by Jack Heath
The door rolled aside, and Kyntak laughed weakly. He wondered idly if he was going mad.
Vanish walked in, holding a syringe. The woman stood on Kyntak’s left, pointing a gun at him. “Oh, come on,” Kyntak rasped. “Surely I don’t have any blood left.”
“You wouldn’t think so, given that you haven’t had anything to eat or drink since I brought you in.” Vanish smiled as he jabbed the needle into Kyntak’s vein. “But somehow you keep generating it at a steady rate. My working hypothesis is that you’re able to convert your fat reserves into blood, almost like a backup metabolism.”
“Remind me to send a thank-you note to Retuni Lerke when I get out of here.”
Vanish withdrew the needle from Kyntak’s arm. “Neither you nor Six is getting out of here,” he said. “But I’ll pass on the message to Lerke when I next speak to him.”
Kyntak closed his eyes. “You have Six?”
“Oh, yes. He’s just a few cells down. Speaking to him is fascinating from a nature versus nurture point of view—same DNA, same situation, but he responded quite differently from you when he woke up.”
“He’s going to kill you,” Kyntak whispered faintly.
“He’s not in a position to kill anyone,” Vanish said. “But it’s strange that you should say that. Six has a reputation for restraint when it comes to murder. In fact, he stopped to bandage up one of my soldiers on his way down to this floor.”
Kyntak smiled. “Yep, that’s him. Six the merciful—but not weak. He’s escaped from every cell he was ever put in, shuffled every Code-breaker who so much as looked at him sideways, and broken into half the maximum-security facilities in the City without working up a sweat. It’s true he’s pretty levelheaded. It’d be hard to make him angry enough to kill you. But if you really wanted to, you could.”
He started to laugh, a thin, wheezing chuckle. Vanish’s smile faded slowly as he watched.
Kyntak cleared his throat before continuing. “In fact, you know what I’d do? If I really wanted him out for my blood—not that I would, of course, because he could be the world’s greatest assassin if he tried—but if I was suicidal and wanted to send Six of Hearts completely over the brink, I know exactly what my first move would be.”
There was a long silence. Vanish stared at him.
“I’d kidnap his twin brother!” Kyntak howled, and then he burst out laughing again, a rattling, hysterical cackle. His chest heaved and his throat scraped against the strap around it.
Vanish moved away from the table, the syringe still in his hand. He beckoned to the red-eyed woman. She muttered into her radio and the door slid open. Vanish walked out backward, watching Kyntak with a frown of disbelief, and the door closed.
Kyntak stopped laughing and smiled grimly. There, he thought. Maybe Six and I will die here, and maybe no one will ever know what happened to us. But I’ve had my revenge on our captor—I’ve scared him. He will see our face in his nightmares for the rest of his life.
The loss of blood was making him dizzy. He closed his eyes and rested.
Six was thinking hard. There had to be a way out of this. There was already a way.
He’d reassembled all the new data in his head to get what he finally believed was the complete picture. Vanish had been a criminal many years ago, rich enough to afford a new body to transplant his brain into. Presumably it was a desperate measure. His crime syndicate must have been falling down around him, perhaps because some not-yet-extinct form of law enforcement was closing in on him, but more likely because he’d trodden on the turf of a criminal empire with more manpower. He’d dumped his old body somewhere with most of his brain missing in order to fake his own death. He had probably mutilated it so the surgery wasn’t obvious. He wouldn’t have wanted the people looking for him to know what he had done.
So he starts recruiting again, Six thought. Goes somewhere new. Hires a load of soldiers and at some point begins injecting them with nanomachines. Now he has an elite force: better fighting through chemistry. He changes bodies a few more times, using the technique as a disguise rather than a last resort.
