by Jack Heath
He also said that he didn’t believe Vanish had wounded himself just to get into the emergency room for an easier escape. With so much damage to his face, he couldn’t be identified by any witnesses to his crimes or by previously taken photographs—not that there were many of either. As long as Vanish maintained his silence in ChaoSonic custody, his real name would never be exposed.
But this seemed illogical to Six. By gouging out his own face, hadn’t Vanish made his appearance so distinctive that he would never be able to conceal his identity again?
Six recalled an old story about a criminal whose head had been shaved and who had shaved the heads of a dozen other men as they slept so he could not be identified the next morning. He imagined Vanish inflicting injuries identical to his own on the faces of thousands of innocent people so ChaoSonic would never find him.
He shook off the image with a shiver. Not only was that completely insane, it wouldn’t work. Presumably the doctors in the emergency room had taken a sample of Vanish’s blood and compared it to their DNA database.
He scrolled down. Yes, they had, but it hadn’t helped identify him. Vanish’s DNA wasn’t on file, and his blood was of the most common type, O positive. Six knew that trying to identify someone by blood type was nearly impossible. He could think of twenty people at the Deck who were O positive, including himself. He scrolled back up and kept reading.
Vanish hadn’t mutilated thousands of strangers to stay hidden. He had just disappeared. While his forces occasionally turned up and wreaked havoc on ChaoSonic facilities, the man himself had not been seen again. And his capture had taken place…almost thirty years ago?
Six went over this again, just to make sure he hadn’t misread it. He hadn’t. Vanish had scarred himself and disappeared twenty-eight years, eight months, and three days ago.
He scrolled farther up, looking at the list of crimes Vanish was believed to be responsible for. The first one was eleven years earlier, and they got older as Six read. Abduction of a ChaoSonic official, twenty-two years ago. Bombing of the Gear munitions factory, thirty-eight years ago. Assassination of a security chief, forty-seven years ago. There were more events listed. ChaoSonic was the result of a small merger almost fifty years ago, so that was as far back as the records went.
In fact, the people who’d been kidnapped, set free, and then discovered working for Vanish were rarer than Six had thought. Each kidnapping only happened once the previous victim was dead. Because he usually picked people in such extreme positions of power within ChaoSonic, Vanish only seemed to need one at a time.
No wonder they suspect Chelsea Tridya, Six thought. This implied that Vanish was at least seventy, in a city where most people were dead at sixty. The Lab’s supply of Tridya’s drug was stolen only a few months ago, and it couldn’t actually make someone younger. It couldn’t even keep their age at a complete standstill. The Lab was using an inverted formula anyway—they were making children age quickly. So ChaoSonic assumed that Vanish collaborated with Tridya, and had access to the drug in some form for at least a decade. Tridya hadn’t designed her formula back then, but maybe they didn’t know that.
Six held the theory in his mind, testing it, feeling its weight like a ball being tossed lightly from one hand to the other. Did he believe that there was a seventy-year-old, hideously scarred puppet-master behind today’s events?
No way. ChaoSonic had had the wool pulled over their eyes.
Vanish wasn’t a man at all.
Vanish was an organization.
It only took Six a few seconds to connect his spare mobile phone to the web page King had sent him. Soon the location of the teenage boy’s mobile was a blinking red dot on the screen, superimposed over a map of the City. There was a white line which showed where the phone had been since King set up the tracking program. It seemed that the monorail train had gone more or less straight from the Timeout to a warehouse thirteen kilometers west of it, and stopped.
It’s in my search area, Six thought. And it’s a warehouse, so it’d be a suitable base of operations for Vanish, particularly if there’s an underground area—that way ChaoSonic wouldn’t know how big it is. And there’s an airfield right next to it, so the troops can get all over the City quickly.
He stared at the screen of his phone intently, searching for anything that would contradict the signs. There was nothing.
I think I’ve just found Kyntak, he thought.
