Empyre

by Josh Conviser

  “Murder and genocide isn't the best family legacy,” Laing shot back.

  “A legacy of power! The Krueger family made and sold arms for generations. We didn't make war. We were war! But, like all things, it couldn't last. Echelon destroyed what had taken centuries to build.”

  Ryan's eyes went wide.

  “Didn't think I knew?” He turned to Frank. “Christopher Turing and his mighty Echelon hunted me down. You hunted me down.”

  “For supplying the chemical agent used in the Memphis attack,” Ryan growled.

  It was Frank's turn for surprise. “That killed thousands!”

  Krueger shook his head as if addressing petulant children. “People die.”

  “I should have killed you,” Ryan said.

  “You should have. But Christopher Turing forbade it, didn't he?”

  Ryan stared in disbelief. “How do you know this?”

  “You turned me over to Turing yourself. I'll bet he told you that I didn't survive interrogation.”

  Confusion ebbed under a growing sense of betrayal. Ryan locked it down.

  “Trying to figure out how I ended up under EMPYRE's thumb?” Krueger asked, enjoying himself. “Can't tell you myself. Turing spiked my memory. I remember nothing of that time. One moment, I was safe and secure in my ancestral home, the next I was in EMPYRE's hands. They knew everything—knew what I had done. And they held it over me. I could either help them, or submit to a trial that would destroy both me and my family name.”

  “So this is revenge?” Frank asked. “All this?”

  Krueger did not turn to Frank, but held his eyes on Ryan as he continued. “Took some time to figure out what had happened to me. I'll admit, it's been a pleasure to watch you squirm, Laing. But all this—weaponizing Sarah, drawing you out—has been part of a larger plan.”

  “To cut EMPYRE's hold on you,” Ryan said.

  “Well, yes. But that was just the opening salvo. EMPYRE's goals were too small. I'm branching out. And you're going to help me.”

  “Not likely,” Ryan replied.

  “I want what was taken from me,” Krueger said. “What Turing stole.”

  “Your memory?”

  “Yes, Ryan. Turing took something fundamental from me. I want it back. Yes, he left me with my childhood, my past, even the knowledge necessary to work for EMPYRE. But he took something, Ryan. Something my whole life was driving toward. Something I need to fulfill my destiny.”

  A dead silence filled the space between them. Then Ryan lurched forward. He grabbed Krueger by the throat, relishing the act of killing this man.

  The moment didn't last.

  Krueger's hand pulled free of his pocket. It gripped a City-approved com device already on call.

  Frank saw it first. “Ryan,” he said.

  But it was too late. Laing was far gone—rage, fueled on helplessness, driving him. He drew Krueger close, boring down on the smaller man, ready to kill.

  Krueger managed to bring the com-link up to his mouth and rasp, “Send.” That was all it took.

  In seconds, the announcement began. The female voice piped into the gardens, cutting the moment. “Attention residents. Threat level has been elevated to Severe. Sarah Peters, wanted terrorist, has entered The City. She has hacked our system infrastructure with plans . . .”

  The voice trailed into static. Replacing it were images. From every wall panel, every monitor, every flow node, images of the devastation in Trenton and Australia cycled through.

  The City erupted in terror.

  36

  THE CITY

  The blurred rush of images flashing over the vid walls pulled Laing from his rage. He released Krueger, who fell back, sputtering softly, eyes burning with fury.

  He recovered quickly. “Evoking terror,” Krueger said. “Something I've had a great deal of time to perfect.”

  “What more could you want from her?”

  “From Sarah? Please, Mr. Laing. I don't want anything from her. She's just a vector—a weapon which I used to destroy EMPYRE and weaken you. Now, she's a lever to get what I want.”

  Frank stepped forward. “Where is she, Krueger?”

  “Right now, Taylor is escorting her to my yacht. Trust me, you want them to reach that ship. The City is about to self-destruct.”

  “Please,” Frank scoffed. “An imagined threat isn't going to titanic The City.”

  Krueger raised an eyebrow.

