by Jack Heath
Six whirled around and leaned back, swinging his foot out from under him as he did so. In a wild sweeping kick, he smashed into the knees of the commando on one side and, lifting his leg higher as he spun, the head of the other.
Both soldiers fell, one with a dislocated knee and the other with a bruised skull. Six crouched down and pressed his fingers swiftly under the jaw of the first, forcing him into a deep sleep.
Six didn’t have time for a thorough examination, but he could see from the equipment of the soldiers that they weren’t ChaoSonic troops—they never carried knives—and the TV remotes were a bizarre twist.
The helicopter thundered overhead. Six could see shadows moving in the fog as more troops approached. Once they saw him, they would soon see the other agents by the stairwell. It was time for his diversion.
Six unclipped an OT-78 grenade from his belt. In one smooth motion he pulled the pin with his thumb, swung to face the chopper, and hurled the grenade into the air.
A red light blinked on it as it spun lazily towards the helicopter.
The gunner wasted a fraction of a second staring at it. Then he dropped the Pelican and dived out of the hold. A climbing rope unraveled behind him as he plummeted earthward.
The grenade clipped the tail of the chopper.
Boom!
The rear end of the helicopter disintegrated in a ball of white-hot energy. The main rotor splintered, sending shards of the blades flying in all directions. The chassis pitched sideways, engine screaming, and one of the landing skis fell off. With a hiss, the ejector seat shot forward out of the cockpit and a large black parachute bloomed immediately behind it.
Six took cover as the skeletal frame dived towards the floor of the corridor. The nearby soldiers shouted as they did the same.
Clang! The cockpit and chassis slammed into a corridor wall, shattering it into dust and debris. Six felt the floor shudder with the impact.
He was on his feet before the echoes had died away. He braced himself for an explosion, but none came. The fuel tank hadn’t ignited. He could still hear the chattering of helicopter blades, so he had a sinking feeling that there was more air support coming. But at least…
There was a loud crack, and a strong black net wrapped itself around Six. He stumbled and fell, palms first, onto the concrete. Turning his head, he saw the gunner from the helicopter drop a launcher to the floor, and draw an AM-92 tranquilizer pistol.
It was incredible that the soldier was still walking, let alone launching nets. But Six stifled his astonishment and began tearing at the rope with his fingers. It wouldn’t break. It was some kind of synthetic nylon fiber that cut and burned his skin.
There was movement in the fog. The commandos were clambering back to their feet, and the gunner was approaching.
Tearing the net didn’t seem to be an option. Six tried to stand up, but all six corners of the net were weighted with ball bearings. They swung in as he stood, banging painfully against his ankles and tightening the net around his legs. He lost his balance and fell back down onto the concrete.
I can’t let them neutralize me, Six thought, or the others are as good as dead. He wriggled forward across the floor, the ball bearings rolling noisily as they dragged behind him. He stretched out his hand, wincing as the nylon ropes tightened over him, and grabbed the foot of one of the three soldiers he had already knocked out.
He pulled the soldier back towards him by the ankle, not daring to waste time looking to see how close the gunner was. He reached out, releasing a clasp on the soldier’s belt, and the diamond-edged Feather knife fell to the floor.
The gunner raised the tranq gun. Took aim.
Six swished the knife outward in a straight line, and the net zipped open like a body bag. He dived through the gap, just as a tranquilizer dart snapped out of the pistol and slammed into the floor.
One of the soldiers made a dive for him. Six smacked his elbow down into his neck and slipped out of his grip. With the remains of the net still tangled around one hand, he dashed into the foggy corridors once again, heading for the outer wall.
Okay, he thought as he ran, that’s one helicopter and at least four soldiers down. What’s left?
Another helicopter and at least twenty-five more soldiers, he surmised. It wasn’t looking good. Retreat was definitely still their best option. He had to get the others off the second floor. He sprinted down the foggy corridor, heading towards the apartment containing Crexe’s body. When he was about seven meters from the door, three commandos burst through it, turning to face him.
