Talon of Scorpio

by G T Almasi

  “Staatszeiger,” I growl.

  After Hitler was assassinated in 1942, most Nazi ministries were disbanded. The notorious SS survived the administrative purge by reinventing itself as the SZ, short for Staatszeiger, or “State’s Hand.” Their primary directive was to manage and protect the hugely profitable Greater German institution of slavery. This critical mandate included guarding the German cloning program, Carbon. Slavery has been abolished, but Carbon rumbles on.

  A comm from Hector interrupts my train of thought. “Status check.”

  Patrick answers, “Estimate ingress in one minute. You?”

  Hector comms, “All quiet.”

  “Okay,” Brando replies. “Out.”

  My neuroinjector releases a dose of Madrenaline to help my mind push aside the big picture and focus on the here and now. I twist my silencer onto Li’l Bertha’s barrel and take aim. My pistol’s targeting system spins gently and centers her sights on one of the guards’ heads.

  “Okay?” I comm to my partner.

  “Go for it.”

  Phup! Phup!

  Two .30-caliber bullets fly across the room, one for each guard. The slugs crack the men’s skulls open, and the two gunsels reflexively exhale and drop in a heap.

  We advance. I check the bodies. Dead and dead. Our feet pad down the stairway until we stand in front of a heavy door. While Patrick picks the lock, I scan the space beyond. Four orange silhouettes shimmer within a large circle of much dimmer heat signatures. My partner nudges the door open and steps aside. I brandish both of my pistols, take a deep breath, and charge into the laboratory.

  We’ve come in through the emergency exit. I squint in the bright electric lights. The lab’s perimeter is lined with a couple dozen tall, cylindrical capsules. In each capsule floats a developing human clone. The center of the room is dominated by a rectangular container the size of a car. My previous visits to Carbon tell me that’s where the Original is housed.

  A black-clad SZ butthead slouches in a folding chair. Punx flings a hunk of depleted uranium at his neck. The heavy disk chops through meat, gristle, and major arteries before cracking into the wall beyond. The wound expels a crimson gusher that slathers the ceiling like a paint sprayer, the creep’s knees buckle, and he gurgles to the linoleum floor.

  The remaining targets, two women and a man, whirl to face the soldier’s final moments. His grotesque spasms shock the three technicians into paralyzed pillars. Woman One faints. The man wets his pants.

  Woman Two stutters, “B-bitte, nicht schiessen!” Please, don’t shoot!

  Each labbie wears a white coat over a plain outfit and colorless skin. Woman Two carries a thick sheaf of papers rubber-banded to a clipboard.

  None of them are Fredericks.

  My feet carry me past the frozen doofi to a pair of wide, heavy doors. I peek outside. A tiled hallway stretches through a dozen pools of light from fixtures mounted on the walls. Dim heat signatures calmly shimmer at the hall’s far end.

  So far, so good. Patrick asks Clipboard if she’s seen anyone matching Fredericks’s description. She rapidly admits he was here yesterday morning, but his Gestapo controllers only allowed him time to log in to the lab’s jackframe and perform a quick operation before they manhandled him right back out.

  My partner comms to me, “Get them secured. I’ll check with HQ.” He compiles a coded request for direction to comm back to ExOps while I tie Clipboard, Fainty, and Pissy to a sink in the restroom. When I return to the main area, my partner’s mouth is hanging open.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You…” He shuts his mouth and comms, “You won’t believe what they want us to do here.”

  “What?”

  Brando pulls his fingers through his brown hair. “ExOps wants you to terminate…everybody.”

  “The three techs?”

  “N-not just the techs.” His eyes dart across the row of cloning cells.

  My back grows damp with icy sweat. “Darwin, that cannot be what they meant.”

  Patrick doesn’t respond.

  “All of them?”

  He can barely nod his head.

  My God!

  They want me to kill twenty-four clones in cold blood.

