by Jacob Gowans
Her face screwed up in pain. “I want to stay!”
He hugged her again, and this time she hugged him back. Then he pressed a gun into her hand. “Go. Live a good life for my sake.”
She backed away, hurt and confused and scared. Sammy wanted to weep with her as he watched her climb through the elevator hatch just as the doors began to close. He waved weakly, but she didn’t wave back.
“I’m ready, Sammy,” Jeffie said, steadying one of the two projectors. A red line, called the danger line, ran across the projector bases. While Jeffie steadied them, Sammy bolted the machines to the floor, making sure the danger line on one base lined up with the other. Once this was done, they quickly donned their zero suits. This would allow them to move about the room without interacting with the holograms emitted by the two projectors.
Seconds after they finished changing clothes, the elevator returned to the white floor with a soft ding. Jeffie blasted two shields. Sammy turned on the projectors.
“Battery levels at one hundred percent,” a robotic voice stated from one of the two projectors.
“Enter Mode One,” Sammy ordered.
The machines projected the images of twin drone guns around themselves so the projectors were no longer visible.
“Safety measures off,” he ordered the machines. “Destroy all targets in front of the danger line.”
A sudden BOOM came from the elevator as the doors blew outward. The smoke cleared and Sammy saw shields large enough for the Aegis to crouch behind, fully covered. Almost a dozen men and women in muddied brown-green uniforms poured out of the broken lift. Behind them, the elevator dropped the rest of the way down the shaft like a stone, crashing just out of Sammy’s sight. The drone guns whirred to life and spat bullets at the Aegis as they poured inside. Their shields had small bases for the Aegis to steady and support them with their feet, which allowed them to use both hands to shoot.
The bullets of the drone guns scratched and dented the Aegis shields, but did little else to harm the enemy. They made their way around the room, sticking to the walls, as Sammy knew they would. So predictable, yet so effective.
He and Jeffie stood apart. The angle of their shoulders formed a wedge. Their blasts shielded them from all angles except the rear. The drone guns’ rapid fire was deafening and shells littered the floor from all the guns both friendly and foe. Sammy couldn’t keep track of all the rounds from all the guns as he was accustomed to doing during battle. He watched the Aegis, analyzed their movements, and noted the minute communications they sent one another to adjust their form and position as they reacted to Sammy and Jeffie’s defenses.
“There could be more on the way,” he told Jeffie. “Take out as many of them as possible before they surround us.”
“What do we do?”
“Blast their shields. The drone guns will do the rest.”
Together they made a coordinated effort of moving about and blasting shields. High and low attacks, side to side shots, and occasionally powerful direct attacks knocked the Aegis off balance. The drones made the Aegis pay for each exposed bit of head or shoulder. It wasn’t long before the white walls were sprayed with red and pink and gray, and the bodies of the fallen hampered the Aegis’ movement around the perimeter of the room.
More Aegis arrived, this time by way of rappelling down the elevator cables. Sammy and Jeffie had already killed nine of the original twelve with a tenth injured. They carried their shield and hopped out, stepping around and over the bodies of their brothers. Sammy took advantage of their cautiousness and attacked furiously before they could launch a coordinated counterattack.
Using the walls and the heads of the Aegis, he stayed airborne for almost ten minutes, punishing them from above while Jeffie and the drone guns tore them apart. In the eyes of each Aegis, he saw Stripe, his tormentor in Rio. The Anomaly Thirteen and its poisoned darkness swelled inside him, yearning to be free. The growing carnage around him didn’t help, either. The scent of blood and bowels and body parts clotted his nostrils. Smatterings of it flew everywhere. It sickened and exhilarated him. He danced on the edge of danger and loved it. Yet the closest Sammy came to receiving a wound was when a bullet whizzed past his left ear as he flipped through the air with a jump blast while shielding himself with his hands.
When it was all over, thirty bodies and shields scattered the room, even blocking the elevator door from closing. Sammy ordered the projector to enter stand by mode to save battery power.
