Victor.”

  21

  SAME MORNING, 1:58 A.M. GMT

  TOWER OF LONDON, LONDON, PROVINCE OF GREAT BRITAIN, GG

  He’s not here. He told me he wasn’t, but there was still part of me that hoped my father was being kept at this Carbon installation.

  This uppermost chamber is lined with computer cabinets, deep racks of pressurized tanks, and a swarm of thick tubes slinking through holes in the floor. In one corner is a raised platform holding three computer terminals. It’s obviously the control center. Brando makes a beeline for one of the workstations.

  Centered in the space is what appears to be a gigantic sarcophagus: twenty feet long, six feet wide, and five feet tall. It’s like a shipping container for a limousine. This must be the Original.

  On top of the container is a thick glass plate for viewing the interior. I stand on tiptoe and take a look. Inside is a silvery rectangular slab the size of a dining room table. A thick rod connects the slab’s short edges to the walls of the sarcophagus so that the slab is mounted in there like a piece of food on a spit.

  The slab moves, rotating along its long axis, and smoothly flips over. The other side reveals the Original, a woman, although I can’t see much of her. A breathing tube is mounted over her mouth and nose, and her hair is covered by a chrome helmet with a zillion thin wires coming out of it, like a metal Afro.

  From the neck down the woman is tucked into the hollow core of the slab, which is essentially an articulated, padded body envelope. The cloning process must take enough time that the subject’s position has to be shifted periodically. The silvery manvelope has a few large hinges along its length, I think so the subject can be bent at the waist and knees. Maybe to help blood circulation? Jesus, how long do they keep her in there?

  Only the top half of the Original’s face is visible. She seems to be asleep or unconscious. There are dark circles under her eyes. The overhead lights glare off the viewing glass, and I move a bit to see inside better.

  The Original’s eyes spring open.

  I yowp and recoil from the sarcophagus. “Darwin, she’s awake!”

  My partner sits at the control station and reads from the screen in front of him. “Yes. It says here the subject has been placed into a locked-in state with a steady dose of pancuronium bromide.” He gnaws one of his thumbnails. “She’s paralyzed but cognizant.”

  When I lean over the window again, the woman’s terrified gaze tracks my eyes.

  “Can this lady feel anything?”

  “She can feel everything. The Carbon researchers don’t want the subject’s mental activity dulled with anesthetics.”

  The woman’s head doesn’t budge. She can blink, and her eyes can move. That’s it. Small pearls of water course down the sides of her face.

  “She’s crying.” I place my hand over the glass. “We’ve gotta get her out!”

  “Oh, my God, Scarlet. No way!”

  “She’s in agony, Darwin. They have her on a breathing machine!”

  “Yes, exactly. Her respiratory functions are paralyzed along with the rest of her. We don’t have any of the drugs we’d need to—”

  “We can’t leave her there.”

  “We have to, Scarlet! If we pull her off that ventilator, she’ll suffocate and die.”

  The mission that killed my first partner resulted in a heap of intel about Germany’s cloning program, including Carbon’s success at speed-growing clones to the physical equivalent of twenty years old in one-tenth the time it would take naturally. That phase was called Gen-2, and for a few precious moments it was the most mental thing I’d ever heard of.

  Trick and I also recovered data about Carbon’s current phase, Gen-3, which instantly replaced Gen-2 as the most mental thing I’ve ever heard of. Gen-3’s objective is to map an Original’s living consciousness into a clone. This would create an exact age-shifted duplicate with all the maturity, memories, and knowledge of the Original. The Frankenkrauts call it psychogenesis.

  ExOps’s Med-Techs call it the craziest, most overreaching ego trip since the Tower of Babel. They swear up and down that psychogenesis is absolutely impossible. Then they haltingly admit that they said the same thing about Gen-2’s goal of accelerated growth.

  My retinal cameras take a picture of the paralyzed woman trapped in the chamber. She stares at me, desperately pleading. I s
adly shake my head. She presses her eyes shut and keeps crying. My feet slowly back away from the sarcophagus.

  Brando returns to his torrential typing. I rotate in a circle and photograph the lab. Formations of stainless-steel cabinets, Goliath-sized generators, racks and racks of pressurized bottles, wires, tubes, and cables—there’s stuff everywhere. Even with the industrial-strength air conditioners mounted on the ceiling, the profusion of biotech thingamajigs keeps the room toasty warm. But I still shiver when Trick comes up the stairs.