  —COMMSTREAM 8TM-8AH8—

  07:59.38

  Scarlet and Darwin,

  Message received: Scorpio no longer in Bastogne. Itemize everything in

  Crypt > cancel transmission

  Crypt > replace /‘itemize’/‘liquidate’/

  Crypt > restart transmission

  07:59.52

  Scarlet and Darwin,

  Message received: Scorpio no longer in Bastogne. Liquidate everything in the lab, return to your Greeter, and then proceed to Karlsruhe, Germany.

  17

  ONE MINUTE LATER, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 8:01 A.M. CEST

  BASTOGNE, PROVINCE OF BELGIUM, GG

  The lab contracts to a point behind my head. Everything outside that point is a coal-black void except Patrick’s face, although his skin is dark and his hair is light. His mouth opens to a white circle, and whatever he says is lost in the thunderous waterfall of static filling my ears. Up becomes down and left flips to right. A hard surface smacks my cheek. Deep warmth skips across my teeth and swishes around in my mouth.

  Patrick’s shout revives me. “No!” he yells. “Wait, no! Stop!”

  The side of my head hurts. I open my eyes in time to see my partner lunge at the jackframe terminal on the desk. He runs his fingers all over the keyboard. The computer’s monitor displays a scrolling column of text. It moves so quickly I can only catch the beginning of each line, which reads “999.999.” From a dusty recess in my mind looms a conversation where Patrick bored me to death by explaining how these six nines with a dot in the middle represent ExOps’s net address.

  The computer ignores Brando’s attempts to halt whatever the fuck it’s doing. I sit up and rub my sore jaw as Patrick dives under the desk.

  “Prickmotherfuckershitpiss!” My partner claws at the terminal’s power cable until it springs out of the wall. The computer screen goes black.

  God knows I’m no prude about profanity, but I’ve never heard Brando unload a compound swear like that. Despite the chilly floor pressed against my back, a bead of sweat emerges from my scalp and drips down my forehead.

  Patrick crawls from beneath the desk and stares at me like the doomed deceased in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. His face is a ghostlike mask of concentration. He’s comming to someone. I tune my commphone in to his call.

  “Almighty, Almighty,” he comms. “This is Darwin and Scarlet. Repeat all after, ‘Stand by for…’ ” He waits for a moment, but there’s no answer. “Almighty, please repeat.”

  “Darwin,” I say. “What happened?”

  Patrick continues comming while he answers me out loud. “I lost ExOps.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Harbaugh.”

  “So comm somebody else.”

  “I’m on Almighty.”

  Right. A comm with the emergency code word “Almighty” relays itself down ExOps’s org chart until somebody answers. It’s a last-ditch option for agents on a truly shitcanned mission. It always works. A failed transmission to Almighty might as well be the appearance of the Forty Whores of the Apocalypse.

  “Almighty,” I comm. “This is Scarlet. Come in.” Nothing. “Almighty! Pick up!”

  What the hell?

  “Okay,” I say. “So we’ve lost comm-signal. That happens plenty of times.” I wave at our surroundings. “We’re underground.”

  “This was different.” Brando drops into the desk chair and rubs his temples. “The signal was fine, then it vanished.” A rattling hiss escapes from between his teeth.

  I cross the room
and sit on the desk next to him. “What were they gonna send you?”

  “Revised orders, I think. Harbaugh had no idea what I was talking about.”

  “Talking about…when?”

  Patrick doesn’t hear me. He scratches his fingers through his hair. “They must be outta their goddamn minds, sending me directions like that.”

  “Darwin! When did Harbaugh not understand what you were talking about?”

  “When I told him to shove that order up his ass.”

  I wince. Bosses never like hearing that. “Then what?”

  “First the comm-call dropped.” He looks at the dark monitor on the desk. “Then this terminal went nuts and spammed the shit out of every ExOps computer on the net.”

  “That was the nine-nine-nine thing?”

  “Yeah.” He rubs his knuckles against his temples. “What you saw was the delivery end of a denial-of-service attack.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve delivered a few myself.” He chews his fingernail. “Man, this is so bad.”

  I brush his hand away from his mouth. “Define bad.”

  “ExOps will think we’ve gone rogue.”

  Okay, that’s bad. Every story in our business beginning with rogue ends with dead.