  Through concussion-hazed vision, she saw Taylor goggled in at the flow-port. She struggled against the restraints he had wrapped on her. They didn't budge.

  Sarah's run had plugged this flow-port into The City's heart. Taylor knew it—had counted on it. He pushed in and ran vid shots of the bio-attacks. Then he began a system shutdown, first hitting the cabins, then extending the lockout into the communal areas. Lights blanked out, the soft hum of vibrancy ground to a halt.

  Finally, their cabin went to black. He dropped the goggles and turned to Sarah. “Time to go.”

  —Ryan, I'm sorry.

  Her thought chilled Laing's rage. She was still alive.

  —Sarah! Where are you?

  —Taylor has me. He's shut down the core systems.

  —I know. Listen, I'm coming. Just hold tight.

  Laing turned on Krueger. “Take us to her.”

  “Gladly,” he replied.

  The garden had faded to a musty black. Lights extinguished and the faux sky went neutral, revealing that the garden's ceiling was in fact quite low—just higher than the tallest trees. A feeling of claustrophobia settled over the place.

  Already, the anxiety sparked by Taylor's vid storm had risen to a boil. Now, with the power grid offline, panic flashed through The City's population. They were trapped at sea with an invisible killer.

  Laing pushed Krueger through the crowd.

  “You see, Laing, if the threat is real enough, you don't need the act to spark the response. The City is about to tear itself apart.”

  Bursting into The City's central thoroughfare, Laing pulled up short. It was bedlam.

  “And we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Krueger quoted, softly chuckling.

  Frank wheeled, sucker-punching him in the gut. Krueger crumpled. Laing glared at Frank.

  “What? Fucker deserved it.”

  Laing hauled Krueger back to standing.

  “Terminal 6, berth 456,” Krueger sputtered.

  Before them, the masses thronged, spilling into the thoroughfare. Ryan dragged Krueger into the mosh.

  “You feel it, Ryan?” Krueger shouted over the din. “The tension? The fear?”

  Far ahead of them, black-armored shock troops flooded the thoroughfare, forming a sharp V and pushing forward.

  The City's voice rose: “Do not panic. City military has been called out to maintain order.”

  “The key, Ryan, is to know your enemy. The City doesn't have a police force. Never needed it. What it does have is a highly effective military. The City moves through dangerous waters. Those troops don't know crowd control. They only know how to kill.” As Krueger spoke, civs, pushed from behind, piled down on the wedge of shock troops.

  The press grew stronger, catching Ryan, Frank, and Krueger in its crush.

  “Those troops will ignite the terror I generated,” Krueger said.

  Frank turned on him. “Will you shut the fuck—” He didn't finish. A single gunshot rose over the mob frenzy. Then a scream.

  “Oh, shit,” Laing said.

  “Shit is right,” Frank replied.

  The sounds sparked the mob. Fear turned to riot.

  In slow-motion synchronicity, the shock troops drew down.

  “Bloodbath,” Krueger whispered.

  The surrounded troops opened up, splashing red over the residents' uniforms. Civs on the front line fell in fleshy waves, unable to stop the stampede.

  “Come on,” Laing shouted, trying to hold back his cough.

  They pushed through a side street. Around them, panic spread like a flash
fire. When steam ducts scattered throughout The City hissed open, blanketing everything in fog, the riot went nova.

  Laing led them out into the open air. Men, women, children crowded the outer causeway. The mass push forced more and more over the railing. Already, Laing could make out the staccato splashes of bodies hitting ocean fifty meters below.

  Laing and Frank fought their way down the causeway, punching through panicked residents.

  —Ryan, The City's done.

  —I know, Sarah.

  Ryan, Frank, and Krueger reached the ship's stern. Residents ebbed and flowed in waves of terror and desperation.

  “We're never getting down there,” Frank screamed over the chaos.

  “Maintenance ladder—far side,” Krueger broke in.

  They scrambled over, and sure enough, a maintenance ladder ran down to Terminal 6.

  “I should kill you now,” Frank fumed.