  “Hiya, Hot Stuff,” he says.

  I’m all set to respond—dead partner, no biggie—when what’s happening hits me. I press my palms over my eyes. Jesus, Brando will think I’m nuts. I pull my hands down and cross my arms in front of me instead.

  Trick is gone. I choke down a deep breath and command my knees to stop swaying.

  Only a ghost, Alix.

  Trick’s voice echoes from behind me. “Scarlet.” No, it’s not Trick. “Check out this file.” Brando comms me a data file. I swallow my anxiety attack and open the file in my Eyes-Up display.

  It’s a map of Europe superimposed with a scattered constellation of green dots. “What’re these dots?”

  “That’s where all the Carbon facilities are.”

  “Are you kidding? There must be fifty of them!”

  “Sixty-five,” he comms, “but most of them are only for research, like the labs we saw in Zurich. There are nine cloning facilities like this one.”

  “Which one is my father in?”

  “I don’t know.” Brando rapidly works the computer’s keyboard. “My Info Coordinator may be able to help us figure that out.”

  A muffled thud echoes from outside. Sounds like our boys are really putting it to the German police. Raj comms to both Brando and me. “Scarlet, Darwin, we’re running low on ammo.”

  Brando replies, “Roger that. We’re leaving now.” He types a final flourish into the computer, heads for the stairway, and calls out, “Victor! Let’s round up Goldilocks and her three bears.”

  I follow my partner but stop to take one more gander at the tomblike metal cloning chamber.

  He’s in one of those things, waiting for me.

  I hold Li’l Bertha next to my head. “Dad?”

  All I hear is whooshing air and humming generators. My skin crawls, and a cold tremor from the cut on my leg courses through my shoulders and down my arms.

  Dear Lord, please grace my father with Your strength and curse his keepers with one of those fucked-up Old Testament plagues. Boils will do nicely. Amen.

  * * *

  CORE

  MIS-ANGEL-2184

  Heavily encrypted intercept, source unknown:

  START TRANSMISSION : SHE’S IN LONDON : TRANSMISSION END

  22

  SAME MORNING, FIVE HOURS LATER, 7:13 A.M. GMT

  245 WESTBOURNE GROVE, NOTTING HILL, LONDON, PROVINCE OF GREAT BRITAIN, GG

  The red-tipped cigarette stays between my lips as I exhale through my nostrils. Look, Ma, no hands. I feel like a total rebel until a burning twister of hot vapor burrows into my eyes. I wince and snatch the butt away from my mouth. So much for James Dean.

  It turns out Grey smokes not only for the pure tobacco flavor but because the old “Can I get a light?” routine is such a perfect icebreaker for Infiltrator work. When Brando, Victor, and I returned with Curly and the three neckties, we found Grey casually smoking on the safe house’s front steps. On an impulse, I asked him if I could bum one. I’d barely finished the question when he held his cigarette case out toward me.

  “Don’t tell your mother.” His lighter seemed to magically appear in his palm, already lit.

  I puffed the cigarette into life. “Thanks, Grey.”

  Raj came out and escorted our Carbon pals inside. Meanwhile, from the corner of my eye, I saw Brando tilt his head and look at me.

  “What?” I said. “My leg hurts.”

  He quietly watched me smoke. We both know I have Overkaine for things like leg wounds. He turned to Grey without taking his eyes off me. “Sir, will you help me question our pris—uh, I mean, our guests?”

  Grey had been observing our mostly unspoken conversation with a tilted smile. “Sure thing, Darwin,” he said, “but drop the ‘sir.’”

  That was a few hours ago. Since then I’ve changed into my street clothes, rebandaged the gash on my leg, and had a bite to eat. Then I equipped Victor with a comm-headset so he can talk to us, stowed the scuba gear in its ExOps duffel bag, and bummed another cigarette off Grey before he sent me and Rah-Rah up here to the roof to keep a lookout for die Fritz.

  We alternate from the front of the building to the back every twenty minutes or so to help us stay alert. Neither of us speaks unless we see something. It’s early Sunday morning, and this is a residential neighborhood, so we’re pretty much silent.

  Brando keeps me and Raj tuned into how things are going downstairs. I can’t follow the technobabble, but I gather we’re harvesting even more Carbon intel than my haul from Zurich. The scientists we brought here are fed up with how much the Reich has “perverted their talents.” The woman, Curly, says she might as well give it to us so “somebody can do some good with it.”