Six dived into a rolling position and swung his arms out like clubs as he hit the floor. One commando was knocked over as Six’s shoulder collided with his knee, and the other two were taken out by Six’s whirling arms.
Blunt, Six reflected, but efficient.
He ran past the door they had come through and turned into the room with the shattered closet wall. He hoisted the sledgehammer from the floor onto his shoulder and, with a mighty swing, drove it right through the boarded-up window.
The wood splintered easily, leaving a meterwide hole through which Six could see the dim outlines of the streets and buildings of the City below. Clutching the sledgehammer in one hand and the knife and net in the other, Six dived into the void.
It took him less than a second to establish that the remaining Twin was not on this side of the building. Good, he thought. It’s about time I had some luck.
He began to plummet towards the distant ground, but a meter below the window, he stabbed his knife into the wall. The plaster cracked with the force of the blow, and the knife was driven in almost to the hilt. Six gripped on to the handle firmly, and he stopped falling.
He checked his watch: 12:12:33. Almost three minutes had passed since he’d seen the others—he had to hurry. Taking down the helicopter had ensured that the soldiers were focused on finding him, but he wasn’t sure how long that would last.
Dangling from one hand high above the ground, with the sledgehammer clamped between his knees, Six used his free hand to untangle the net. Except for the slit he had made with the knife, the nylon cords were intact. He attached one corner to the handle of the Feather with a clove hitch and lifted the sledgehammer again.
Six had abseiled many times before, although usually with the proper equipment—a climbing rope, a harness, a carabiner, gloves, and a pickax. Doing it with only a net and a knife while carrying a sledgehammer was like trying to play Beethoven on a piano lacking half its strings.
But there was no time to improvise anything better. He could still hear the chattering of gunfire and the pounding of helicopter blades. Resting his feet against the wall to stop his body from swinging in the breeze, he looked around for a first-floor window to climb through.
And he found it. Like most of the windows in the building, it was boarded up, but Six was sure he could break through the barrier with the sledge. He lowered himself until he was holding the bottom of the net. Then he rappelled towards the window, walking horizontally across the wall of the building with the net in one hand.
He could just reach; if he held the bottom of the net at arm’s length in his left hand, and stretched out with his right as far as he could, he could touch the boards sealing the window. He looked back at the knife in the wall with the net wrapped around it. It still looked stable.
Taking a deep breath, he hefted the sledgehammer and swung it.
Crack! The wooden boards splintered on impact, leaving an opening wide enough to climb through. Six put the sledge between his knees and reached for the sill.
Thump! His knee banged against the frame as he fell through the window, and he tumbled to the floor in a cloud of dust.
Immediately he rolled out of the room into the first-floor corridor and ducked behind the wall, out of sight of the window. His instincts proved correct. Like a giant black bird, the helicopter loomed in the window and the opposite wall boiled with bullet holes as the Twin’s gunner opened fire with the GN-860.
> But as long as the helicopter was hovering beside the building and peering in the first-floor windows, the Deck agents on the roofless second floor were safe. Six clambered to his feet and began to run towards the hollowed-out stairwell, shaking the dust off his fatigues as he went.
He glanced at his watch. 12:16:21—almost seven minutes had gone by since he had seen the agents. He hoped they were still safe.
The stairwell door had been jammed shut by the explosion, but the hinges seemed intact. Six took aim about fifteen centimeters above the handle, where the lock should be, and gave the door a hefty kick.
The door swung outward with a crash, showering plaster into the stairwell. Chunks fell to the basement level, cracking against the mound of debris which had once been the staircase, almost invisible in the darkness.
Six pressed a hand against the door frame, testing its strength. It seemed capable of holding his weight. Gripping it with one hand, he leaned out into the well and switched on his radio.
“Assault team, do you copy?” he whispered.
Only static came back.