Something clicked in Six’s mind. He remembered the list of senior ChaoSonic officials who had been captured by Vanish, and who had the stolen ChaoSonic information for him after being released. He remembered that there had only been one at any given time. He had assumed that they were coerced into working for Vanish because he had tagged them with his nanomachines, and that he had only needed one at a time because they were so well placed within the company—but now Six had a much more frightening thought. Each and every one might have been Vanish himself. He had started stealing not only bodies, but also identities. He used his assistant/brain surgeon to represent him anywhere he was supposed to be in person. Niskev Pacye was currently filling that position, but there must have been others before her.
Hiss. The valve in the corner opened, releasing some more oxygen into the room. Six ignored it.
So ChaoSonic chokes the vestigial government and rises to power, he thought, continuing his mental timeline. The Takeover. Vanish stays in hiding and keeps sending his soldiers out on missions, but starts stealing exclusively from ChaoSonic because they now have a virtual monopoly on everything. And sooner or later, they notice him and try to hunt him down. Presumably they managed to get one of their own operatives into this force—and that would be why he showed up as a potential buyer for Earle Shuji’s robot army. Robots are more loyal than people.
Anyway. ChaoSonic lures him into a trap and captures him. He scratches on his own face so he can’t be connected to any of his previous crimes, and to make his appearance so memorable that later no one will suspect a normal-looking man of being him. Someone in his team, probably one of Niskev Pacye’s predecessors, takes the initiative and uses the locator in Vanish’s own nanomachines to find him, then storms in with a bunch of troops. They decimate the ChaoSonic forces to send a message, then Vanish changes bodies again, while ChaoSonic searches for a hideously scarred man they’re never going to find.
Fast-forward thirty years, and Vanish is well established. He’s got his new assistant, his own private army, a fistful of credits, and a century of experience. So what made him go to the Lab eight months ago?
Project Falcon? Six thought. Was he interested in replacing his army with a team of super-soldiers, each carrying my designer DNA? It was possible, Six supposed, but this was after they had gone to see Shuji, not before. Wouldn’t Vanish rather be investigating the bot angle? Particularly when one of his troops had betrayed him before: Project Falcon made them strong and fast, but not incorruptible.
Six took a quick breath. Of course! At this point, Vanish no longer treats the body-swapping as a defense against ChaoSonic. He sees it as his defense against age—his road to immortality. Breaking into the Lab was only indirectly linked to Project Falcon. What Vanish really wanted was Chelsea Tridya’s formula! He’d heard about its ability to slow the rate of cell division and mutation, and figured he could enormously extend his own life span without having to switch bodies.
It would have been a ruin when he broke in, Six thought. Sevadonn dead, Crexe and the soldiers gone, Nai taken away by Kyntak and Six. The inside of the tower was smashed and burned. But they didn’t know that the clone was in there, too—Vanish found him and took him. He would have been furious to find the drug missing…but only until he discovered the self-replicating telomeres in the clone.
So he spent the next few months planning a way to get Kyntak and/or Six to his facility. Kidnapped Methryn Crexe as bait…
The thought of never going back to the Deck and leaving his fate a mystery to his friends was bad enough. The idea of letting a madman steal his identity and wear his face for the rest of eternity was far worse.
He tried to flush the image out of his head. This wasn’t helping. He wasn’t going to die. Not here. Not now.
He considered trying to pull his hand through the copper clamp—it might be possible if the bones dislocated or broke. Bu
t he could safely assume that Kyntak had tried that, and he had a head start of at least nine hours, depending on how long Six had been unconscious.
Hiss. Six wondered if there was some way he could use the oxygen valve—but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t involve getting off the table first. Dead end.
The roller-door slid open again. Six looked towards one of the wall mirrors and saw Vanish’s face through the widening gap. He rested his head back down against the pad.
“I haven’t decided which of you to use yet,” Vanish said. A soldier entered with him and stood impassively in the corner. “You’re both very similar from a medical and health standpoint. So I’ve decided to use the opportunity to run a few tests first.”
“Whose body are you wearing now?” Six asked. “Just out of curiosity. Who died so you could wear their face? Another ChaoSonic official?”