It was 19:39:45. He needed to get going as soon as possible, but had to get some equipment first. Six walked into the training room and pressed his palm lightly against the wall. It slid aside, revealing four rows of weapons.
For Kyntak’s safety, he was going to have to enter the facility silently and invisibly. This meant lightweight equipment that could be used quietly—no shotguns, no automatic rifles. But he was going to have to get out as well—and once he had rescued Kyntak, he expected the alarm would be sounded quickly.
He picked out a quarterstaff, which could be separated into two halves for carrying, and an Owl semiautomatic pistol. He screwed a silencer to the gun, then took a nylon rope from the rack and started spooling it over his shoulder.
“I’m going on a suicidal rescue mission,” he said to Harry as he worked. “Want to come?”
“No,” Harry said. He didn’t turn his head to look at Six.
Of course not, thought Six. It’s not that he’s scared; it’s that he doesn’t want anything. He’s a robot. “Do you want to stay here?”
“No.”
Six thought about it. He couldn’t use Harry to create a diversion for easier entry—any disturbance would be either too subtle to help or so obvious the alarm would be raised. And taking him inside wasn’t an option. One intruder would have a far better chance of staying hidden than two.
But when he and Kyntak were on their way out, possibly with the entire Vanish army behind them, they would be able to use his firepower.
“Harry, get out the motorbike,” he said. “I’m going to find an outfit for you.”
Harry walked out the door, and Six started sifting through his wardrobe.
Two minutes later, the house was locked up and he was outside, helping Harry get dressed. Six didn’t have a garage or a backyard. His bike was kept on the thin strip of concrete between the back of his house and the wall separating his property from his neighbors’. He had built the motorcycle himself from parts of other bikes. He’d had to scan each piece for bugs as he went, because ChaoSonic made them all, and ChaoSonic often bugged their products. But it was worth it. Six’s bike was better quality than even the most expensive models; it had a six-cylinder engine, a carbon-fiber chassis, and a softail-style monoshock suspension. The fiberglass fairing was polished to an obsidian-like shine.
Six had chosen to dress Harry in one of his long black coats, a pair of grey jogging pants, and a thick woolen beanie. Harry was taller than Six, so the pants didn’t quite reach his ankles, but not enough plastic skin was exposed to look suspicious. His synthetic feet and hands could pass as shoes and gloves. Other than his fingertips and the soles of his feet, Harry’s plastic exoskeleton was coated in PTFE, an almost frictionless fluoropolymer, so Six had to attach the belt very tightly around Harry’s waist to keep his pants from falling down.
There was really nothing Six could put on Harry’s face—a ski mask or even sunglasses would be too suspicious. He resolved that Harry would sit behind him on the bike and they would go fast. Anyone who happened to look would be much more likely to think mask than robot.
Six himself had changed into a black spandex catsuit—the clothes he’d borrowed from the teenage hoodlums were useless from a stealth point of view. He had the two halves of the quarterstaff strapped to his back, with the climbing rope looped over the straps and the silenced Owl in his belt.
“Do you know how to ride a motorbike?” Six asked Harry as he climbed on.
“No.”
“Fair enough,” Six said. Why would a robot that could run at sixty kilomet
ers an hour need to know how to ride a motorbike? “Hang on tight.”
Plastic forearms crushed his abdomen. “Not that tight,” wheezed Six. “Just don’t fall off.” Harry’s grip loosened, Six revved the engine, and the motorbike thundered into the night.
Driving didn’t take much concentration, so Six was free to consider the facts as they traveled. If Vanish is an organization rather than a man, this changes everything, Six thought as the wind blasted past his face. It would explain the hundreds of highly trained troops, the half century of crimes attributed to one man, the deals with so many Code-breakers and the co-opting of so many officials. A single person couldn’t do all that, even assuming that he was able to live to the age of seventy. Sooner or later he’d be found out, or betrayed, or murdered by a rival.