“Kyntak, can you hear me?” he tried.
Still nothing. Six was about to try again when Agent Nine poked his head out of the door on the floor above, silhouetted in the foggy light. He looked down at Six.
“Whoa,” he said. “How’d you get down there?”
“It wasn’t easy. The rest of you will have to come this way. Just drop and I’ll catch you.”
Nine nodded nervously. “Okay. Ready?”
“Yes. Go.”
Nine stepped through the doorway into the well, and Six caught him with one arm and swung him into the first-floor corridor. Nine landed in a catlike stance, rattled but safe.
Six looked up. “Who’s next?”
It took less than two minutes to ferry agents Four, Five, Eight, and Ten to the first floor. The sounds of gunfire still raged on upstairs—Six hoped that this was just because the attacking soldiers were using it as a scare tactic.
He leaned out through the doorway again, but no one seemed to be coming down.
He took a swift head count. “Where’s Two?” he demanded. “And Kyntak?”
“I haven’t seen Kyntak since we left the van,” Nine said. “But Two was with us at the door.”
Six peered out again and looked up. There was no movement above.
He glanced at his watch again—12:19:30. The longer the other agents stayed, the more danger they were in. He wouldn’t leave Kyntak and Two behind, but he couldn’t risk the lives of the others.
“Go,” he said. “Now. The floor is structurally weakest in the center of each apartment—use your grenades to break through it, and get back to the trucks in the basement. Head for the Deck. I’ll find Kyntak and Two.”
The agents nodded and headed down the corridor, following Agent Five. They were soon out of sight around a corner.
The stairwell door was still open. Six put his foot on the handle and climbed up onto the top of the door. It rocked on its hinges, but being thick and heavy, its inertia was too strong for the movement to dislodge him.
He ducked instinctively as another blast of gunfire came from the floor above, closer this time. Keeping one hand on the door, he drew his Owl pistol from his belt and aimed it at the upper doorway.
When a figure flew out into the stairwell, Six almost fired. But then he recognized the Deck-issue fatigues, identical to his own. Two, he thought, or Kyntak.
The figure fell towards him limply, arms hanging from slackened shoulders, knees bent at ninety degrees, gloved fingers letting an Eagle automatic slip away from them.
He’s unconscious! Six thought. Letting go of his Owl, he leaned out into the center of the well, reaching for the arm of the falling agent.
But as the figure spun slowly in the air to face him, Six found himself looking into the still, lifeless eyes of Agent Two—and the bullet wound between them.
The body slipped through Six’s clutching hand and disappeared into the darkness below.
Six lost his balance and toppled off the door. He grabbed the handle on his way down and hung there, reality seeming to fade as the color washed out of it. He felt dizzy and light-headed.
He looked down. Two was dead.
The first thing Six felt was relief that it hadn’t been Kyntak. The second thing he felt was shame for feeling this.
The third thing was self-loathing, disgust for failing to protect Two, letting him die—a man whose last words to Six had been, “We trust you, Six. Go.”
And for witnessing the murder of a friend and feeling guilt instead of grief.
But it was Six’s first thought that brought him back to reality. Kyntak. It was too late to help Two, but Kyntak was still up there. And if I hang on to this door handle much longer, he thought, staring into the void, Kyntak could die too.
If he isn’t dead already.
Like a flash, Six was on the move. He scrambled back up to the top of the door, took aim at the doorway above, and jumped.
There was a soldier standing in the corridor. His face revealed nothing behind the mask and goggles, but as he saw Six appear through the doorway, he raised his weapon.
This is the one, Six thought. The soldier who killed Two.
Six had no gun, but it didn’t matter. He preferred it that way. He charged silently towards the soldier just as he got his weapon up and opened fire.
Six ran up the wall on his left-hand side, keeping his head at the same altitude but his torso out of the way of the barrage of bullets. The soldier didn’t have time to readjust his aim before Six punched him in the face.