“You can’t make me feel guilty.” Vanish laughed. “It’s every man for himself in this City. I was given the intelligence and the tenacity to survive, and I don’t believe it was wrong of me to use them. If I hadn’t started taking bodies, I’d be long dead by now. That makes it justifiable homicide. Call it self-defense, if you like.”
“If you didn’t feel guilty,” Six said, “you wouldn’t feel the need to twist logic into a moral defense of your actions. Inside, you know you’re preparing to kill two innocent people to save your own worthless skin.”
Vanish laughed again. “Worthless? I am the only living link to pre-Takeover times—the City’s oldest person! I’m a national treasure! What have you seen or learned in your sixteen years that gives you more right to live than me?” A syringe appeared in his hand, this one full of a shimmering golden liquid. “If it makes you feel better, think about all the people I won’t have to kill once I’ve taken your body. In a way, you’re saving their lives.”
He jammed the needle into Six’s arm, and Six winced. “Since you asked,” he continued, “I can’t remember the name of this body’s previous owner—I rarely remember their names unless I need their identities. I have it written down somewhere, I think. He was a music teacher. I chose him because he played rugby on the weekends, and I wanted the strength.” He smiled. “I suspect it hasn’t prepared me for a Project Falcon body, though.”
“More nanomachines?” Six asked as Vanish withdrew the needle.
“No. This is accelerant—my own formula. Mostly a mixture of epinephrine, NENB, and mateine. It decreases reaction time and increases strength. You’ve seen it work on my soldiers. It should take about a minute to kick in fully.”
Six’s jaw dropped. Mateine was just caffeine, and epinephrine was basically synthetic adrenaline; neither of them would do him any serious harm. But NENB was a dangerously strong stimulant. “Won’t that also cause brain damage?”
“The possible side effects include dehydration, addiction, paranoia, and exhaustion once it wears off,” Vanish said calmly. “It can also suppress the immune system, but we have ways of combating that. The nanomachines don’t secrete very much into the bloodstream, though, so there’s rarely any permanent damage.”
“But you’re not giving me nanomachines,” Six said. He was already feeling queasy. “You’re giving me a pure dose!”
“Yes,” Vanish said. “I’m hoping that your extraordinary metabolism will give you greater resistance than my soldiers have to the negative effects. But I obviously want to test it before taking your body rather than after, just in case I’m wrong.” He shrugged. “If it kills you, I’ll just take Kyntak’s body instead of yours.”
His voice seemed to be getting slower and deeper. The room was getting brighter. Six’s mouth felt dry.
“I’m going to send in an opponent for you to fight to test your accelerated reflexes,” Vanish said. “It’ll be recorded so that I can watch it later. Then I’ll come back in and examine you for damage.”
He gestured to the guard and the door slid open. Six felt the accelerant course through his veins. Every muscle in his body tingled with energy. He tried to lunge at Vanish, and he felt the copper clamps bend a little. Vanish and his guard walked out the door, but it didn’t slide shut.
Six tried again, bracing his arms against the table and pulling his wrists against the clamps. The table groaned encouragingly, but nothing moved. Six felt his heart palpitate in his chest. The accelerant was making him feel sick. But he knew that was his best chance to escape. The door was open and the soldier he was supposed to fight hadn’t arrived yet.
He tried to pull his legs against the clamps. The sinews in his ankles were crushed against the copper, but the accelerant numbed the pain.
He froze as he heard heavy footsteps outside. Thud, thud, thud. That didn’t sound like a soldier.
Six’s eyes widened as it appeared in the doorway, familiar features shining in the light, silvery eyes gleaming.
“Harry?” he asked.
MISSION FIVE
04:39:02
INTO THIN AIR
The door slid shut and the clamps popped open. The strap around Six’s neck slithered away into a hole in the table. He rolled off and fell slowly, as if he were on the moon. He landed on his feet and stood up.
“Harry?” he repeated. “Is that you?”