It was like struggling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle and discovering halfway through that the wrong picture was on the box. An organization could achieve many things that a lone person could not—ChaoSonic had shown everyone that. Corporations were not subject to human ailments; they didn’t die naturally and were hard to kill. They didn’t have emotions, and their actions could affect many people, requiring just as many people to affect them back. And the value of extra manpower could never be underestimated.
But there was something that gave lone operatives an advantage—concealment.
ChaoSonic had never allowed another corporation to rise. It was clinging to its monopoly over the City with every white knuckle it had. There were thousands of ChaoSonic operatives whose sole purpose was to find fledgling corporations and crush them, eliminating competitors in advance. Finding the Deck was not their top priority yet, partly because it was so well hidden, partly because it was a nonprofit organization, and partly because its interests so often overlapped with ChaoSonic’s own. ChaoSonic lost money to thieves, and employees to murderers, and the Deck was constantly shuffling them away. But anyone else who was a member of a non-ChaoSonic group had better be looking over his or her shoulder.
But now Six was picturing something new: a secret organization that had been established more than fifty years ago, before ChaoSonic had tightened its grip; that had stayed secret until now by attributing all its actions to a lone enigmatic man, recruiting more and more people, remaining invisible even as it grew, welling up towards ChaoSonic from beneath, like a volcano under the City that was slowly getting ready to explode.
Pedestrians crossing the street hurried as Six and Harry rocketed past through the fog, pulsing in and out of visibility as streetlamps rushed by overhead. Six saw a small child tugging on the trouser leg of a man and pointing at Harry. He twisted some more power into the engine with the throttle, giving them an extra boost into the next wall of gloom.
The situation seemed both simpler and more complex than Six had guessed a few hours ago. On the one hand, the bizarre variety of Vanish’s actions so far—breaking into the Deck, killing Methryn Crexe, kidnapping Kyntak, attempting to abduct Six, then trying to kill him when they failed—could be explained by the fact that a conglomerate had more motives than a single operative. No group was ever perfectly unified, because different people would always have different agendas. The strongest teams used their diversity to support their efforts, King had once said, while the weaker ones let their differences tear them apart. He had been trying to explain the value of cooperation to Six, and failing. Six had seen why other people might need to work together, but there was nothing he was incapable of doing on his own.
So Vanish was a group of people, each of whom had something to gain from today’s events. But this realization didn’t help Six much—one man would have been easier to investigate than fifty.
But for now, Six had a single goal—rescue Kyntak. Kyntak would get the Spades off his back and help him keep Vanish from exposing them.
Six clenched his hands around the grips on the handlebars as other thoughts swirled in his brain. Unless I can’t rescue him. Unless I’m not strong enough and I die trying. Unless he’s already dead and I’m on my own again.
They were getting close now. He slowed the bike down to a manageable seventy kilometers per hour. Other people are addictive, he thought. You don’t need them at first, but once you’ve been exposed, you can’t get by without them. A year ago I was completely satisfied being on my own. Not happy, but satisfied. And now I’m on a suicide mission, looking for my twin brother. Not just because it’s right and because I owe it to him. And not because I like him all that much. Because I need him. I can’t go back to the way I used to live.
He switched off the headlight and clicked on the ChaoSilent muffler. He’d taken the chip from a pair of stealth boots and attached it to the exhaust pipe when he built the bike; the small subwoofer and tweeter amplifiers, which he’d pilfered from a guitar amp and placed under the suspension, now emitted the phase opposite of his motor and tire noise. His bike glided along with a barely audible clicking sound as the volume settings adjusted themselves.
The giant domed shell of the warehouse materialized on the horizon. Six slowed the bike even more, scanning the area for soldiers. None yet, but he was still outside the perimeter.
As he’d guessed, the barrier was no more than a chain-link fence, about four meters high. He had no doubt that Vanish could afford something better: automated sentry guns, electrified razor wire, or even a small-scale replica of the Seawall around the warehouse. But spending so much money in such a public way would shatter the illusion that the warehouse was privately owned and unimportant. It would draw ChaoSonic operatives to it, like rats to rotten meat.