The soldier’s mask cracked and he fell to the floor, dropping his weapon—but he wasn’t too dazed to kick Six in the knee. Six spun his leg, bending with the impact so no bones were broken, then stepped forward and pinned down the soldier’s arm with his other foot as the man reached for the fallen gun.
The soldier aimed a punch at Six’s hip with his free fist. Six blocked it, caught the man’s forearm, and held it against the ground with one hand. He used the other to reach under the man’s mask and grab his throat.
He found the windpipe and squeezed.
The soldier’s legs began kicking wildly, trying to throw Six off. Six squeezed tighter. He could feel his victim’s adrenaline-powered pulse through the jugular vein, racing at 150 beats per minute.
Don’t kill him, Six reminded himself. You’re not a murderer.
The soldier tried to lift his arms up from the floor, in vain. His pulse climbed to 170 as he realized he was at Six’s mercy.
Six squeezed tighter. No, he thought. Killing this man won’t bring Two back. But he didn’t seem to be able to control his hands.
180.
190.
The scrabbling of the soldier’s legs was getting slower, weaker. His arms were resisting Six’s pressure with less and less force. Like a spider sprayed with pesticide, his panicked motions were subsiding. His heart rate began falling fast, slipping back to 150, then 100.
If you kill him, Six thought, you are worse than him. He may have shot Two in self-defense.
Eighty.
Sixty-five.
And every second you spend here, Six told himself, Kyntak is in more danger.
He unclenched his hand. The soldier slumped to the floor, bruised, unconscious—but alive. Six fell backward. He stared at his gloved hands for a moment, flexing the fingers to unstiffen them. Look what I almost did, he thought. The human body could sometimes survive as much as four minutes of strangulation, and Six was confident that he had done no permanent damage. But he was alarmed. His subconscious had taken over. He was a being of reason. He saw the futility of killing the soldier for what he had done to Two, but a deeply buried part of Six’s mind had wanted to do it anyway, a raw aggression which circumstances had activated.
Murder is like a virus, he thought. Infectious. The more you see it, the closer it comes to you, the more likely you are to succumb to it.
Six peer
ed into the fog. The floor was thick with the bodies of soldiers, all out cold. Most were lying where they had fallen, it seemed—but all had been disarmed. This looked like Kyntak’s work.
Six could hear the thundering of helicopter blades again. He reached towards the unconscious soldier. The Eagle lay beside him. Six picked it up and checked the magazine as the Twin descended out of the fog above him.
There was a whistling noise, and then a tranquilizer dart thudded into Six’s neck. He gasped in pain, which lasted only a second before a pleasant numbness began to spread through his veins.
The gunner launched another net at him. Six tried to get out from under it, but the muscles in his legs seemed to melt away. The world tilted towards him and he staggered into the wall.
The side of his head collided with the plaster, which cracked, but Six felt no pain as stars exploded before his eyes. The net covering him wobbled, as if he were looking at it from underwater. Six fell to his knees.
The Twin descended farther, apparently looking for somewhere to set down. The gunner was fiddling with his harness and climbing through the door. Suddenly Six realized that the soldiers hadn’t come to wipe out the Deck. It was about him. The bait had been for him. They’d come to take him away.
The logical part of his brain overcame the desire to sleep, and Six tried to tear the net off. But he only fell over. His arms hit the ground, and suddenly felt as if they were made of iron. His head landed on his elbow.
“Yeaaaaaarrgh!” Screeching like an eagle, Kyntak suddenly sprinted out of the grey air towards Six and the helicopter, not through the corridor, but along the top of one of the walls. He raced by above Six without even glancing at him, and then jumped into the air, legs together and arms outstretched…
…and flew headfirst through the hold door of the helicopter, crashing into the gunner. They both tumbled out of sight into the hold. The Twin reared back, as if it had been hit by a cannonball instead of a teenager. Then the pilot pulled it up, engines whining, and it vanished into the mist above.