The bot didn’t reply. It stood stock-still, staring impassively at the wall.
Six remembered Earle Shuji telling him that Niskev Pacye had approached her to buy bots. She had known the address Vanish used for deliveries. And Six remembered that she had seemed nervous, as if she were hiding something from him.
Now he knew what. Vanish has a prototype bot too, he thought. If he’d sent a human soldier for me to fight, I’d have won, accelerant or no accelerant, and then I might have been able to coerce him or her into opening the door. There’s no chance with a robot. It can’t be threatened, bribed, or reasoned with.
The oxygen valve hissed above him, but it seemed to take longer than before. His heightened consciousness stretched the sound out—from a burning fuse to a hissing snake.
He bounced restlessly on the balls of his feet, feeling the accelerant sweep into full effect. With every thrust he seemed to hang in the air, as though he were moving in real time but the universe had slowed to a crawl. Gravity barely seemed to touch him. His hands curled into fists that felt tougher than ever before. But his tongue was burning and his already sensitive retinas stung with the light blazing through his dilated pupils.
The robot still hadn’t moved. Six assumed that it was waiting for a radio signal from Vanish. Probably less time had passed than it seemed, considering his accelerated thought processes.
He braced a foot and a hand against the table and gripped one half of a clamp with the other hand. He pulled with all his might and felt his turbocharged muscles strain. With a shriek that seemed to last forever, the copper tore at the base, and Six fell slowly backward. He drifted towards the wall and smacked into it, clutching his prize: a thick, square blade. It glinted reddish-bronze in the bright light.
Six waited.
The bot waited.
Then it lifted its arm and fired at him with its builtin Swan.
Six launched himself sideways into the air as bullets streaked around him. The accelerant had pumped so much power into his reflexes that he could actually see the bullets coming—fast and blurry, but visible.
The first few rounds hit the glass wall behind him, drilling holes into it and sending fine cracks spiraling outward. The glass was too thick to shatter, and there was a layer of metal behind it—probably steel, Six thought, like the door. No way out there.
As he fell behind the table and smacked onto the ground, he couldn’t see the bot, which stopped firing immediately and walked towards the table. Thud, thud, thud.
The first time Six had met Harry, he’d challenged him to combat. But Harry had been in a nonlethal mode. He couldn’t use his gun. This was a far more dangerous situation.
Six didn’t know how many bullets remained in the clip of the Swan, but he su
spected it would be more than he could dodge—and the bot might be capable of reloading.
He had two plausible strategies. One: Keep circling the table in a crouch, never giving it a clear shot. Two: Charge. Shuji’s bots were programmed to use hand-to-hand rather than gunfire if their opponent was closer than two meters.
The thumping footsteps had stopped. Six listened carefully.
The table groaned noisily, then lurched to one side with a sickening crack. The bot ripped it out of the floor with both synthetic arms and held it above its head, cords with loose wires trailing to the floor. It threw the table towards the wall. To Six’s eyes it seemed to drift as slowly as a cloud before slamming into the glass with a shower of sparks.
With an earsplitting thunk, the table landed on its side, propped up against the cracked wall. Now nothing separated Six from the bot except a flat square of plastic on the floor with a few tufts of shredded steel poking up from it, where the table had been attached.
The bot raised its gun and Six lunged forward, stopping just inside the two-meter mark. The bot swung a fist at him; Six ducked underneath it. The bot’s arm whipped over Six’s head like a helicopter blade.
I know things about this bot that Vanish may not know, Six realized. Like the code that shuts down all its systems. What was it—something that sounded like Latin?
“Cerfitipus talotus!” he shouted triumphantly.
The bot punched him in the stomach.
Six doubled over and slid backward across the floor.
Kyntak looked up as Vanish entered his cell. This time, the red-eyed woman didn’t stand in the corner; instead, she stood beside the table and held her gun close to the left side of Kyntak’s head. Vanish walked to the other side of the table, holding a syringe and two large vials filled with dark-red liquid.