“Levels at seventy-one percent,” the battery reported.
“Let’s move the bodies,” he told Jeffie, “get them into the elevator shaft.”
Stacking the bodies was hard work. Sammy’s arms and legs protested at each Aegis he picked up or dragged across the white floor. He noted the way Jeffie’s body sagged when she tried to stand up straight, the heaviness around her eyes, and how her breaths were long and drawn, almost like sighs. He wanted to say something to comfort her, but couldn’t. No time for rest.
“How’s your ammo?” he asked Jeffie.
She gave him a thumbs up.
“You okay?”
Jeffie nodded. “Are you?” Her tone told him she wasn’t only asking about his physical state.
“Fine.”
“Are they sending more?”
The answer was yes, but instead Sammy said, “We’ll find out soon.”
They split the last of the energy pastes, but Sammy wasn’t sure it did anything to help. Ten minutes later, the rappelling equipment the Aegis had used shot up the cables with a high-pitched whirring sound. Sammy and Jeffie exchanged a dark look.
A few minutes later, the noise returned accompanied by animal-like shrieks echoing down the tunnel, growing louder each second. Thirteens. They exploded from the elevator shaft just as Sammy gave the command to reactivate the projectors. He counted thirteen newcomers. The Thirteens lack of protection meant they should be mowed down like weeds, but some of them picked up the shields of the fallen Aegis. Others used nothing but their constant motion and rapid reflexes to confuse the drones.
Unleash me and win.
Sammy ignored the voice and shot blasts at the Thirteens. The drones’ bullets passed through him as harmlessly as wind, but caught one Thirteen in the thigh, piercing him. If the Thirteen felt any pain, he didn’t show it. Instead he whipped his gun around and shot at Sammy, but Sammy had already moved, dodging four other Thirteens’ fire with a rapid blast to the upper right wall and then another off it.
He and Jeffie had to be careful with their zero suits. The technology allowed holograms to pass through them, but the electric current in the zero suit had to remain unbroken or else rather than passing through their bodies harmlessly, the holograms would treat them as any other space in the room. With the projectors’ safety controls turned off, a bullet could mean instant death.
Sammy and Jeffie changed their focus from offense to defense. They had to keep the Thirteens in front of the red line on the projectors’ bases to keep them in targeting range and because the projectors were vulnerable from behind the line. Half of the Thirteens shot at Sammy and Jeffie while the other half targeted the drones. The more they attacked the drones, the heavier the drain on the holo-projectors’ batteries, which had to consume more energy to deflect the bullets. Already the batteries were down to sixty percent charge, and not a single Thirteen had died.
“Coordinated attack!” he ordered the drones. “One target at a time. Jeffie, pick the same target as the drones until it’s dead. Then switch to another.”
This new strategy worked better. Sammy worried about keeping the Thirteens behind the line while Jeffie picked them off one by one. Yet three times the Thirteens managed to get past the blasts and the drones to attack Sammy and Jeffie in close range. Sammy made the first one pay by catching her off-guard and blasting her into the wall hard enough that she blacked out. Then the drones and Jeffie put enough bullets in her to turn her into a pencil.
The second Thirteen who made it past
the red line fired both guns at Sammy from less than a meter away. Sammy protected his exposed flank from other Thirteens with his left hand and blasted away the bullets with his right. The Thirteen shrieked. Sammy wanted to use his burn blasts to melt the Thirteen’s eyes out of his skull. The rage inside him bubbled and spat, urging him to release his full potential. But Sammy forced himself to focus. He shielded with one hand and shot strong blasts at the Thirteen until he caught him on the leg and made him lose his balance. Still shielding, Sammy blast-jumped off the floor, flipped over, and put his shoes on the ceiling. Then he blasted again and flipped once, shooting down and landing on the Thirteen with a bone-crunching smash.