  Raj and I exchange knowing glances when she says this. He sighs and returns to his post. Suddenly he cranes his neck to check out something in the street.

  He comms to me, Grey, Victor, and Brando all at once. “Team, this is Raj. A large six-wheeled van has stopped a hundred feet from our front door.”

  I throw my cigarette down and stand on tiptoe for a better view of the house’s rear approach. “Raj, it’s clear back here. Do you need help?”

  “No, Scarlet. Stay there. If this is a raid, they’ll come from all directions at once.”

  “Maybe we should have had Victor bring his guys with him,” I comm.

  Raj hunches down so he can watch the van below without exposing himself more than he needs to. “No, it was better to get those men out of the city. We couldn’t have armed or supplied them, anyway.”

  This is true. In fact, we can barely supply ourselves. Raj and I have our ExOps-issued weapons, of course, but we’ve been in-country so long that we’re running out of ammo for our specialized people perforators. To supplement our draining ammunition supply, we each have a stolen MP-50 with as many clips as we can hump around. Curly brought us out of the Tower via a series of abandoned tunnels that used to be some kind of intracity mail delivery system. One corridor went by an underground armory, where we got ourselves all heated up with weapons, a crapload of bullets, and some of those Kraut grenades on a stick.

  I scan the house’s backyard. The whole neighborhood is lined with two-, three-, and four-story white stucco buildings like the one we’re standing on. In the middle of the block is a red brick church Grey calls the Tabernacle. It’s surrounded by narrow trees, lush hedges, and small plots of remarkably green grass. Even after decades of occupation, the Brits still can’t be beat for their gardening skills.

  Then I spot a problem in paradise: snakes.

  “Gentlemen, this is Scarlet. Three armed soldiers are sneaking through the park to our rear.”

  Grey instantly comms, “Okay, team, we’re bugging out. Darwin, join your partner upstairs. Victor, cover the front door. I’ll take care of our guests.”

  “Roger that, Grey,” Raj comms. “You’ll find your own escape route, I assume, sir.”

  “Affirmative, Raj. You exit with Scarlet, Darwin, and Victor.” Infiltrators are so good at hiding that they have their own response to this kind of situation. It’s called Evade in Place, meaning he’ll stay here and use his Mods to remain out of sight. When he finds out what the Germans’ intentions are, he’ll report to ExOps.

  Brando emerges from downstairs. He zips across the roof and surveys the street out front. Then he runs to my post and leans out over the backyard. “Crap,” he says.

  Raj comms, “Grey, that van just unloaded a dozen SZ troops in full riot gear. Should I eng
age them?”

  Grey responds, “Raj, you big animal mother, I’ll consider it a personal favor if you light those foxtrots right the hell up. Scarlet and Victor, the same for you: any SZ or Gestapo targets you see, you kill. Try to abstain from cops and Wehrmacht.”

  I pour myself a bucket of Madrenaline. My pulse, breathing, and blood pressure all speed up. A serving of Kalmers swirls in to steady my hands. I lean out from the roof’s edge to see if the competitors slinking into the backyard are regular assholes I need to merely cripple or if they’re extra-strength assholes I can send to the great Oktoberfest in the sky.

  My upgraded googlies telescope in for a closer look. Their collars all have the Staatszeiger’s silver insignia: zigzag SZ runes on the right and an upraised hand with fingers made of lightning on the left.

  “Raj,” I comm, “I have confirmed SZ back here, too. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  “Roger that,” Raj answers. “Here we go.” He opens up on the troops in the street with a long rattling overture of fully automatic fire from his MP-50.

  I carefully aim a series of short bursts, one at each of the three intruders trespassing through my little green heaven. Intruder One is easy since he doesn’t know I’m up here. Intruder Two tries to hide under a small bench, but my second bullet tempest takes him apart. Intruder Three has the most time and disappears into a hedge. I pepper the place where he vanished.

  “Scarlet…” It’s Brando. I can barely hear him over Raj’s cacophonous firefight.

  “Hang on, Darwin. I’m trying to nail this fucker.” I fire into the hedge on either side of Intruder Three’s hiding spot to—

  “SCARLET! DOWN!” Brando shouts. My weapon’s sights abruptly swing away from the ground. I plunge—no, I’ve been pulled—backward. My butt lands on something softer than roof as a loud crack splits the airspace formerly occupied by my head.

  “Sniper!” Brando comms from underneath me. “Across the block, behind us! On that four-story building; he’s behind the big water tank.”