  Krueger laughed. He hopped onto the ladder and began the descent. Frank followed, Laing bringing up the rear. From his vantage point, Ryan watched the havoc spread. There was no disaster, natural or otherwise, that could sink The City. As such, life rafts were never a consideration. With no means of escape, civs flung themselves into the water like lemmings, fleeing an imagined bioattack, and the very real shock troops. Already, corpses flecked the ocean around the ship.

  The three reached the deck only to find a phalanx of shock troops guarding the terminal. Their stand was fruitless—a dam about to burst. Troops splintered off, picked away by the massing throng. The rioters broke through the line, charging into the marina, swarming the yachts, desperate.

  Behind the wave, Krueger led Frank and Ryan into the marina. At berth 456, a wall of bodies blocked access to a sleek yacht. Cresting the bloody crush, Laing watched Taylor calmly firing on anyone who got too close, killing with cold precision.

  He held Sarah before him on the yacht's aft deck. Seeing Ryan, Taylor pushed closer to her. Ryan could just see his taunting smile through the curtain of Sarah's hair.

  Laing charged.

  Taylor only smiled larger. He holstered the gun and pulled something else from his jacket, something black and sharp.

  Sarah flushed on seeing Ryan. Taylor's psychopathic killing spree had numbed her to zero. Ryan pulled her back from grim oblivion. He charged at her. She forgot her restraints, pushing hard to reach him.

  Taylor held her fast.

  Then, cool ice pervaded her. She saw it for an instant. A needle, long and sharp, attached to a palm-sized device. Taylor slammed the device down. The needle punctured the lens of her eye and entered her pupil.

  Laing stopped short, Frank jamming up behind him. Ryan watched the needle slide in, smooth and languid. Then the contraption at the needle's end sprouted pincers that bore down into Sarah's eye socket, holding it fast to her face.

  Sarah shuddered for an instant, then stood stock-still.

  Krueger shifted past Ryan and Frank, hopping aboard. “Echelon took my memories, I'm taking hers. The eyes are a pathway to the brain—a window into the mind. As you can see, I'm interested in the view.”

  “Motherfucker,” Frank said with cold fury.

  “Listen very carefully,” Krueger said. “I want what Echelon took from me. What Turing took. For every moment I don't have it, Sarah loses a slice of her past. The spike I have inserted will slowly wipe her memory, taking it down to zero if you don't move fast.”

  Krueger grabbed a digi-palette that served as the yacht's control module and kicked the craft into an emergency egress. At the bow and stern, the pincer cables gripping the berth retracted into the ship. As its engines churned, Laing could only watch Sarah slip away. The mayhem around him faded to nothing. He focused on Sarah. A single tear of blood slipped free of the spike.

  Behind her, Taylor grinned cold.

  37

  THE CITY

  A force-induced quiet hung over The City, thick and claustrophobic. It hadn't taken long for The City's tech-men to regain system control and reinstate order. A new voice issued calm pronouncements that the past moments had been nothing more than a hoax. There was no pathogen. Sarah Peters was not onboard. Residents were free to return to their business.

  But the damage was done. The City's impregnability had been challenged and the exodus continued unabated. Ferries rocketed from their slot ports. The floating bodies oil-slicking the water around The City had been pushed aside to allow passage.

  Residents fled en masse and the world reverberated from their flight. The City had been an anonymous zone where the world's powers could meet in clandestine security. No longer. High-level negotiations between the United States and Canada being held on-ship broke down, sending the peace accords into a tailspin. Word got out that Israel and Egypt had been working on a trade pact and violence surged through the two countries. As The City floundered, world politics stutter-stepped.

  Ryan and Frank walked down empty causeways. The echo of their steps rose through dead air. What had been a bustle of people and commerce just hours ago was now a graveyard. Ryan hazed into the click-step of his feet, not quite ready to acknowledge the silence.

  “You knew,” Frank said. “You knew about Krueger and still dumped that psycho on EMPYRE.”

  Ryan shook his head. “No.” It was all he could say.

  “Well, someone did.”