  “But…but.” I indicate the unplugged terminal. “This had nothing to do with us.”

  “We know that,” Brando groans. “But from ExOps’s point of view I refused an order and then a jackframe in my control crashed the agency’s computer network. It’s only a matter of time until they send a Malefactor to terminate us.”

  Christ. Malefactors are Levels trained to kill other Levels.

  I gently pat down my pistols. “What now?”

  “I don’t know.” My partner shakes his head. “This can’t be a coincidence, but I don’t see how—”

  A comm-voice interrupts. “Scarlet! Darwin!”

  It’s ExOps!

  “I need backup!”

  Wait, no. This transmission is local.

  Patrick answers, “Hector? What’s your situation?”

  Oh crap, it’s just stupid Hector.

  “I am being attacked from—” Hector’s voice stops, then starts again. “From I do not know. I am pinned down.”

  Patrick’s eyes flick toward me. We both stop breathing.

  Gunshots ring though Hector’s commphone. “Get you here!”

  I speak first. “How the fuck could ExOps dispatch a Malefactor so quickly?”

  “No way,” Brando says sharply. “It’s been less than a minute.” He swings his fist into the terminal monitor. “Fuck!”

  The terminal falls off the desk and thunks to the floor. The monitor’s L-shaped plastic foot snaps off. This is unsatisfactory punishment. I pull out Li’l Bertha and pound a few shots through the offensive piece of equipment. Bits of broken glass and plastic skrang across the floor and ping off the bottom of the clone tanks. One of the lab technicians screams. I’d almost forgotten about them.

  “Thanks,” my partner says ruefully. “Let’s go help Hector.”

  We return to the cistern, run through the tunnel, and climb into the little cemetery. Gunfire echoes from nearby.

  “Hector? What’s going on?” I comm.

  More sharp reports bounce off the houses and streets. I can’t tell where they’re coming from.

  “Hector!”

  “Yes,” he comms. “I am here.”

  Flashes of light pulse from the center of town. Patrick runs toward them. I follow.

  Patrick comms, “Hector, what’s going on?”

  “I believe I am fighting a Level.”

  An explosion lights up the middle of Bastogne. More gunshots. Another explosion.

  Is it the Malefactor?

  We whip around a street corner and charge into the town’s main square. Civilians hide behind cars, dash into shops, or run out of the area. I spot Hector crouched behind a bullet-riddled statue of some Pope Rottencrotch who came from here. His Holiness’s tall stone crown has cracked down the middle.

  Brando and I press ourselves tight against a wall. “Hector, we’re here.”

  Craggy pope-chunks fall on Hector, who covers his head. “The shooter is on the roofs.” He points his weapon and fires for effect. “But he changes position.”

  I break cover, race across the street, and mount the side of a four-story half-timbered house. My blurry extremities scale the windowsills and beams until I reach the roof.

  I grip Li’l Bertha in my left hand and steady myself with my right as I clamber across the uneven rooftops. My Eyes-Up display connects the dots between Hector’s position and the competitor’s shots, then extrapolates the gunfire’s source. Our enemy is on the roof of the Rathaus, across the square. I focus all my vision Mods on that area: optics, infrared, and millimeter-wave radar. This results in so much information I have to turn off my regular optics to make sense of what I see.

  Cool-blue rooftops, outlined in green from the radar, pass under my feet. My hands are hot-orange shapes at my sides. Pencil-thin red lines streak across the square from high left to lower right.

  “Scarlet,” Patrick comms. “Hector’s getting pretty banged up.”

  “Almost there.” I jump across a blue-black alley and run to the top of the Rathaus’s next-door neighbor.

  Another red bolt fires down into the square. The source is much closer this time. He must be just over this—

  Wham!

  The enemy agent and I reach the roof’s peak at the same time and run into each other like a couple of Stooges. I spin to see who—

  It’s Talon!

