Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  A young man, Hispanic, his eyes milky because they'd been left open post-mortem and had dried out. The pool of blood under him had congealed into a thick mess and had glued his uniform to his corpse. Several bullets had punched through his chest, leaving fist-sized holes as they'd exited. His holster was empty and he had no body armor. I forced his eyes closed because I couldn't bear to look at them any more even though I'd seen hundreds of corpses just like that.

  Rent-a-cop security. What a fucking waste of a human life. Why weren't there Guild members working security? Supers who had some fighting chance against an armed and determined foe?

  It disgusted me.

  I straightened from my stoop and took a deep breath. José there had voided his bowels after death, a very common reaction, and it had left a familiar odor in the air. It almost masked the minty tang Alpha Zulu assault anesthetic gas left behind. Anaesthetic gas wasn't a very common load, but most assault teams carried at least a single canister. AGAG, as we used to call it, didn't fog the air and wasn't absorbed through the skin like tear gas, didn't leave a mess like CS gas tended to, didn't throw fragments like an explosive grenade, and since it dissipated into harmless compounds after thirty seconds, unless inhaled, you didn't need a gas mask after you fired one from a standard 40mm barrel-undermount launcher. Anyone who was unlucky enough to get a whiff of it before those thirty seconds, though, was going to be dizzy or worse for about fifteen minutes.

  All that was left was a minty smell in the air and a small metal canister that was ruptured on one end. It was shaped like a giant pain capsule with an indentation in the middle where the plastic sabot ring had been.

  A small metal capsule that looked exactly like the one almost hidden in the potting mix an unhealthy-looking palm was growing out from.

  Maybe the commanding officer had been more experienced than I'd given him credit for. Better prepared, to say the least.

  I retrieved the canister from the jauntily-decorated clay pot holding the drooping palm and eyed it for a second. There would be a residue and maybe even some trapped gas for analysis so it went into a pocket and I pressed on. The security room couldn't be too far away. This building wasn't that big.

  I took the doors in the order I came to them. Not one of them was labeled so I thought it was the most efficient method of searching the rooms. I had the nagging suspicion, though, that no matter what I did, it'd be the last room I went to.

  There was a trick to that thought, but my brain was too distracted by what I'd just walked into to make sense of it.

  I was in a small, but functional, kitchen currently occupied by three corpses. Two were rent-a-cops and one was a pretty young woman. Or, at least, what was left of her. Whereas the security guards had been shot once, in the face, the super --- still in her costume, which was pink and black with a stylized P emblazoned in gold on what looked like oversized cape clasps on each shoulder even though none was evident --- had been hacked up pretty badly. Her throat had been slashed, I could count at least twelve separate stab wounds in her chest and stomach, and, judging by the red foam still clinging to her bloodless lips (somehow still popping this many hours after her death), had finally had a suicide capsule forced into her mouth. I looked around quickly and spotted the security camera. The red LED blinked silently, telling me at least one witness to the carnage was still around.

  The girl's eyes were still open, staring blindly at a spot on the ceiling I saw nothing special about. Two fingers and a little focus pushed her milky eyes shut. I repeated the ritual with the two guards. To hell with the cops and what they'd think. These men and women had died fighting. They deserved a little respect.

  The next room was unoccupied by anything other than a plant and a hamster. Well, a plant. Someone had skewered the hamster with a knife taken from the kitchen and left it in the cage.

  I looked around the room, taking it all in. My attention was drawn to the pictures on the computer desk and hanging over the bed. A young man had roomed here, if the electric razor, skin mags, and half-empty whiskey bottles had anything to say about it. He had pictures of a young woman I assumed to be either a daughter or a younger sister as well as an older couple who looked a little stern, but the one that seemed to have the highest priority was of the younger woman leaning over the windshield of an older muscle car, a grease smear on her cheek looking terribly out of place, and a young man who looked a lot like the older couple leaning over the engine adjusting some part I couldn't see.

  I picked up a half-empty bottle of a cheap cologne and looked at the dust covering the cap. It hadn't been touched in months.

  It was the kind of thing a daughter or much-younger sister would give as a gift.

  I put the bottle back and retreated from the room. There were no answers for me there.

  Between the AGAG capsule and the residue on the woman's lips I had all the evidence I would need, but I wanted more. I knew what I had wouldn't convince Steamroller, but Venom might take my word for the residue. Jackhammer would probably believe me because he'd asked me to look into it. Wildcard... I had no clue.

  So onward I pressed.

  The next room was another dormitory-style bedroom with a computer desk on one wall and a bed on the other. This one had shelves with small figurines instead of pictures. Unicorns, kittens, dragons, a wizard, and two Japanese robotic statuettes the likes of which you only got in special-edition anime DVD cases, kept each other company. A single painting of a unicorn, done on black velvet, kept watch over an immaculately-made bed with pink, heart-shaped pillows and a black comforter stitched with a large gold P. Her computer desk was uncluttered except for a letter --- written longhand --- on expensive stationary and smelling faintly of rose water. It was open to the last of four pages and I could just make out the the signature as belonging to a woman named Mom. As I turned to go I noticed a drugstore photograph jammed into the door frame, just above the light switch. It was of an attractive young woman flashing the peace sign, her arm around an unshaven brute of a guy, as they sat in a roller coaster car. The expression on her face was totally different from the one I'd seen a few minutes ago in the kitchen. Her face was much more attractive when it was frozen in laughter than when it was frozen in the last rictus of pain.