During this, the third Thirteen made it past the red line. Jeffie pushed the rest back with blasts and bullets. The Thirteen whipped his pistol at Sammy, but Sammy arched back and lost his balance, landing on the fallen and broken Thirteen beneath him. As Sammy fell, he shot at the Thirteen with foot blasts, missing with the first blast, but spinning her around with the second. The Thirteen shot at him as she spun, but her shot went wide to Sammy’s left. He could tell instantly it had no chance of hitting him, so he didn’t shield. Instead he blasted at her with hands and feet, pinning her against the wall so Jeffie could kill her.
“Take her out, Jeffie!”
But Jeffie didn’t fire. Sammy glanced back and saw her on the ground, scooting back and grabbing her knee with one hand and shielding herself with the other. Blood seeped from her wound as she tried to staunch the flow.
“Jeffie! Take the shot!”
Jeffie let go of her knee and picked up her gun. Sammy dropped his blasts just as Jeffie fired several bullets into the Thirteen’s chest and abdomen. Not her cleanest work but adequate. Sammy got back to his feet and blasted back the other Thirteens.
“Stay down,” he told Jeffie as he moved in to provide her better cover. “Shoot from the floor.”
Sammy worked even harder on the remaining Thirteens, picking them off one at a time with the drones’ help. Although they were less than half in number as the Aegis, it took Sammy more than twice as long to finish the Thirteens off. The last one was a tricky bugger. He stood less than a meter and a half tall but was as spry as any Thirteen Sammy had faced. Implanted pearls in the skin of his face and green-black tattoos gave him a reptilian appearance. His forked tongue snapped each time Sammy attacked. Jeffie was low on bullets, saving them in case more enemies came, so Sammy did all the work. He finally caught the Thirteen with a blast that stunned him enough that the drone guns could do their job, and the Thirteen ended up just like the others: a bloody mess.
Pools of blood now replaced the once pristine whiteness of the room; the stink of it made the air hot and thick. Sammy’s zero suit was more red than blue now as was Jeffie’s. The screen of the zero suit covering his face was splattered with blood as well, making it difficult to see in some areas.
He knelt next to Jeffie and rolled up her pant leg to examine the wound. She hissed in pain when he moved it. The tears in her eyes reminded Sammy that despite all her experience and training, she was still just a sixteen-year-old girl.
“We don’t have a lot of med supplies,” she protested. “Save them for yourself.”
Sammy ignored her and treated the wound. Then he took out one of their two zero suit patches, unrolled her pant leg, and placed it over the hole in the special fabric. The charge in the suit activated the patch, and the patch wove its metallic fibers into the suit, restoring the electrical current.
“You okay?” he asked her.
“Been better,” she answered.
They cleared the room of the bodies. Sammy wanted to destroy the Thirteens’ rappelling descenders clamped to the cables, but the gear had already disappeared.
“More Thirteens?” she asked, grimacing each time she put weight on her injured leg.
Sammy sighed and sat down to preserve what little strength he had. “I hope not.” He checked the time. “Still an hour and a half before time to activate the code.”
“Ugh,” was Jeffie’s reply.
“She’s trying to tire us. She knows I’m here.”
“Who is she?” Jeffie asked.
“The Queen.”
“How do you know?”
Sammy shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we just need to wait ninety minutes.” But he knew she would come as well as he knew his own name. Blood soaked his hair and clothes and made his skin sticky. “Battery report.”
“Forty-nine percent,” the battery replied.
“I am exhausted,” Jeffie admitted. “And starving. Do you have a cheeseburger in your pack? I could really go for a cheeseburger. Extra ketchup.”
Unleash me. I can help you destroy her. It is the only way you can win.
I’ve beaten her before. I’ll beat her again.
She can blast now. Remember what Trapper told you? You can’t hope to win without unleashing me!
Sammy closed his eyes and almost fell asleep, but high-pitched whirring noises forced them open again. More coming. He wanted to cry. Jeffie looked like she wanted to as well. As the sound grew louder, he and Jeffie stood, arms hanging to their sides, waiting. Blood and sweat dripped down their faces, but they couldn’t wipe it off through the zero suit screens. Enemies dropped silently onto the pile of dozens of bodies at the bottom of the elevator, sliding down them into the white room. Their faces mirrored Sammy’s. Hybrids. His own clones. Ready to attack the original.