  Ryan's mind reeled. All those years ago, Turing had assured him that Krueger was taken care of—and now the man was back from the dead.

  “You took this guy down, right?”

  A long moment elapsed before Ryan processed Frank's question. “Yeah.”

  “And what happened? How did he end up in EMPYRE? Why didn't you just off him?”

  “I wanted to,” Ryan said absently. “They wouldn't let me.”

  “They?”

  Laing didn't respond. He churned back through his memory. It wasn't they. It was he. Ryan had run down Krueger for Turing. And he had turned the man over to Turing himself.

  Frustrated, Frank continued. “Why did Echelon bother with this guy at all? Was it just Memphis?”

  Ryan jumped to reply, pulling away from a thought line he really didn't want to go down. “There's no one like Krueger.”

  “The fuck is this guy?”

  “The Krueger family? You haven't heard of them?”

  “I don't do history, all right?”

  “Kruegers have been around since early in the twentieth. German. They supplied arms to their country through both world wars. Imagine a country of that size whose weapons industry lay in the hands of a single family. They were Germany.”

  “And they didn't get knocked off their pedestal after the wars?”

  “They got a hand slap. To truly gut them would have broken the German industrial infrastructure. The Krueger empire survived. It teetered through the years, expanding and contracting as it entered new industries. But—”

  “Nothing's more secure than making weapons.”

  Ryan nodded. “Echelon cut into them. We engineered a hostile takeover, flushing the family with so much cash that we hoped apathy would set in. It almost worked.”

  “And Alfred?”

  “He's a genius, Frank—and determined to supply the world with Krueger weaponry.”

  “But you said you cut out their industrial legs.”

  “Krueger saw that the new battle zone wasn't on the field, but here.” Laing tapped his chest. “Inside.”

  “Biologicals,” Frank said with the slightest hesitation, as if uttering the word forced its reality.

  “He designed pathogens, weaponized viruses, and he supplied them to a widening range of . . . customers. Echelon caught most of them.”

  “Most.”

  “Okay, we missed Memphis. But Memphis wasn't the reason we went after Krueger. If it was just that, we would have fed his location to the UN and let them haul him in.”

  “Krueger had something worse in his arsenal?”

  “We thought so. Or Turing did.”

 
“Right. Turing—the genius who spiked Krueger and handed him over to EMPYRE.”

  “No,” Ryan said, adamant. “There must be something more. Something we're missing.”

  Frank shrugged.

  Krueger's cold patience sent a shiver through Laing. How long had he sat in the background, waiting to reap his revenge on Laing and the world?

  “I should have killed him,” Ryan said softly.

  Frank laughed. “Well, now's your chance.”

  “He was perfect for EMPYRE. Almost too perfect. A man who understood death—and terror. An organization that fostered such action. It's like EMPYRE was built to house Krueger.”

  “My dad used to say, don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

  “Looks like EMPYRE took the wrong pig into its pen.”

  They entered Ryan's cabin. Vestiges of Sarah's fight with Taylor lay strewn across the room. Laing felt the violence of their confrontation with each step through the wreckage. Guilt ripped into him. He had let her down—again. His chest spasmed at the thought. He fought through it, carving out breath after breath. Maybe it was the virus. Maybe something else.

  Sarah fought hard. Once she was free of The City's bubble, the hawkeye sighted in on her. From above, she saw the yacht, herself, and the hideous thing protruding from her eye. As it neared, Taylor plucked the hawkeye from the air—a move she didn't think possible. He drilled the hawkeye back into the holster in her side, his fingers lingering within her for a bloodcurdling moment. The violation ran to max.

  Sarah reeled back, hands dragging over the memory spike in her eye. She began to pull it free, her good eye tearing up with the pain.

  “I wouldn't do that if I were you.” Krueger's words came out soft and cruel. He was relishing this. “Pull the spike and your entire memory will be fried. It's part of you now.”

  Taylor hauled her back up to standing. Sarah thrashed against him. Krueger pushed closer, grabbing Sarah's hand, drawing it up to his own eye. Under the skin of his eyebrow, she felt protrusions.