  There were two other doors leading off the common room I hadn't been through; one directly opposite the entrance and one next to the kitchen. I picked the one next to the kitchen on a whim and wasn't disappointed. The smell of blood, vomit, and spilled intestinal contents assaulted my nostrils despite the nearly-silent fan pulling air out the ceiling vent.

  Another security guard, also shot in the face, had apparently caught a slug in his forearm before stumbling into the bathroom. He had died in the shower stall, a red swirl congealed around the drain.

  Laid out in the middle of the floor, on his back, was a shirtless man. His bottoms were flannel sleep pants so stained with blood I couldn't make out the original color. His stomach had been ripped open from crotch to sternum, spilling his intestines onto the floor, and he'd been allowed to thrash around before his throat had been cut. I couldn't tell if he'd been slipped a suicide pill as well, what with the blood that had covered his face, but it would have been damn sloppy if they hadn't. I didn't recognize his features, but there were four bedrooms I hadn't been in yet. His eyes were shut, probably squeezed that way against the pain before the end, but the guard's weren't. Five seconds later they were and I was on my way.

  My shoes --- which I had replaced the sandals with when I learned I had to fly halfway across the continent --- made squishing sounds as half-dried blood adhered to the floor with each step. The carpet in the common room silenced the gruesome noise as soon as my soles made contact. I didn't look back to see if I was leaving red footprints. I didn't need to.

  I searched five other rooms before I found the security setup. I found it undisturbed. I could make that assessment by the simple fact that I had to break the lock with my bare hands to effect entry to a room roughly the size of
your average closet. A wall of heat washed over me as I stepped inside. Ventilation, apparently, was not considered a priority for something that produced heat more effectively per unit of any measurement you'd wish to use for comparison than your average electric heater.

  All the computers in the entire building had been wired into this room. The network cables all plugged into a blade server system that looked needlessly complex for what it was supposed to do, and what appeared to be an equal number of cables exited it, plugging into a black box spray-painted with the letters "FRWLL" in day-glow orange. While it was, no doubt, a dedicated firewall, I saw no cables leaving it. The security cameras had to have their own line, but they too seemed to feed into the wall-of-computers that ran the entire security system, which by my count had failed in almost as epic a manner as the Russian campaign in Afghanistan.

  Whoever in Washington had decided to assign Justice Star to the Taliban for the duration had to have been smoking more dope than a highschool art teacher. Last I heard, The Star of Islam was kicking some massive ass for the Afghanistani Empire in their war with Pakistan. That's what you get when you brainwash people, though.

  Twenty blades running in the server enclosure, up to forty hard discs feeding them, and any one of them could have the video recording from the cameras on it. Of course, finding out which one of the Cat-5e cables running out of the wall was from the camera system might help since each cable ran to a different input on the server enclosure. On the other hand, I didn't have the two or three hours it'd take to run down each line. If someone had just color-coded or labeled the fucking things it wouldn't matter so much.

  Well, at least it was a fairly standard system. Bernoli blades in an EZOUT server enclosure were pretty common, and for good reason, but someone had wired in a couple of Trendar scramble boards at some point after the initial installation. That could complicate things. Still, at least someone was thinking of making it harder for hackers. That any hacker who could get through a dedicated hardware firewall with a three-layer software backup wasn't going to break a sweat over a few Trendar scramble boards didn't enter into things. Someone, at some point, had been thinking. That appeared to be a rare occurrence in the Guild.

  Bernoli blades were normally stamped with a production code that indicated what they were supposed to be used for but, since I hadn't bothered to try to memorize the translation tables for over a hundred twenty-digit alphanumeric codes, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Besides, they were inside the case and I didn't want to break into it if I didn't have to.

  Someone had to service this setup once in a while, to load updates and reboot individual blades that had crashed, so that meant there had to be a secure way to access it. Nobody, not even the sloppiest technician the Guild could hire, would leave it open to remote intrusion over the intra- or internet. Even a dedicated pipe would be vulnerable; direct physical attacks could leave it open to infiltration. That meant a local-only access point, but I was afraid I'd need a laptop with a Bernoli terminal emulator to hook into the system.

  I wiped some sweat from my forehead and took a step back into the cooler air of the hall. If I were to set up this system so that anyone with access could perform updates, how would I do it?

  I'd stash a keyboard and small monitor in an out-of-the-way place inside that room. Not that there were too many places that were out of the way, mind you, but I'd have designed it that way in the first place. The room was claustrophobic after a little while and the heat was oppressive, so I'd want to get in and get out as fast as possible.

  The door opened inwards rather than swinging out like you'd think for such a small room and I hadn't looked behind it. I hadn't wanted to, to be honest. I was in too much of a hurry to get away from that heat.