  She winds up to sock me with a haymaker. I lean away and swing Li’l Bertha between us. Her hand chops Li’l Bertha out of my grasp. Talon raises her own sidearm, a beaten-up LB504 with a bunch of aftermarket accessories attached to it. I grab her hair and punch her mouth. Her head snaps back, but she still whacks me across the face and knocks me off balance. I spring down the roof and vault back the way I came. Talon fires her weapon at me, and smashed chips of slate tile cut the air around my whirling arms and legs.

  I wing myself around a protruding dormer window and jam Punx into my right pad. My competitor peppers the lower corner of my shelter. I climb over the dormer and spray a row of razors at her. Her yellow-and-orange silhouette ducks out of my normal line of sight before dropping to a narrow black alley between the blue houses.

  “Scarlet?”

  “Darwin, it’s Talon!”

  I recover Li’l Bertha from a rain gutter. By the time I find T-Bitch again, she’s reengaged Hector, who zigzags toward her position by hurling his body from cover to cover. I aim Punx almost straight down at the top of Talon’s head and fire a short burst. Three scalpel-sharp disks of depleted uranium plunge like radioactive angels.

  The fucking bitch warps out of the way, and my shots cut three slits in the ground at her feet.

  Vapor Mod!

  Talon turns to retreat up the alley and unloads a cloud of bullets at me. I leap back as her shots tear a ragged gash into the roof’s perimeter. The sirens of emergency vehicles—cops, probably—wail in the distance.

  Hector reaches the alley.

  “Hector,” I comm. “She’s falling back.”

  “I will pursue.” Hector and I tear ass across town. I scramble over the rooftops and he barrels through the alleys and lanes.

  We don’t gain on her.

  At all.

  My God, this chick runs like a gazelle!

  Talon absolutely flies out the south side of town, sprints onto highway N4, then catches up to and jumps at the back of a passing truck. She clutches one of the grab-rails and swings herself onto the loading deck’s protruding lip. The hosebag turns and flips us off with her free hand.

  I drop to the street an
d stand next to Hector, both of us huffing and puffing. The sirens are louder.

  “Scarlet, what happened?” It’s Patrick.

  “She’s gone,” I comm.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, but our Russian friend here needs some attention.”

  “On my way,” my partner comms.

  “Brando?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If we bump into that bushpig again, we’re gonna need help. She’s the fastest fucking Level I’ve ever seen.”

  —DARE: SECURITY, ROGUE ALERT—

  10 SEP 1981, 08:01.19 CEST

  SCARLET / DARWIN REFUSE ORDER, CARBON BASTOGNE.

  —DARE: SECURITY, ROGUE ALERT—

  10 SEP 1981, 08:01.24 CEST

  SCARLET / DARWIN CARRY OUT UNAUTHORIZED DESTRUCTION OF CARBON BASTOGNE.

  —DARE: SECURITY, BREACH ALERT—

  10 SEP 1981, 08:01.49 CEST

  CC: Executive Intelligence Chairman (XIC)

  DARE FILES COMPROMISED. SOURCE: CARBON BASTOGNE, SCARLET / DARWIN.

  —DARE: SECURITY, BREACH ALERT—

  10 SEP 1981, 08:02.31 CEST

  CC: Executive Intelligence Chairman (XIC), Department of State, Department of Justice, White House, Office of the Senate Majority Leader

  EXOPS COMM-GRID UNDER SYSTEMATIC DENIAL-OF-SERVICE ATTACK. SOURCE: CARBON BASTOGNE, SCARLET / DARWIN.

  18

  NEXT MORNING, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 10:05 A.M. CEST

  KARLSRUHE, GREATER GERMANY

  The concrete highway thrums below Pepé’s tires, sending a slight vibration through the steering wheel into my palms. I try to imagine that we’re on a peaceful Sunday drive, calmly driving through the country.

  It doesn’t work. I am neither peaceful nor calm because we’re marooned in a horizon-swallowing bullet festival. We’ve got to get direction from HQ, since the brief for this Job Number most certainly did not foresee our target’s abduction by Germany’s secret police. However, we still can’t comm with ExOps. Or anyone, really. Neither I nor my partner can access the global communication system. We can use our commphones like walkie-talkies, but the range is less than a mile.