Six thought it was safe to assume that there’d be some form of security between the fence and the warehouse, again probably something not too flashy. He eased the bike to a halt, hooked his fingers through the fence, and pressed his face against the wire, peering into the darkness. The warehouse was still just a silhouette to him. The fog shielded the details from his gaze.
“Harry,” he whispered. “Can you see any guards?”
“Yes,” Harry said. His voice was muted to the volume of Six’s own, but there was no difference in tone—a robotic equivalent of whispering that still unsettled Six. “There are three sentries in towers on the three visible corners of the warehouse, each armed with Wedge-tail FBN2 sniper rifles. There are two guards standing near the main door, and another near the side door, each carrying Raptor pistols.”
“Any sensors?” Six asked.
“Yes. There is a ChaoSonic Mark 3 security light on each wall of the warehouse.”
“What range do they have?”
That model of security light was older than Harry, so he had the specifications in his CPU. It took him less than half a second to recall the data. “They can be tuned to detect movement at a maximum range of fifty meters,” he said.
Six nodded. That meant that if they crossed the fence, they could only get about ten meters before a spotlight would click on, exposing them.
He tensed as something moved at his feet, but relaxed as soon as he looked down. It was just a rat, sniffing his shoe as it scurried past. Harry’s head turned to follow it; he’d never seen an animal before, Six guessed.
Six picked the rat up by its tail, holding it at arm’s length. It hissed in panic and waved its claws in the air as it swung from side to side. Wrinkling his nose with disgust, aware of how many germs were likely to be rubbing off onto his skin, Six pushed it flat against the fence, and it wriggled through one of the holes and landed on the ground on the other side.
As he had expected, the rat scampered in a direct line away from him. It vanished into the darkness between the fence and the warehouse.
“Harry, can you hit the sensor closest to us with your paintball gun?”
“Yes,” the bot replied.
There was a pause. Six sighed. He’d asked instead of instructed. “Do it,” he said.
Harry raised his arm and fired a round into the darkness. The security light snapped on as the ball of goo slapped against the sensor, illuminating
the concrete surrounding the warehouse. Six could see the sentries in the towers now, and the guards. None of them were wearing night-vision goggles, so they were relying on the security lights to alert them. The warehouse was painted red, stained black in parts by the darkness. There were five sedans and two construction vehicles parked outside the giant door, all too close to the building to offer any cover. There was a narrow ladder attached to the warehouse wall, but a sentry was standing right next to it. The rat had changed direction; it was running parallel to the fence about twenty meters away.
There was a long pause. Six waited for the timer to switch the light off again.
The distant crack of a sniper rifle echoed out from one of the towers, and the rat skidded sideways across the concrete. Six winced. Sorry, buddy, he thought. I didn’t expect that.
The light clicked off. With the sensor blocked by paint, Six figured it was now safe to cross. He curled his fingers around the links in the fence.
“Harry,” he said, “follow me.” He climbed the fence easily, crossed the tip before the wire had time to buckle under his weight, and dropped nimbly down to the other side. Harry didn’t climb—he jumped, lifting his legs up so they didn’t scrape the fence on the way over, and landed with a silence that belied his weight. He rose slowly out of his crouch to stand beside Six.
Six took cautious steps forward. Enough to bring him within range of the sensor.
The darkness was impenetrable. He couldn’t see the guards or the sentry towers. The security light stayed off.
They were inside the fence, but they still had to make it past the sentries and the door guards, and Six had to assume there would be more troops inside. They would see him as soon as he walked through the door.
Six peered into the gloom, picturing everything he had seen when the light was on. Two towers on the corners nearest him, with a sniper in each one. Neither was as high as the warehouse, or he’d be able to see them above the silhouette of the domed roof. Five sedans and two construction vehicles.