  Nothing for it, though. I stepped back in, swung the door partway shut, stepped around it, and closed it fully. Sure enough, hanging off the wall, right where the door would have hidden it, were a swing-down keyboard blocking access to an LCD screen. Both were just big enough to use while standing. I pulled the keyboard down and noticed some data ports on the side of the screen, probably for portable data sources like external hard discs for on-site updates.

  I pressed the power key on the monitor and waited. A few seconds later, after it had warmed up (though why it needed to warm up was beyond me considering the temperature in the room was high enough to give a Florida native heat stroke), I got a login screen asking for a user name and password. I cursed.

  Think, you fool. What would someone use for a login on something like this?

  I had no idea. And, of course, this was the one place on the frigging planet the Guildphone wouldn't get signal. I tried a few golden oldies like "user" and "password", "login" and "password", and everyone's favorite "admin" and "admin", but all I got was "Invalid ID or invalid password. Please check your spelling and try again."

  I wiped my face again and could feel the sweat starting to stain my armpits. The heat wasn't making my thoughts come any easier, either.

  Damn it. In desperation I tried reversing all the ones I'd already used,.even putting the password in the login and vice versa, but that failed too. I slammed my hands down on either side of the keyboard but all that accomplished was to make the whole assembly give off a loud and threatening crack.

  A long-forgotten lesson flashed into my memory, completely without warning or preamble.

  When it came to computer security most people were insanely lax. What that meant was the majority of users left the basic password and login alone, at least for the highest-level account access. It was very true of wireless networks, as anyone with a laptop with wireless capabilities could tell you. By extrapolation, anyone who didn't truly know what their equipment was capable of --- or who was just plain lazy or self-assured their security was tight --- probably didn't bother to change things like that.

  So I wracked my brain in search of the basic login setup for an English-based Bernoli blade system for all of fourteen seconds before I was hammering keys again.

  "Acorn"and "4fortytwo2" got me immediate access to the command-based operating system.

  I grinned as I punched in very familiar commands. It took me less than a minute to get access to the security system, another fifteen seconds to find the status of the video recordings, and another minute to figure out how to get it to dump the last twenty-four hour imaging cycle onto a DVD. Fifteen long, sweaty minutes later I heard a tray whir open. It took me almost a full minute to find where it had ejected from and another five seconds to realize, with a rather violent curse, that I had nothing to carry it in. My pockets weren't big enough, I had no jewel case, and I didn't even want to think about carrying it on my finger during supersonic flight back to Alberta.

  Of course, how the hell was I going to find the place, anyway?

  First things first. The disc. A quick look around the room made me realize how lucky I was that there'd been a blank disc in the burner. Aside from what was hanging from the walls or sitting next to the blade enclosure there was nothing. Not even a scattering of loose cables.

  I opened the door and stepped out. The air in the second common room was positively chilly compared to what I'd been in for more than twenty minutes. Whoever had designed that setup apparently hadn't realized that heat killed computers. Of course, it might be more apathy than ignorance.

  I went into the first bedroom I came to and pulled a DVD case off the wall, tossing aside the disc hiding within. I locked the DVD I'd just burned into place and tucked the whole assembly into my belt, under my shirt. It wasn't an ideal solution but it was the only one I could think of. After a few steps I tucked it into the band of my underwear for added grip. I just hoped it had been worth the hassle.

  As I stepped outside the sergeant came running up to me with burly, thick-necked backup. I could see the determination on the sergeant's face and I cursed inwardly. This wasn't going to go well.

  "Sir, please turn around and place your hands on your head. I have a warrant for your ar
rest..." The first one began.

  That's as far as he got before I punched him in the throat. The other officer flanking the sergeant went to draw his gun but I kicked him in the gut. He doubled over and vomited, his hands flying to the impact site even as he fell. The first officer, clutching his throat and making gurgling sounds, had already hit the ground. I'd made sure I hadn't hit him hard enough to crush his windpipe. Just hard enough to shut him up.

  The sergeant, on the other hand, was a little slower on the uptake. He was just then reaching for his holster when I grabbed him. I slapped the hand reaching for the pistol aside and lifted him off the ground, my hand around his throat and squeezing hard enough to restrict his air supply. I turned and walked the few steps separating us from the wall and slammed him into it hard enough to split the back of his scalp open.

  I wanted nothing more than to squeeze until something went crunch and I could drop him, but something was stopping me.

  He grabbed my wrist and gurgled something unintelligible.

  "What's your name, Sergeant?" The other cops were shouting something behind me. I could feel the gaping muzzles of their pistols pointing at me.

  "Thomkins," he managed to choke. Both hands were on my wrist, feebly trying to break my grip. The longer I held him the weaker his fingers got.

  "Well, Sergeant Thomkins, I have one question for you. Do you have any family?" My voice sounded odd to my ears.

  "Son," he gasped.

  "How old?"

  "Fiff-teen," he hissed, his fingers scrabbling desperately against my grip.

  "The next time you see him, then, you give him a hug. He just saved your miserable fucking life," I growled through gritted teeth. I spit in his face before dropping him to the ground and jumping into the air. I picked a direction and blasted off as fast as I could bring myself to go, one fist stretched in front of me to help break up the pressure wave, the other holding the DVD case as tightly against my skin as possible..