* * * * *
On the 94th floor of the Rio N Tower the Queen hovered over the shoulder of a technician working in the Computer Sciences division. Constant communication passed between the Orlando and Rio towers.
“They’ve checked the black and red floors in Orlando,” a new report came. “No sign of the intruders. The main elevator plummeted down the shaft. Now disabled.”
“If Sammy is on the white floor in Rio, then Walter Byron must have gone to the white floor in Orlando,” the Queen stated, not for the first time. She rounded on her techs, eyes ablaze. “Find out what is down there!”
“We’re trying!” said one tech in an insubordinate tone. The Queen stared and memorized the tech’s face. Later. Something long and painful. Perhaps I’ll flay you. The thought excited the Queen, but her enthusiasm quickly turned into a deep itching in her skin followed by bolts of pain and revulsion as she envisioned peeling back someone’s skin piece by piece.
Get control.
“How can no one know what’s down there?” she asked. The notion was absurd. Not one tech had any idea about what was on the white floor. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the only two towers with white floors were hit simultaneously. But why?
Techs had searched through databanks, schematics, and code but uncovered no helpful information. How had something hiding in plain sight been kept such a secret? The Queen had known about the floor. She’d been in the undergrounds of both towers, but she’d never given the white button on the elevator panel a second thought.
“Chad, give me a report!” the Queen said into her com.
But there was still no answer from him. She glanced at her clock. Almost an hour now with not a word from that little—
Either Diego had wiped all information regarding the white floor out of the Hive’s servers or it had never been there at all. And the fox had so many cursed firewalls around his most precious pieces of information that it would be a wonder if they ever broke through them. Regardless, Chad had proven himself worthless. The Queen would kill and replace him at her next opportunity. Another jolt of pain shot up to her torso, making her queasy.
“Here’s something,” one of the techs said. “A memo from the CEO of N Corp marked urgent … sent to the architect of the towers. Apparently the two towers were built simultaneously.”
“Give me the memo!” the Queen snapped at the worker. When the girl sent it to the Queen’s com, the Queen scanned it quickly. “This tells me nothing except that he wanted the white floor done in white. Why are you wasting my time
?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
The Queen wanted to kill this one too. Instead, she left. “Call me when you have something that isn’t completely useless.”
She read the note again:
The tactile esthetics of the room are unimportant. White represents a classic symbolism that I find important.
A memory popped into the Queen’s mind. As a young girl, she’d been invited to her friend’s baptism. Her friend wore a white dress as she descended into a font filled with water. The dress had billowed out in the water, then clung to her friend’s skin. Someone at the ceremony had said the white represented purity and cleansing.
Cleansing. Diego’s word. What had he said to her before she killed him? That the fox had a purpose for him, a planned way to die. Somehow the two were tied together. She knew it. Cleansing of what?
The Queen saw the answer. Cleansing. White. Simultaneous. The solution.
“No,” she muttered to herself. “No, no, no.” More words came to her mind, this time they belonged to the fox: The new world I will build has no place for Thirteens and Hybrids.
The fox was ashamed that he had to use the Thirteens, the Aegis, and these even newer Hybrids to achieve his ends. He viewed it as a problem, and to counter it, he’d created the solution. He planned to snuff out the Aegis, the Hybrids, and any remaining Anomaly Thirteens in an instant.
You bastard. You bastard! She ran back into the room with the technicians. “Are there any terminals on the white floors?”
One of the technicians typed furiously on her keyboard. “Yes. One on each.”
“And are they connected to a mainframe within our master system?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they are, you find a way to block those terminals.”
The Queen watched them work for five minutes, their frowns growing deeper by the second. They all seemed reluctant to be the one to give her bad news. Finally one of them spoke up, a girl no older than twenty-five. “The terminals are unreachable. They are each hardwired to satellite dishes. At the Hive.”